Harmony (ONE) -- breaking the blockchain makes it better

Harmony was founded in 2017 by Dr Stephen Tse who holds a PhD in Cryptography, 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. The Harmony founding team comprises twelve people, with seven of them being former employees at Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.

Harmony, the next generation sharding-based blockchain that is fully scalable, provably secure, and energy-efficient. Harmony addresses the problems of existing blockchains by combining the best research results and engineering practice in an optimally tuned system. Specifically, Harmony makes breakthroughs in the following aspects:

● Fully Scalable: Harmony shards not only the network communication and transaction validation like Zilliqa, but also shards the blockchain state. This makes Harmony a fully scalable blockchain. 1

● Secure Sharding: Harmony’s sharding process is provably secure thanks to the distributed randomness generation (DRG) process which is unpredictable, unbiaseable, verifiable, and scalable. Harmony also reshards the network in a non-interruptive manner to prevent slowly adaptive byzantine adversaries.

● Efficient and Fast Consensus: Unlike other sharding-based blockchains which require PoW to select validators, Harmony is based on PoS and thus energy efficient. Consensus is reached with a linearly scalable BFT algorithm that’s 100 times faster than PBFT.

● Adaptive-Thresholded PoS: The threshold of stakes required for a node to join the network is adjusted based on the volume of total staking in a way that malicious stakers cannot concentrate their power in a single shard. Moreover, the threshold is low enough so that small stakers can still participate in the network and earn rewards.

● Scalable Networking Infrastructure: With RaptorQ fountain code, Harmony can propagate blocks quickly within shards or across network by using the Adaptive Information Dispersal Algorithm. Harmony also adopts Kademlia routing [37] to achieve cross-shard transactions that scale logarithmically with the number of shards.

● Consistent Cross-Shard Transactions: Harmony supports cross-shard transactions with shards directly communicating with each other. An atomic locking mechanism is used to ensure the consistency of cross-shard transactions.

By innovating on both the protocol and network layers, Harmony provides the world with a scalable and secure blockchain system that is able to support the emerging decentralized economy. Harmony will enable applications that were not previously feasible on the blockchain, including high-volume decentralized exchanges, interactive fair games, Visa-scale payment systems, and Internet-of-Things transactions. Harmony strives to scale trust for billions of people and create a radically fair economy.

In terms of how Harmony works, it’s not all that far off from how Ethereum 2.0 is going to work. In fact, you could say that Harmony is essentially a finished version of Ethereum’s next iteration.

Source: Medium

This is primarily because Harmony uses sharding which involves splitting a single blockchain into multiple parts called shards.

Source: Medium

Harmony currently has four shards and each shard can process 500 transactions per second, which totals 2000 tps. Harmony’s total transactions per second will increase as more shards are added.

Source:Medium

Now what’s crazy is that transactions within Harmony shards are about as fast as transactions made between shards achieving finality in less than two seconds.

This quick cross-chain communication is something that other smart contract blockchains are currently struggling with namely Polkadot and Kusuma with their parachains.

Source: Medium

To secure its four shards Harmony uses a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism called Effective Proof of Stake (PoS) or EPoS.

Source: Medium

This involves randomly assigning validators to one of the four shards and reducing their staking rewards if their stakes get too large. This is to ensure that no single validator grows large enough to corrupt a shard.

Source: Medium

Harmony also uses slashing to keep validators in check, but only if they step out of line. Harmony doesn’t slash validators for downtime like most other Proof of Stake (PoS) cryptocurrencies, and Harmony has pretty low barriers to entry for staking with 10,000 ONE being the minimum stake for validators and 1,000 ONE being the minimum stake for delegators. Annual returns are currently 10%.

In addition to the ONE coin, there are thousands of fungible and non-fungible tokens on the Harmony blockchain. ONE is used to pay for transaction fees on Harmony and these transaction fees are usually less than a thousandth of a cent. Any one used to pay for transaction fees is also burned, more on that later.

The Harmony blockchain currently hosts around 40 decentralized applications, and the Harmony ONE Wallet browser extension is used to interact with them. It’s also used to delegate ONE to validators.

Just like its name, Harmony also has harmonized integration and partnership with other smart contract blockchains like Binance Smart Chain, SushiSwap DEX, Terra (LUNA), ViperSwap, MochiSwap, and some NFT ecosystems like daVinci NFT, Crazy.ONE

Harmony (ONE) tokens can be purchased on most big exchanges, such as:

1. Binance you can purchase Harmony(ONE) using your mobile phone or desktop. You only need to follow the step as instructed. You can also receive a 25% discount on trading fees using BNB. Use the link above for a bonus 10% discount
   

2. 2. MXC.com
   

3. Huobi Global
   

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9. 8. After you purchase any cryptocurrencies, if you would like to store the coins in offline devices for safety, you can use Ledger

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