Forkast Forecasts for 2021: Mance Harmon of Hedera Hashgraph on China, DeFi and industry giants

Welcome to Forkast Forecasts 2021. In this new series, leaders, innovators and visionaries in blockchain-related fields tell Forkast.News what they see as the most noteworthy developments for this industry in 2020 and their predictions for the year ahead.

Mance Harmon

Mance Harmon is CEO and co-founder of Hedera Hashgraph, a decentralized public network — powered by distributed ledger technology (DLT) — that supports new and existing applications running at web scale. Hedera Hashgraph is being used by Acoer’s Coronavirus HashLog dashboard, which enables scientists as well as journalists to easily understand the spread of Covid-19 and trends over time. Hedera’s distributed ledger is also being utilized by Hala Systems, a social enterprise developing advanced technologies to protect civilians in Syria from misinformation and provide an early warning system to save lives.

Prior to Hedera Hashgraph, Harmon was head of Architecture and Labs at Ping Identity. He was also program manager of the Missile Defense War Game at the U.S. Missile Defense Agency and course director for cybersecurity at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

Biggest developments in 2020

• What’s happening in China: “What China is doing with the BSN, the Blockchain Services Network and the CBDC efforts, that they are literally a step or two or maybe three ahead of most of the rest of the world in terms of their DLT focus and efforts, and that is being noticed.”

• How DeFi is changing the perception of finance: “What we’re seeing is the confluence of DeFi (decentralized finance) with componentized finance, tokenization, and a realization that public networks are the future, with one more advance or one more change in the market that happened just late this year, and that is the realization that business processes need to move off the mainnet, need to move off of layer one to layer two so that public networks can scale and provide the privacy and regulatory compliance and customization that enterprise customers really care about.”

Predictions for 2021

• Layer two solutions on the rise: “Layer two solutions are going to become prominent, meaning… there’s going to be a movement at an industry level over the next two years to really move all of that business logic off of those layer one platforms into layer two peripheral networks. That’s going to be a major theme beginning in 2021.”

See related article: Vitalik Buterin explains Ethereum 2.0’s four phases: sharding, scaling, proof of stake and more

• Industry consolidation and demise of small players: “What we’ve seen to date has been interesting in that we’ve built quite a large industry, but it’s an industry of small players by and large, and that’s going to change. We’re going to see consolidation, we’re going to see players that were important in years past die off, go away, become unimportant, and the tech giants are going to make their mark. ”