With several blockchain projects vying to provide the finest services possible to DeFi consumers, Harmony (ONE) is one of those exceptional blockchain-based initiatives that has innovated to maximize the effectiveness of decentralization at scale.

What is Harmony ($ONE)?

Harmony is a blockchain platform that was created to facilitate the development and deployment of multiple decentralized apps (DApps). The challenges that Harmony needs to solve are common to the entire blockchain industry – most notably scalability. It aims to be the first scalable production network with a proof-of-stake.

The Harmony blockchain addresses the bottleneck issues that frequently plague the Ethereum network by utilizing a novel sharding mechanism and a proprietary consensus algorithm. The network focuses on the operation of decentralized apps through the use of random state sharding, which enables the creation of building blocks in a matter of seconds. Essentially, the entire system is designed to facilitate interoperability and ultra-fast transactions.

In basic terms, Harmony is a next-generation blockchain built on the sharding technique that is extremely safe, scalable, and energy-efficient. Apart from that, the platform is recognized to handle current blockchain difficulties by combining best engineering practices and research findings into a minimally adjusted system. Harmony has the ONE coin that may be used for payments and as a fuel for creating transactions in the Harmony ecosystem.

OutStanding Features

What Is Harmony Trying to Achieve?

Harmony’s ideally adjusted system achieves advancements in the following areas:

• Scalability: The use of a sharded blockchain enables the partitioning of both network traffic and blockchain state. It completely scales the Harmony blockchain.
  Faster and efficient Consensus: The Harmony blockchain is built on Proof of Stake, rather than Proof of Work, as other sharding-based blockchains are, which speeds it up by around 100x.
• Consistent Cross-Shard Transactions: Harmony supports cross-shard transactions in which shards communicate directly with one another. Consistency is ensured by the atomic locking method.
• Secure Sharding: A major objective of any blockchain is security. Harmony takes advantage of a mechanism called distributed randomness generation (DRG). It is unpredictability, objectivity, scalability, and verification.
• Lower gas fees: Due to the huge number of transactions per second that Harmony can execute and its use of proof-of-stake validation, the network is seldom congested, like Ethereum is, and thus does not have high gas fees.
• Huge potential for NFTs: Harmony’s cross-chain capabilities open the network up to some interesting possibilities for NFT.

Harmony’s Tech Features

Sharding

Sharding is the act of dividing a blockchain network into smaller partitions, referred to as shards, in order to reduce network latency. Sharding was created to solve the Ethereum network’s scalability issue. Numerous blockchain systems have attempted to solve this problem, however the majority have proved to be ineffective or even harmful.
Harmony has overcome the usual sharding concerns, and the powered sharding is responsible for the blockchain’s 2-second transaction finality. Transaction costs on the network are 100 times cheaper than those on other blockchains. There are four shards: shard 0, shard 1, shard 2, and shard 3, each of which supports 250 validators. A single Harmony shard can reach 1000 transactions per second.

Harmony blockchain is sharded in three dimensions: state, network, and transaction.

State Sharding

In Harmony, each shard maintains its own chain of blocks and state database. Therefore, the validators of each shard only need to store 1/N of the global state, where N is the number of shards. The consistency between states from different shards is guaranteed by the property of eventual atomicity of cross-shard transactions, which guarantees that double spending between shards can not happen.

Network Sharding

Harmony’s validator network is also divided into shards where each shard involves a separate set of validators connected closely with each other and running consensus between themselves. Most of the time, validators communicate with other validators within the same shard to reach consensus or synchronize blocks. In cases of cross-shard transactions and beacon chain synchronization, validators from different shards send messages across shards through the globally connected network.

Transaction Sharding

Transactions in Harmony blockchain are sent to and processed by a specific shard instead of all shards. This way, shards can process transactions in parallel which greatly improves the overall transaction processing capacity of the blockchain. Users need to specify a field named shard_id in the signed transaction which indicates which shard this transaction belongs to. For cross-shard transactions, another field named to_shard_idis needed to indicate the destination shard while the shard_id field indicates the source shard.

Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance (FBFT)

Consensus is a vital part of any blockchain. It is responsible for the security and performance of a blockchain and is sometimes referred to as the blockchain’s “engine.” Harmony’s consensus method is dubbed Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance (FBFT), a novel enhancement to the well-known PBFT technique. Because the BLS (Boneh–Lynn–Shacham) aggregate signature is employed to dramatically minimize communication costs, FBFT is orders of magnitude quicker and more scalable than PBFT. Specifically, FBFT enables a consensus of at least 250 validators in less than two seconds

For every round of consensus in FBFT, one validator serves as the “leader” and there are three phases:

The announce phase: the leader proposes a new block and broadcasts the block hash to all of the validators.

The prepare phase: validators verify the message and sign on the block hash, as well as send the signature back to the leader. The prepare phase finishes when signatures with more than 2/3 of the voting power are collected. After that, the leader aggregated the collected signatures into a O(1)-sized BLS aggregate signature and then broadcast it with the whole block to start the commit phase.

