"Building The Future of Cross-Fi" (Harmony-Waves) Report Review

12 Feb 2020 by rate3

Today I want to briefly review the report, which was named "Building The Future of Cross-Fi", co-authored by "Harmony" and posted on Wave's page (December 4, 2019).

More often than not, it's hard to find some useful information on corporate blockchain website without painstakingly sorting through mesh of shills, Balaibalan colangs and blown out of the proportion "internal news".

Sure enough, "Wave" is mentioned seven times and "Harmony" - nineteen in this piece. Well, what do you expect, this is business as usual :)

Still, it's a small price to paid for reading it because this report not only contains some curious data on the state of DeFi and "cross-border payments" (CBP) industries but also demonstrates commercial potentials of this huge market for fledgling DeFi companies.

The overall size of CBP market is estimated by authors to surpass $130 Trillion (with "T") referring to "Proof of Capital" ($50M blockchain focused venture capital fund) data.

However, almost all that amount ($127T) is coming from "Accounts Payable / Marketplace payouts" (I assume it's part of global corporate accounting) while the rest is divided among "Remittance" ($550B), "Online Commerce Bill Payments" ($1.6B) and "Wages and Salaries" ($1T).

If you try to check those number with Google you'll get the following "global remittance is expected to grow 3.7% to US$715 billion in 2019"; "E-commerce Payment Market Size to Surpass US$ 1,455,200 Million (zic!) by 2024" (marketwatch.com) and "Global E-commerce Payment Market (reaches) $64.69 Bn in 2018-2025" (prnewswire.com).

"Online Commerce Bill Payments" and, specially, insane "Accounts Payable / Marketplace payouts" figures turned to be mush harder to independently substantiate, which, IMHO, might call for additional disclosures from part of report's creators.

Anyhow, authors propose to, first, (surprise - surprise) tackle remittances market by serving Harmony protocol to clients. It must bring to them "instant finality", "digital wallet", "trust layer" and "borderless".

It's not, of course, clear (without deepening yourself into technical intricacies) what competitive advantages Harmony might have over constellation of other new protocols currently available on the market.

Do not take me wrong. I, myself, is an early enthusiast of Harmony (specially, of its white paper) and publish its first review back in Feb 2019. However, after one year passed, competition is so up in the air that Harmony must account for it in all of its statements and projections.

At the same time, we shall pay tributes to authors for dubbing "Cross-Fi" term and demonstrating to us (although, on not so-hard data) that this market is so much bigger than that, which most of us (me including) previously accounted for.

Regardless, I've much appreciated that Harmony exposed its future market expansion plans for everyone's critical scrutiny and, potentially, commercial challenges.

IMHO, it's in the true spirit of the DLT economy to confront competitors directly letting the users and the tech decide, who will win the day.