What Is Harmony (ONE)?
Harmony is a blockchain platform designed to facilitate the creation and use of decentralized applications (DApps). The network aims to innovate the way decentralized applications work by focusing on random state sharding, which allows creating blocks in seconds. According to the project’s website, Harmony is expected to introduce cross-shard contracts and a cross-chain infrastructure by the end of 2021.
| Coin Basic | Information |
|---|---|
| Coin Name | Harmony |
| Short Name | ONE |
| Circulating Supply | 11.60B ONE |
| Total Supply | 13,331,584,314 |
| Source Code | Click Here To View Source Code |
| Explorers | Click Here To View Explorers |
| Twitter Page | Click Here To Visit Twitter Group |
| Whitepaper | Click Here To View |
| Support | 24/7 |
| Official Project Website | Click Here To Visit Project Website |
Who Are the Founders of Harmony?
Stephen Tse is the founder and CEO of Harmony. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in cryptographic protocols and type theory.
While finishing his degree, Dr. Tse became a research intern at Microsoft. In 2006 he started working as a senior engineer at Google, spending four years in the company. In 2011 he founded Spotsetter, a successful search engine which Apple later acquired. In 2014, Dr. Tse became the principal engineer for Apple.
He founded Harmony in 2017. The Harmony Coin founding team comprises twelve people, with seven of them being former employees at Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.
Cross-Chain Interoperability
Harmony’s bridges can connect any Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake chains. Our FlyClient architecture is fully trustless and highly gas-efficient. Currently, our bridges for Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain secure tens of millions cross-chain assets.
Developers simply change Chain ID and enjoy faster EVM executions identical at the bytecode level. They can use their familiar and standard Web3 tooling to easily migrate to Harmony.
What about users? They can continue to use MetaMask or Ledger — but now pay minimal fees. Any Ethereum wallets or portals can work on Harmony without code changes or new installs — they are fully compatible for both transaction messages and execution environments.
Platform Strengths
Secure, Random State Sharding
Harmony Coin has transcended the blockchain trilemma by bringing the best research to production. Sharding is proven to scale blockchains without compromising security and decentralization.
They divide not only the network nodes but also the blockchain states into shards, scaling linearly in all three aspects of machines, transactions and storage.
To prevent single shard attacks, we must have a sufficiently large number of nodes per shard and cryptographic randomness to re-shard regularly. Each shard has 250 nodes for strong security guarantee against Byzantine behaviors. They use Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) for unbiasable and unpredictable shard membership.
Fast Consensus w/ Instant Finality
Harmony has innovated on the battle-tested Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) for fast consensus of block transactions. Our Fast BFT (FBFT) leads to low transaction fees and 1-block-time finality in Harmony Mainnet.
They use Boneh–Lynn–Shacham (BLS) constant-sized signatures to commit blocks in a single round of consensus messages. We achieve 2-second block time with view changes in production against adversarial or unavailable leaders.
Harmony Coin Mainnet was launched in June 2019. The network has produced 30M+ blocks with 450k+ transactions in publicly traded, native ONE tokens.
Effective PoS & Token Economics
Harmony has designed a novel Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism for network security and economics. The Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS) reduces centralization and distributes rewards fairly to thousands of validators.
The staking mechanism supports delegation and reward compounding. To support 100% uptime but fully open participation, EPoS slashes validators who double-sign and it penalizes elected but unavailable nodes.
Harmony Coin Economics Model caps the annual issuance at 441 million tokens (about 3% rate in long term). The model gives validators a simple and predictable return. All transaction fees are burnt to offset the issuance, naturally leading to zero inflation when our network usage becomes high.
Scaling Cross-Chain Ethereum Applications
Harmony is an open and fast blockchain. The mainnet runs Ethereum applications with 2-second transaction finality and 1000 times lower fees.
The is your open platform for assets, collectibles, identity, governance. The secure bridges offer cross-chain asset transfers with Ethereum, Binance and 3 other chains.
What Makes Harmony Unique?
Focusing on processing speed and validation, the Harmony mainnet aims to revolutionize block creation. By introducing the sharding process, the company reduced node validation times significantly.
To ensure the protection of nodes and secure the validation process, Harmony introduced the Verifiable Random Function (VRF) for unbiased and unpredictable shard membership. This means that nodes and validators are assigned and re-assigned in a randomized manner.
The project’s Harmony Grants program is an initiative that aims to support innovation and attract developers to the Harmony mainnet.
How Is the Harmony Network Secured?
Harmony Coin introduces a new version of the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus. Called effective proof-of-stake (EPoS), this method allows simultaneous staking from hundreds of validators. This consensus method was developed in accordance with the sharding concept utilized in the Harmony network.
Unlike proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanisms, EPoS is designed for faster processing times and improved scalability. While PoW requires a lot of electrical and computing power, staking consensus methods rely on an abundance of value holders, who become validators.
Harmony is also looking to boost staking incentives to attract more node operators. The Harmony Open Staking initiative encourages interaction with the network and incentivizes stakeholders with the highest amount of ONE tokens.
