Harmony is a 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.
- 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 slow 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 networks by using the Adaptive Information Dispersal Algorithm. Harmony also adopts Kademlia routing to achieve cross-shard transactions that scale logarithmically with the number of shards.
- Consistent Cross-Shard Transactions: Harmony supports consistent 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 can 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 increase trust for billions of people and create a radically fair economy.
Who are the founders of Harmony (ONE)?
The founders of Harmony include:
Stephen Tse has been obsessed with protocols and compilers since high school. He reverse-engineered ICQ and X11 protocols, coded in OCaml for more than 15 years, and graduated with a doctoral degree in security protocols and compiler verification from the University of Pennsylvania. Stephen was a researcher at Microsoft Research, a senior infrastructure engineer at Google, and a principal engineer for search ranking at Apple. He founded the mobile search company Spotsetter with institutional venture capital; Apple later acquired the startup.
Rongjian Lan was a search infrastructure engineer for the Play Store at Google. He published over 10 academic papers on spatio-temporal querying and map-based visualization. Rongjian started researching decentralized protocols in early 2017. Rongjian is the co-chair of ABC Blockchain Foundation, with more than 100 engineers from Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn as members. He was a doctoral candidate in computer science at the University of Maryland College Park and obtained his bachelor’s degree from the University of Science and Technology Beijing.
Sahil Dewan is a graduate of Harvard Business School, where he served as president of the blockchain and cryptocurrency club. He has worked at Draper Dragon Fund and advised several blockchain projects. Sahil founded FuturEd, an ed-tech startup that pioneered a mobile platform for alumni engagement and fundraising for over 100 educational institutions in India. He was also elected country president for AIESEC India, a youth leadership organization present in more than 125 countries.
What is Harmony (ONE) used for?
Build apps
Harmony is a blockchain platform designed to facilitate the creation and use of decentralized applications (DApps). The network aims to innovate the way decentralized applications work by focusing on random state sharding, which allows the creation of blocks in seconds.
Governance
Community inclusion is important in Harmony, hence, governance is crucial. With Harmony’s unique token, participants get to vote.
How is Harmony (ONE) unique?
The Harmony team released the HRC-20 Governance as the next step into decentralized governance. This is intended for all projects that have their HRC-20 token on the Harmony network, enabling them to have their own governance system.
HRC-20 are fungible tokens minted on the Harmony network, much like ERC-20 tokens are on Ethereum. Functionality-wise, the HRC-20 is similar to ERC-20 tokens like USDC, UNI, SUSHI, etc., except that it is issued and used on the Harmony network, instead of the Ethereum network. This is most useful for any application that needs their token and wants to build on Harmony. The community members get to help make decisions on Harmony or protocols while living on it.
How many Harmony (ONE) coins are in circulation?
The circulating supply Is 12,305,426,115 ONE tokens while the total supply is 13,156,044,839 ONE.
How is Harmony Network secured?
Harmony’s consensus protocol is linearly scalable in terms of communication complexity and is thus called Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance (FBFT). In FBFT, instead of asking all validators to broadcast their votes, the leader runs a multi-signature signing process to collect the validators’ votes in a-sized multi-signature and then broadcast it.
Therefore, FBFT is at least 50% faster than ByzCoin’s BFT. Besides, Harmony adopts RaptorQ fountain code to speed up the block broadcasting process. The fountain code broadcasting technique also avoids a security issue in ByzCoin’s original tree-based multicasting design.
How do I buy Harmony (ONE)?
The ONE token can be used for a wide range of uses, like staking and governance.
ONE tokens can be easily purchased by the following steps.
* Open an account with the crypto trading platform.
* Transfer the specific amount of your fiat currency to your account.
* Wait for your deposit to be confirmed and buy ONE through your trading account.
Which Cryptocurrency Wallet Supports Harmony (ONE)?
The PTPWallet platform supports many cryptocurrencies simultaneously, such as Harmony (ONE). Because of its vast use case, it has grown to become one of the most used platforms, as it serves as an exchange and an engine to discover other cryptocurrencies. Users can easily use PTPWallet as their ONE wallet because it offers a simple interactive interface, making it easy for people to navigate through its system.
