The same source recounted how Tse “would often stand up in front of us and, and say ‘I want to cry, make me cry.’ He would ask us to tell a story to try to make him cry which was very weird.”įormer team members also claim Tse didn’t offer full-time employee status to team members, instead keeping them as contractors. “He would often come up and just kind of force you to say something or force you to ask something, whether or not you wanted to,” said a different former team member. The employee was forced to play over an hour of basketball ‘every single day… despite how busy or productive you’re trying to be’ What questions do you have for me?’ If you had no questions for Stephen, he would be disappointed and say he would come back in a few minutes and expect you to have a question when he returns,” the source said. “He is known to interrupt employees and say, ‘You have my time for a few minutes. He described how he would grab staff by the arm – sometimes mid-conversation – and “move them around like chess pieces” at company events, talk behind their backs, and belittle them in front of colleagues and associates. One former member of staff described Tse’s typical behaviour: He shut the staffer’s laptop in the middle of work to command attention, and the employee was forced to play over an hour of basketball “every single day… despite how busy or productive you’re trying to be.”Ī different source even wondered if they might lose their job if they didn’t play basketball with Stephen as requested.Īnother ex staff member relaid multiple stories of how Tse treated team members. While many had attributed Harmony’s downfall to the $100 million Horizon bridge hack it suffered in June last year, former team members, ecosystem developers, and community members also pointed to Harmony’s leadership as another root cause.Įcosystem developers building on Harmony detailed how communication with the blockchain’s leadership went “unanswered for weeks,” became “increasingly difficult,” and led to Tse and Jiang breaking funding promises “with no good faith of attempting new arrangements.” The price chart for the ONE token looks like what crypto traders might call a pump-and-dump rather than the “future of finance.” Developer activity has slowed to a crawl. Less than $6.9 million worth of assets remain – a 95% drop. Things looked good.īut 12 months later, the blockchain is a ghost town. Harmony’s flagship app, a fantasy RPG game called DeFi Kingdoms, was all the rage among crypto “degens,” and the chain’s native token, ONE, was trading close to records. Last year, Harmony’s total value locked – a measure of assets deposited into DeFi protocols on the chain – hit a high of $1.42 billion. Harmony’s biggest draw is that its transaction fees are much cheaper than those on the more dominant Ethereum blockchain. It is a smart contract-enabled chain, allowing ecosystem developers to build DeFi protocols, crypto games and NFT projects. Harmony is one of several “Layer 1″ blockchains that soared in value during the 2021 crypto bull run. In a standout incident, several former team members reported that a disgruntled ecosystem developer physically assaulted Tse in Harmony’s Palo Alto office after they claimed he reneged on a $250,000 grant promise. The same staff accused Li Jiang, fellow founder and Tse’s second in command, of “mismanaging treasury funds,” taking Harmony’s coffers from a $1 billion value at the start of 2022 to around $50 million today. Former contractors for the Simple Rules Company, which develops and maintains the once-thriving Harmony blockchain, have accused the company’s two remaining co-founders of misconduct and mismanagement.įive former team members and several Harmony ecosystem developers have alleged to DL News that CEO and founder Stephen Tse reneged on promises and was “controlling” to staff, contributing to Harmony’s steep decline in users and developers over the past 12 months.
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