Harmonic Laboratories (HLabs for short) is an R&D firm born and focused solely on the Cardano ecosystem.

Harmonic Laboratories supports and maintains a considerable portion of the TypeScript tooling for the Cardano ecosystem, which the majority of Cardano developers use, either directly, or indirectly via other libraries that depend on code written and maintained by HLabs.

The mission of HLabs is for true decentralization to become the baseline of application development, not only a nice-to-have feature.

This proposal funds two complementary engineering tracks:

• Pebble: the first production-ready imperative smart-contract language on Cardano. Pebble brings to UPLC a programming paradigm Aiken structurally cannot deliver, ships a TypeScript-shaped surface syntax that the largest developer community on earth already uses, and (per HLabs' published benchmarks) produces on-chain code that strictly outperforms Aiken and is competitive with Plutarch, while remaining dramatically more readable than either.
• Tooling maintenance: keeping HLabs' TypeScript stack (cardano-ledger-ts, ouroboros-miniprotocols-ts, plutus-machine, uplc, etc.) synchronized with protocol upgrades. This stack is not optional infrastructure: it is what production projects across the ecosystem already depend on, including Mesh, Lucid Evolution, and L2 systems like Midgard. When HLabs ships a hard-fork update, the rest of the TypeScript ecosystem ships with it; when HLabs lags, every downstream project lags.

A separate proposal funds the Gerolamo light node at 5 FTE and is voted on independently.

Duration & Milestones

This proposal spans over 12 months, throughout which there will be several deliveries and demos. Amongst the key deliveries, we note:

• maintenance for an upcoming hard fork;
• a production-ready, imperative and efficient, programming language for smart contracts (Pebble).

Total Budget Ask

The estimated USD budget is of $1,000,000 (or ₳4,000,000) + 15% in refundable contingency (₳600,000); for a total ask of 4,600,000 ADA.