The commit phase: involves validators verifying the block and doing a similar signing process as the prepare phase (i.e. 2/3 voting power collection). The consensus is reached after the commit phase is done. This whole process can be done within 2 seconds on the mainnet.

Effective Proof of Stake (EPOS)

Unlike typical blockchains that rely on Proof-of-Work to achieve consensus, Harmony is a Proof-of-Stake blockchain that is both energy-efficient and cost-effective for node runners. The method of electing validators is referred to as Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS), which is the first PoS technique that is sharding-aware and prevents stake centralization. In EPoS, validators with a big stake are required to operate more nodes to sustain the network, whilst validators with a smaller stake are required to run fewer nodes. Additionally, EPoS is capable of randomly and equitably distributing stake among all shards, ensuring that no shard is safer than the others.

Let’s call the bid price of the elected BLS keys the raw stake. The effective stake of an elected BLS key is a bounded value on its raw stake with a threshold around the median bidder’s raw stake (denoted as median_stake in the picture below). The upper threshold is 115% of the median_stake and the lower threshold is 85% of the median_stake. For a key with a raw stake that’s out of bounds of the threshold, its effective stake will be bounded by the corresponding threshold, otherwise, the effective stake is the same as the raw stake.

The effective stake of each BLS key is determined at the last block of an epoch during the election process and will stay the same throughout the next epoch.

Cross-Chain Interoperability

Horizon is a cross-chain interoperability bridge between Harmony and Ethereum that enables the exchange of assets between the two networks. This advancement has the potential to transform international payments and make bitcoin exchanges easier. Additionally, Harmony has established connections to other blockchains, like Binance.

By allowing nodes in other blockchain networks to confirm transactions, Harmony’s technology enables data to be transferred between other blockchain networks, regardless of whether they utilize proof-of-stake or proof-of-work governance.

Distributed Randomness Generation (DRG)

Among the several ways presented for sharding nodes, randomness-based sharding has been identified as the most avoidable. In this case, a mutually agreed upon random number is utilized to decide each node’s sharding assignment. Unpredictability, unbiasedness, verifiability, and scalability are all features of the number. Harmony generates scalable randomness using VRF and VDF.

Roadmap

The team commits and updates engineering milestones freely here

Harmony Ecosystem

The Role of ONE Token

• Pay for transaction fee: The ONE token is the native token for the purpose of refunding transaction fees. Users must specify a transaction fee in ONE in order for the transaction to be processed successfully and included in the blockchain.
• Stake to secure the network and earn rewards: Harmony is a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, which implies that the network’s security is guaranteed by staked tokens. The native token ONE is accepted for staking. To be chosen as a validator, prospective node runners must stake a specified quantity of ONE token. Additionally, ONE token holder can delegate their tokens to current validators in order to participate in the staking process. The more ONE tokens invested on the network, the more secure it gets. Elected validators who successfully sign blocks will be compensated for their efforts with ONE token.
• Participate in open governance: Harmony is a permissionless, decentralized network that is community-governed. Any protocol-level choices or enhancements will be presented as a proposal that will be finalized through the open governance process. ONE is the sole token that is accepted as a medium of exchange for voting in the governance process.

How to buy

Harmony (ONE) coins are available on the majority of major exchanges, including:

• Binance
• Bitmax
• Crypto.com 
• Kucoin 
• Huobi Global

Technical Data

Token Metrics

• Token Name: Harmony
• Ticker: ONE
• Blockchain: BSC
• Token Standard: BEP-20
• Contract: 0x03fF0ff224f904be3118461335064bB48Df47938
• Token Type: Utility, Governance
• Total Supply: 13,276,763,023
• Circulating Supply: 11.71B

Token Allocation

Token Sale

BINANCE IEO

• Date: May 27 – May 29
• 12.5% of Total Supply: 1,575,000,000 ONE ($5,000,625‬ USD)
• 1 ONE = 0.003175 USD

SEED SALE

• Date: Mar 2019
• Raised: $18,000,000 USD

Token Release Schedule

Backers

Team

Harmony was founded in 2017 by Stephen Tse, a former cryptography engineer. The objective was to provide DeFi’s worldwide users with an open, decentralized, and trustless blockchain platform. Along with Tse, the project grew with the assistance of a team of twenty more individuals. This founding team comprised experts in software development, machine learning, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and blockchain technology. More details can be found here.

Partners

Investors

Find more information about Harmony:

Website: https://www.harmony.one/

Docs: https://docs.harmony.one/home/

Twitter:  https://twitter.com/harmonyprotocol

Telegram: https://t.me/harmony_one

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/rdCmBpe

Medium: https://medium.com/harmony-one

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/harmony_one/

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or ideas about the project, please email ventures@coincu.com.

DISCLAIMER: The Information on this website is provided as general market commentary, and does not constitute investment advice. We encourage you to do your own research before investing.

Marshall

Coincu Ventures