INTRODUCTION

Harmony is the next-generation sharding-based blockchain that is absolutely scalable, provably secure, and energy efficient. Harmony addresses the issues of existing blockchains by combining the simplest research results and engineering practice in an optimally tuned system.

Harmony is the newest EVM-compatible smart contract platform to play the liquidity incentive game that was verified to be very effective for Polygon and, more recently, Avalanche in their quest to attract developers and users. Even with incentives, it won’t be simple for brand new L1s to challenge Ethereum and the two other leading DeFi chains, Terra and Solana. Fantom has currently entered the fray, with $600 million in incentives, whereas Ethereum’s L2 scaling solutions are coming online.


HISTORY AND FOUNDER

Co-founded and developed by developers with in-depth experience in encryption and computer science, it provides dApp developers with quantifiability and interoperability. Harmony was founded and is led by Stephen Tse, whereas Nick White is a co-founder and active member of the Harmony community. The startup was formed in 2017 with a 12-member development team, together with Tse.

Harmony is a blockchain-based open-source development project with its own cryptocurrency. Prior to Innovation Harmony, he worked as a research worker at Microsoft, a senior infrastructure engineer at Google, and sold his startup, Spot Setter, to Apple.

Before the IEO, Harmony was a company, and a variety of investors were involved in its fundraising effort, which raised USD eighteen million in April 2019. Silicon Valley’s agreement Capitaland Hong Kong’s Lemniscap VC Investors bought nearly 2.8 billion ONE tokens, and 12.6 billion were set aside for pre-mining. In addition to providing investors access to a growing ecosystem, Harmony focuses on data sharing, decentralized marketplaces, supply chain monitoring, ad exchanges, credit rating systems, and gaming.


REASON TO BUILD THE PROJECT

Harmony (ONE) was launched as a part of the Binance Launchpad's initial exchange offering (IEO) in May 2019. It's aimed to be a bridge between scalability and decentralization efforts. It absolutely was built with the motto "decentralization at scale" in mind, emphasizing knowledge sharing and also the construction of fungible token and non-fungible asset marketplaces.

Furthermore, Harmony guarantees to give high throughput with 2 "lows": latency and costs. They are expected to put the platform at the middle of efforts to establish the groundwork for future decentralized, trustless economies once they are combined.


BASE OF THE PROJECT

Harmony is an EVM-compatible, sharded Proof of Stake smart contract blockchain. Harmony’s fast Byzantine Fault Tolerant (FBFT) consensus protocol, combined with random state sharding and Boneh–Lynn–Shacham (BLS) constant-sized signatures allows Harmony to attain finality in one block or roughly 2 seconds– compared to optimistic finality in Solana or Avalanche, or 6 seconds for Cosmos, or 60 seconds for Polkadot. a normal transfer prices only about 0.000021 ONE. Harmony was the first sharding-based L1 on a main net. It's resolved the dilemma of decentralization-security-scalability by uniformly scaling with shards.

A sharded blockchain needs a large variety of validators. To encourage the delegation of stakes across a wider variety of validators, Harmony uses a novel Effective Proof of Stake (EPoS) mechanism. In several blockchains, the right to propose and confirm blocks is haphazardly determined, however, weighted by the amount staked (e.g., Cosmos) or by delegating to elective validators (EOS). Harmony’s EPoS is based on the quantity staked (the initial option) for every epoch (1 day), however, block rewards are based on the median staked by all validators. This discourages the associated over-concentration of tokens with anyone node or cluster of nodes, increasing decentralization and preventing single-shard attacks.


USE CASES

●Paying network transaction fees.

Staking as a delegator or validator in return for block rewards.

Taking part in Harmony's open governance mechanism.

Solves the blockchain trilemma of decentralization, scalability, and security.


MAJOR NEWS AND EVENTS

DATE

NEWS/EVENTS

IMPACT

24/06/2022

Hackers stole $100 million from Harmony's Horizon Bridge

-26% Decrease

12/01/2022

Harmony launched many cross-chain bridges to connect its network to other Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible networks

+25% Increase

19/10/2021

The ONE World Conference in Lisbon is spreading the word about what the Harmony network is capable of

+48% Increase

09/09/2021

Harmony gets listed on Gate.io exchange

+43% Increase


CONCLUSION

Although it’s in a very crowded space, the Harmony network has done the smart thing by opting to leverage Ethereum’s large user base, rather than competing with it. The space is still new, and there’s no clear-cut winner however, Harmony’s call to solve the fourth trilemma of the blockchain — privacy — may turn out to be its comparative advantage. That being said, it’s clear that Harmony is moving from a cross-chain solution to a fully decentralized platform. We’re interested to see if the Harmony token can still be in vogue when Ethereum 2.0 is fully rolled out.