My guest today is Stephen Tse, Founder of Harmony. Harmony is a blockchain platform designed to facilitate the creation and use of decentralized applications (DApps). The network aims to innovate the way decentralized applications work by focusing on random state sharding, which allows creating blocks in seconds. According to the project’s website, Harmony is expected to introduce cross-shard contracts and a cross-chain infrastructure by the end of 2021. Stephen's been obsessed with protocols and compilers since high school. He reverse-engineered ICQ and X11 protocols, coded in OCaml for more than 15 years, and graduated with a doctoral degree in security protocols and compiler verification from the University of Pennsylvania, where he specialized in cryptographic protocols and type theory. Stephen was a researcher at Microsoft Research, a senior infrastructure engineer at Google, and a principal engineer for search ranking at Apple. He founded the mobile search Spotsetter with institutional venture capital; Apple later acquired the startup. He is currently the Founder of Harmony Protocol, which he founded in 2017. The Harmony founding team comprises twelve people, with seven of them being former employees at Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon. In our conversation, we discussed reverse engineering a new financial system that is transparent and fair. We also discuss Harmony's role in the crypto-ecosystem, Harmony's Effective Proof-of-Stake, DAOs, Decentralization and much more. Stephen explains sharding and why horizontal sharding will be the solution for scaling. Additionally, Stephen gives great advice about how to learn new skills and how to tackle complex problems. This conversation is filled with so much knowledge, please enjoy my conversation with Stephen Tse.
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