February 2025: Cross-Chain Portfolio Agent 🧚, Hiring (DeFi) Engineers 🛠️, Pump.ONE ⛽️
February marked significant milestones for Harmony, including the launch of the token launchpad Pump.ONE, the development of cross-chain DeFi tools, and key protocol enhancements that improved staking, bridging, and asset management. Community engagement remained strong with airdrops, new trading pairs, and insightful discussions on AI’s impact. To further its commitment to building smarter, simpler DeFi in 2025, Harmony also ramped up its hiring efforts, seeking cross-chain portfolio engineers to help shape the future of the product ecosystem.
Week of Feb 1st
February kicked off with airdrops from EasyNode.pro and FlappyH1. Stephen highlighted the sharp rise in DeFi revenue, with DEXs seeing a 160.6% QoQ increase to $196.4M in Q4 2024. He discussed how this growth compares to the earnings of Telegram trading bots, which have become an increasingly popular tool for on-chain trading.
Progress has been made on expanding Pump.ONE to support multiple token factories with competitions, syncing contract updates, and improving the USDC converter with interface updates and balance validation. Work on integrating DeepSeek with 1Bot continues, with progress on resolving Harmony LLM dependencies and supporting Ledger wallet integration. Development on the staking dashboard's Ledger support and a yield enhancer continues.
Top 3 Team Progress:
Artem expanded Pump.ONE to support multiple token factories with competitions, synced contract updates with Yuriy, and improved the USDC converter with interface updates and balance validation.
Frank worked on integrating DeepSeek with 1Bot, resolving Harmony LLM dependencies, and supporting Ledger wallet integration, but faced ongoing M1 compatibility issues and DeepSeek API access challenges.
Soph reduced the number of spawned nodes in Travis CI tests to optimize resource usage. During this, Soph identified a corner-case consensus issue in local network, occurring during the transition from pre-staking to staking epoch when no external validators are present and all internal BLS keys are on a single node. An initial fix was implemented, but further work is required. Development on the staking dashboard's Ledger support continues.
Week of Feb 8th
This week, Kraken Pro launched Harmony perps with up to 20x leverage and Recovery One burned $1.13M in assets in Round 28 ($29.3M depegged to date). Stephen highlighted how the Fat Wallet Thesis presents growing value to wallets.
The protocol team enhanced peer-to-peer connectivity by improving explorer node integration and stream sync logging. Ongoing efforts focused on resolving a race condition and upgrading Streamnet for greater stability. The team also advanced the integration of the Ledger SDK into the staking dashboard, resolving critical issues with Uniswap interactions, WalletConnect, and hardware communication. Continued testing and development of Pump.ONE contracts also took place. Additionally, block production was optimized to reduce latency, while important updates were made to the block version and BLS library to enhance security.
Top 3 Team Progress:
Gheis: Last week saw significant progress with multiple pull requests created, reviewed, and merged, including fixes for explorer node connectivity, staged stream sync logging, and protocol advertisement reliability. Work continues on resolving a race condition affecting explorer nodes, with plans to upgrade and restart them on streamnet for improved stability and performance.
Aaron: Work progressed on debugging and integrating the new Ledger SDK into the staking dashboard, enabling account retrieval and basic login functionality. Additional efforts focused on refining Pump.ONE contracts, resolving critical errors with Uniswap interactions, reviewing research on wallets and stablecoins, and addressing technical issues with WalletConnect, Ledger hardware communication, and domain operations.
Konstantin: Optimized block production by reducing time from 1 second to 0.950 seconds to mitigate network latency. Implemented a new block version with EIP-1559 and EIP-3198 changes and updated the BLS library with the latest security enhancements.
From @harmonyprotocol on X: For DeFAI to onboard the masses, it must abstract complexity like PayPal did for payments.
Week of Feb 15th
During the 3rd week of February, ONETracker updated the “My Tokens” feature to include native tokens and NFTs in one seamless dashboard. FlappyH1 awarded two winners with airdrops. Binance.US released a ONE / USD pair. Stephen shared insights from the 2025 Delphi Digital AI Outlook.
Positive feedback was gathered at Consensus Hong Kong, leading to ideas for rebranding, unique retail products, and incentive programs. Key infrastructure updates were implemented, and testing of the Portfolio Management prototype and rebalancing algorithms moved forward, alongside continued testing for Pump.ONE.
Top 3 Team Progress:
Philipp attended Consensus Hong Kong to gather feedback on building DeFi on Harmony. He received positive responses, especially regarding products like the yield enhancer. Key suggestions included a rebrand, unique retail products, and incentive programs for onboarding teams. Philipp also explored cross-chain partnerships with infrastructure and GameFi projects.
Soph integrated the staking dashboard wallet with the latest Harmony Ledger app v1.15.0, ensuring all staking transactions are functional. He also reviewed several protocol features and fixes, including EOA sender validation (EIP-3607), the 1-second finality fix (1.05s), and the p2p gater PR for controlling non-Harmony P2P nodes. While on-call, Soph investigated long block times on shard 0 mainnet, identifying slower processing by Harmony node leaders as the cause.
Frank advanced the Portfolio Management prototype, resolving deployment issues on fly.io and integrating token lists for supported assets. He enhanced the UI to showcase rebalancing algorithms with mock operations, deployed the DeepSeek r1 paid model to 1Bot, and worked on integrating RPC calls for token balances. Testing of the rebalancing algorithm also took place ahead of swap integration.
Week of Feb 22nd
The Harmony community saw major milestones this week, including its ranking among top blockchain projects by FDV and the official launch of Pump.ONE. Crypto_Land_DAO promoted its CLD Launchpad, while Li highlighted speedy AI-driven development. Stephen also announced hiring for cross-chain portfolio engineers, reinforcing Harmony’s 2025 DeFi.
On the technical side, progress continued on staking dashboard improvements, bridge debugging, and protocol upgrades. The “Show on Ledger” issue was resolved (PR #722), while work on clear signing and potential ERC7730 integration is ongoing. Unify Assets saw improvements in legacy USDC handling and Base bridge debugging, alongside research into LayerZero V2 liquidity transfers. Efforts to address bridge issues were coordinated with the community.
Top 3 Team Progress:
Soph: Following the Ledger integration with the staking dashboard, we fixed the "Show on Ledger" issue (PR #722), while clear signing still requires further development, possibly with ERC7730 and a new wallet integration. Additionally, we investigated debug_traceTransaction inconsistencies and single-transaction timeouts, while reviewing multiple pull requests to support protocol development.
Theo: Launch of Pump.ONE. Update to rules for easier readability (PR #17). Coordination with Philipp and Yuriy for Universal Bridge product bringing more efficient liquidity to Harmony. Continued metrics and testing for Shadow.
Yuriy: Improved the Unify Assets proxy contract (V1) by adding a parameter for legacy USDC (burn-only) and enabling explicit token selection in
_debitFrom. Debugged USDC (Base) bridge issues, synchronized with Theo and Philipp on architecture refinements, assisted with contract deployment, and researched LayerZero V2 liquidity transfers and bridge solutions using Socket protocol.
Conclusion
As March begins, Harmony refines its DeFi ecosystem with a focus on simplicity, utility, and liquidity. The development of exchange.one, a cross-chain AI portfolio manager, will enhance DeFi with automated asset management, seamless cross-chain integrations, and smarter portfolio rebalancing. These innovations make DeFi more accessible, interoperable, and scalable for Harmony users. As we continue to grow, we're hiring and looking to bring on new talent to help simplify DeFi in 2025.
