Harmony Expands to India, Bolsters Growth of DeFin the Rapidly Growing FinTech Sector

Harmony, a Silicon Valley-based scalable blockchain protocol, announced their entry into the Indian market. They are looking towards establishing partnerships in India’s startup ecosystem and foster the development of blockchain solutions in the Fintech space. With Fintech in India already booming, blockchain protocols are looking for meaningful integrations with startups and enterprises in the space to solve real pain-points.

Harmony is looking to partner, invest in, incubate and offer grants to developers and fintech startups looking to solve problems across cross-border transactions, trade finance, commodities finance, gaming, and virtual goods and many other industries. Entrepreneurs will be able to use Harmony’s open-source platform and tools, leveraging the native ONE token to power utility across a variety of use cases. In the first phase, Harmony will pick 5 partners/developers to work on the cross-fi and de-fi use cases.

According to the EY Global FinTech Adoption Index 2019, the adoption of FinTech in India has grown by 87% which is 64% higher than the average global rate. This growth has been attributed to several factors such as government initiatives, ease in access to innovative products and onboarding of users, and the willingness of the consumer market to adopt non-financial services brands if they are partnered with their existing banks.

A report by Invest India states that the overall transaction value in the Indian FinTech market is estimated to jump from approximately $65 bn in 2019 to $140 bn in 2023, overtaking China as Asia’s top FinTech funding target market. Additionally, a report by Gartner stipulated that blockchain technology has the potential to generate 3 trillion USD per year by 2034. With the present trends, the adoption of blockchain in the fintech space is going to open up several opportunities for India’s startup ecosystem. With the two areas of blockchain and FinTech set to grow in tandem, Indian startups and up-and-coming projects can really use the support via collaborations from experienced players like Harmony.

Harmony Protocol is one of the leading blockchain protocols that has made significant strides in solving one of the biggest problems in space - linear scalability. Due to this, Harmony is one of the top seven decentralised networks in the world alongside Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, and Ripple’s XRP. They already have a live mainnet and their native ONE token is listed on several cryptocurrency exchanges. 

The Harmony team is excited to collaborate with  FinTech startups and developers in India that are looking to solve and scale their products and use-cases by leveraging a fast, secure and decentralized blockchain platform. In order to facilitate this, Harmony is partnering with IBC Media - a startup that connects innovators with enterprises to solve real-world problem statements, to facilitate their vision in India.

“We’re excited to enable next-gen Fin-tech products & use cases in India that leverage a fast & secure blockchain . Given that India’s consumer base is adept with using sophisticated intra-country payment options like the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and several digital wallets, we see an opportunity to support the growth of this sector and are excited to collaborate with IBC Media to chart out this journey in India. Harmony will definitely enable the creation and innovation of highly-scalable, secure, FinTech solutions.”Sahil Dewan, Co-Founder, Harmony said.

With respect to India’s growing need for business solutions in the field of cross-border finance, (person) also expressed that Harmony can enable the creation of solutions to reduce the time consumed with faster, transparent, and secure, products.

“We are very happy that Harmony protocol is looking at India as a serious market and believe that they will be a big proponent in driving the growth of the fintech sector in India” said Raghu Mohan, CEO of IBC Media, “At IBC Media, we resonate with Harmony’s vision to scale trust for billions of people and create a fair economy. We are excited to partner with them to create better opportunities and innovate in the Fintech space in India. While it is still early days for blockchain in the country’s fintech sector, such collaborative efforts will explore more widespread adoption going forward.”

About Harmony:

The Harmony Protocol is a proof-of-stake blockchain that uses sharding to reach extremely fast, large-scale settlement for millions of users and helps businesses build marketplaces with fungible and non-fungible tokens. They facilitate the creation of blockchain solutions with zero-knowledge proof-enabled privacy and security. With their entry into the Indian market, Harmony will focus on leveraging India’s rich startup ecosystem and increase blockchain adoption through Decentralized finance (DeFi) and Cross border Finance (CrossFi).