Hey, good morning or afternoon or wherever you're at. Yeah, good afternoon for me. I'm in Europe. Thank you everyone who's joining us. You join myself, Rob from Alchemy Pay, which is a fair crypto
payment gateway, providing on-ramps, off-ramps and NFT checkout and crypto payments to many, many web 3 platforms. Today joining us is Casey Gardner from Harmony and he is the protocol
engineer at Harmony and yeah we're very excited to have him on. We're quite pleased because recently we've brought about a sort of collaboration between ourselves and Harmony by working with one of the projects that they are supporting and investing in which is called
AAG Ventures so currently going through integration with those guys so we thought it'd be a nice chance to get the two communities together and here from Casey who's right at the Centre of Harmony and find out you know what they've been working on over the past
but also what they have planned for 2023, so in no case he's been quite busy on writing a number of papers and setting up the, I guess sort of the roadmap for Harmony in this coming year. So Casey, welcome
Yeah, thanks for having me and you know being on the protocol side Definitely our role is to facilitate all these products so I'm excited to talk to you today and then and learn what you're building. Yeah, great. So where are you calling from today, by the way? Today I
I'm remote working in Palo Alto. The Harmony office is mainly here in California, but normally I work in Denver, Colorado, which is in the middle of the United States. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I was over there a couple of weeks ago for East Denver. You were there too, I saw.
Yeah, I'm one of the board of directors at ETH Denver and been there since 2018. Fantastic. Well, it really was a great event. I mean, it was an enormous event. There was just so much going on. So many people. It was really fantastic. We part of really a colorful
event as well. A lot of fun. Yeah, it's very colorful. You know, it started off as a meet-up and to see where it is this year was kind of full circle. It's a huge event now, but I think we've done a good job at scaling the culture.
And keeping that colorful, friendly, kind of goofy vibe is kind of our ethos. Yeah, for sure. I mean, the events that we go to can really vary a lot. I mean, quite often varies between where they are in the world as well. You know, they can be quite
It really depends. I mean there's some very serious ones that it is nice to be around a lot of developers and people who are Actually working at both hands with blockchain development and with developing these apps and East Denver was was full of those and so yeah it tends to be with that kind of
group of attendees, yeah it tends to be a lot of fun, a lot of colour and yeah I really felt the sense of the Ethereum community being at the centre of it all there which you don't always get that sense of community at each event you go to so it really was an enjoyable event so yeah thanks for your part in
in organizing that. Yeah, I appreciate it. And it's not a conference. We called it an innovation festival because it's really centered around developers and it's a free event. And with that free event, I think you get a different sense of community. So I appreciate that feeling. Cool. Yeah.
Alright, so perhaps if we just start with the basics and maybe introduce yourself in terms of what you do now for Harmony but also how you got started with them and also a little bit of your background of what you were doing before working with Harmony.
Yeah, sure. So I've been with Harmony for about five months. My role is the lead protocol engineer and researcher as kind of only just begun. I just started not too long ago.
Basically, my role is to facilitate the development and the improvement of that protocol. After the the bridge hack is pretty much when I got on to kind of help them in through their next transition. So I came
from the Ethereum Foundation, but before that, and during my student-to-day Ethereum Foundation, I've worked on many projects, and I've been in the space for a long time, and I don't think I work every day, I think I enjoy.
My hobby to its full extent. So yeah, I'm on the technical side obviously, so I kind of stick in my realm of what I'm good at. So usually, you know, Twitter spaces doesn't fall under that, but I'm happy. Yeah, well, we appreciate having you.
We had one of the founders from Qwai Network, which is a new network about to launch last week. It was really great to hear his point of view of someone who is really at the centre of the development of that network.