The Harmony ONE network offers very cheap transactions and houses a unique and fast-growing ecosystem of dapps. Harmony is also significantly more focused on decentralisation than other ultra-low-cost networks such as Solana, and with impressive technology and popular dapps such as DeFi Kingdoms, it’s likely more and more DeFi users will bridge to Harmony in the coming months.
However, bridging to Harmony isn’t as straightforward as it is with other more mainstream networks, which is where this article comes in! We’ll cover the best bridges, and also give a guide on how to withdraw from Binance (avoiding a few potential pitfalls).
Method 1: The Synapse Bridge
The Synapse bridge is probably the easiest way to bridge to Harmony, and it offers a very wide range of networks (11 at last count). The bridge only supports stablecoins, but you can choose to receive a different stablecoin from the one you send. The fees are low, and you even receive 0.1 ONE for gas to get you started!
The interface is very intuitive and doesn’t really require much explanation.
If you haven’t already done so, you’ll need to add Harmony to MetaMask. The details for that are as below:
Network Name: Harmony
New RPC URL: https://api.harmony.one
Chain ID: 1666600000
Currency Symbol: ONE
BlockExplorerURL: https://explorer.harmony.one/
Synapse also offers some quite competitive staking rates for stablecoins, upwards of 30% in the case of Harmony (at the time of writing). However, the rewards are paid out in the Synapse token, which isn’t particularly easy to sell.
Method 2: TerraBridge
If you use the Terra ecosystem (and if you don’t, read here about why you should!), the TerraBridge is a cheap and simple way to bridge UST or Luna to Harmony. The bridge is dead-easy to use and has no fees other than the (low) transaction fee on Terra. It’s one of the most user-friendly bridges in DeFi, albeit with a very limited selection of networks and tokens.
Simply connect your Terra Station Wallet and then enter your Harmony address from MetaMask.
Method 3: Other Bridges
AnySwap offers bridging to Harmony, although in our experience support for Harmony is a bit patchy. There’s only a very small combination of networks and tokens that allow you to select Harmony as a destination address, and there can sometimes be a bit of slippage due to low liquidity. AnySwap is a great platform, but it’s not particularly optimised for Harmony.
You can also use Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain.A huge range of tokens are available (in fact a bewildering number of tokens in all kinds of different formats), but the whole thing feels like it was designed by an engineer. The Synapse bridge offers a much better user experience.
Method 4: Withdrawing from an Exchange (e.g. Binance)
The ONE token (the gas token for the Harmony network) is listed by a small number of centralised exchanges, including Binance and KuCoin. Binance offers Harmony withdrawals for the ONE token, but beware that you can’t withdraw directly to MetaMask.
If you enter an Ethereum-style address, like those used on MetaMask, Binance will tell you that the format is wrong. In actual fact, Harmony is perfectly compatible with this format of address, but seemingly nobody told Binance that.
Instead, you’ll need to withdraw to a Harmony address that begins with “one”. For this, you’ll need to create a Harmony wallet, which you can do with the Harmony browser extension wallet. Download and install the wallet, and you’ll get a ONE wallet address. Note that this wallet extension generally isn’t supported by dapps, hence the need to transfer to MetaMask later.
Copy this “one” address into Binance and then withdraw to that address.
