Harmony ONE is one of the latest projects that attempts to approach the issue of blockchain scalability. The main goal of ONE is to become a much faster and cheaper network than Bitcoin or Ethereum. Besides that, the ecosystem “helps companies to create markets for expendable tokens (such as security offerings) and non-expendable assets (game collectibles, real estate)”. Their team is also working on “zero-knowledge” tests for data exchange (ad exchanges, credit ratings) while preserving consumer privacy.
Using a “full-stack” approach, Harmony is developing a blockchain that is not only scalable but also safe and energy-efficient.
The network aims to eventually build a fair economy for everyone, through blockchain technology. By creating an open network of nodes operated and governed by a large community, called Pangaea, Harmony hopes to achieve that goal.
Pangaea has volunteers and validators from over 100 countries that work together to run nodes. The goals of Pangaea are to test upcoming Harmony protocol updates and milestones such as smart contracts and resharding. It is also created to set-up and onboard nodes that are ready to jump into the mainnet and to identify and award community members who help to secure the Harmony network.
Besides Pangaea being a wholly original and exciting concept created by Harmony, other aspects make this network so unique. The implementation of secure and random state sharding, for example, is proven to scale blockchains without compromising security and decentralization. Harmony divides both network nodes and blockchain states into shards, scaling linearly in machines, transactions and storage. Each shard has 250 nodes for a strong security guarantee.
Harmony has also implemented Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) for fast consensus of block transactions. Moreover, Fast BFT leads to low transaction fees and 1-block-time finality in Harmony Mainnet. If you’re unfamiliar with PBFT, watch the video below for further explanation.
Effective Proof-of-Stake
Harmony has introduced Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS) for network security and economics. EPoS reduces centralization and distributes rewards to thousands of validators. To support 100% uptime but fully open participation, EPoS slashes validators who double-sign and it penalizes elected but unavailable nodes.
Just as with traditional Proof-of-Stake, you can contribute to the network by being a validator or by delegating. Holders of Harmony ONE (native digital asset of Harmony) can delegate their assets to existing validators. Once tokens are delegated, a portion of the reward earned by the validator will be given to the delegator. Delegated assets are also vulnerable to slashing due to risks the validator takes.
Harmony is one of the first Mainnets to have a fully sharded PoS structure. Across the four shards in Harmony mainnet, blocks are produced every 8 seconds, and cross-shard transactions are finalized in 2 block times. There are 320 validator slots divided by 80 on each different shard. To validate new blocks and vote a ⅔ quorum of votes is needed to reach consensus. Validators can vote by bonding voting shares to them. EPoS allows staking from hundreds of validators; the unique, effective stake mechanism reduces the tendency of stake centralization.
So, what does Harmony’s sharding entail?
Through sharding, developers in the blockchain ecosystem, try to increase the transaction speed of a platform. The developing team behind Harmony has taken it a step further and implemented deep sharding of the blockchain state.
The approach involves sharding on both the transaction as well as the consensus layers of a network. Because of the double sharding, the nodes can identify other nodes, which as part of the consensus-building process plays a role in the transaction possibilities. The parallel processing capacity and throughput performance of the platform improve as a result.
Harmony key features are:
•Fully scalable architecture.
•Secure random sharding.
•Efficient and fast consensus.
•Effective Proof-of-Stake.
•Scalable networking infrastructure.
•Asynchronous cross-shard transactions.
The Token
The native digital asset of Harmony is called Harmony ONE. The asset is used for participation in the network for staking, payments and various other activities. ONE asset holders can earn block rewards and are granted voting rights for the governance system.
The current market capacity of the asset is $52,213,294 at the date of writing. The total number of tokens available is 12,600,000,000, of which 54% is currently circulating. Furthermore, 32%, which equals a little over 4 billion ONE assets, are engaged at the moment of writing, according to Stakingrewards.
Harmony ONE coin and the blockchain itself look quite promising in terms of its transaction speed, secureness, and staking reward opportunities.
