Blockchain startup Harmony raises $18 million

Harmony has raised $18 million in its token pre-sale, CoinDesk reports. The company got funds from a number of investors, including Lemniscap VC, BCA Fund, UniValues Associates, and Consensus Capital. According to Harmony co-founder, the sale was the only means to get the funding compliant to the company’s “long-term vision...to create a decentralized protocol.”

Harmony is planning the launch with a pre-mine of 12.6 billion tokens, CoinDesk writes. Currently, a bit over 2.8 billion tokens has been bought by the investors. The rest may be used as incentives to early adopters of the Harmony blockchain. When the network launches, proof-of-stake nodes “will be compensated with an as-yet-undetermined rate of inflation.” With time, the inflation rate should decrease.

The Harmony blockchain has been built to support DApps built for Ethereum. It promises a better experience to Ethereum blockchain. It uses deep sharding, a process that puts different types of calculations on different shards.

The company hopes to attract all DApps with traction; according to Nick White, Harmony’s co-founder, thanks to the protocol Harmony built and open-source smart contracts, Harmony will be able to make porting “practically frictionless.”

“We are building a scalable, high-throughput, low-cost, fast-finality blockchain,” White said.