Harmony Communications Head Quits as Chain Suffers Major Governance Issues

Crypto blockchain Harmony does not appear to be in harmony. Yesterday, Harmony lost their Head of Communications, Giv Parvaneh. In a Twitter thread, Parvaneh explained that he decided to join Findora, an Ethereum scaling solution utilizing ZK technology. This is major news for the Harmony team, since Parvaneh stated in June that he would stay with the protocol despite offers from competing chains.

The negative sentiment began for Harmony when their Horizon bridge to Ethereum was hacked. The private keys that controlled the bridge were leaked and assets on the bridge were depegged, resulting in over $100 million stolen.

There have been major concerns about Harmony's founder Stephen Tse, who holds a lot of control over the project. Parvaneh disliked that Tse rejected multiple core developer solutions for reimbursing hacked people in favor of his own, which involved inflating the token supply.

In addition, the chain's governance structure makes it easy for a "lord of the flies" scenario to occur.

Parvaneh was a popular member of the Harmony team, and Tse's behavior led to intense backlash from Reddit community users. Tse eventually said he would "go back to the drawing board" on evaluating an effective recovery plan. By that point, though, the damage was done. Two core members besides Parvaneh ended up going to Findora before Parvaneh's departure.

Along with the bridge woes, a recent error on the Harmony mainnet occurred where smart contracts wouldn't verify on the blockchain. While it was patched, these code errors are troubling for any potential users. In addition to Parvaneh's departure, top ecosystem projects such as Openswap have also left recently for better performing chains. Sometimes, things like Harmony, which promises 100x lower fees (which are now much higher), are too good to be true.