What Is Harmony (ONE)?

Harmony One is a decentralized blockchain that bridges the gap between stability and scalability. It is a fast layer 1 network that aims to address “blockchain trilemma” by maintaining a high throughput rate. 

Harmony features four shards in its mainnet, producing blocks every 5 seconds and finalizing cross-shard transactions within 2 block times.  Also, its trustless cross-chain technology removes the need for third parties when connecting two blockchains. As a result, Harmony One upholds a blockchain principle of technology decentralization and improves interoperability. 

The network’s 4 shards and its trustless cross-chain bridges make it viable for the network to process all the transactions in parallel. 

What is the Harmony blockchain?

Harmony (ONE) is a fast layer 1 and open blockchain that aims to achieve scalability, decentralization, and security. It aims to achieve these essences through sharding and implementing its Effective Proof of Stake. 

Its mainnet runs Ethereum applications at 2 seconds transaction finality and with fees 100 times lower. As a result, Harmony blockchain makes it simple for developers to create apps. 

Developers are no longer bound under the disorder of Ethereum’s fluctuating gas costs. However, one might argue that what’s so different about Harmony one since all networks are launched based on dethroning Ethereum.  

Well, instead of dethroning Ethereum, Harmony one is collaborating with Ethereum to divide blockchain mediums into parallel speeds, consequently increasing speed and cutting down costs for end users. By implementing such features, Harmony asserts itself as a reliable blockchain.  Its transaction costs are lower than those of traditional systems. 

According to the Blockchain Council, Harmony is a “Layer 2, Ethereum blockchain. It is used by developers to create apps with little to no effort implemented while achieving a great output. 

Harmony blockchain is a post-Ethereum network that was founded by Stephen Tse in 2018. It was launched on Binance Launchpad in May 2019 as part of an Initial Exchange Offering. It is an Effective Proof of Stake (EPoS) whose staking mechanism avoids centralization and aims to achieve scalability, decentralization, and security.

Moreover, Harmony one envisions scaling web 3 by relying on Decentralized Autonomous Organizations and Zero-Knowledge Proofs. 

What Is Harmony Trying to Achieve?

Harmony aims to solve the “Bitcoin Trilemma” by achieving a balance between scalability and decentralization. So in simpler terms, Harmony is trying to achieve the following;

Solve the scalability radicle by removing structural limitations that halt cryptocurrency from becoming digital money.  Bitcoin has been popular within the cryptocurrency space with high performance. However, the prices foreseen in using the payment system are still high.  As a result, through implementing Harmony’s deep sharding technology, Harmony aims to cover transaction validation, network communication, and above all, the overall state of the blockchain. 

Harmony also asserts that it will solve the problem of scalability through solving consensus and doing away with a modular approach. 

• Increase energy efficiency and speed. 

Harmony aims to increase scalability and throughput through the Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocol (FBFT). By doing so Harmony aims to initiate parallel transaction processes to solve its connection latency while tackling scalability. 

Moreover, Harmony aims to make it viable for all devices in use to participate in consensus building. 

• An increasing performance gain high transactions throughput

Unlike other blockchain networks such as Ethereum, Harmony tries to achieve a high-performance gain through high transactions. As a result, other features aren’t sacrificed in due course to trying to achieve high transaction throughput.  

Applications such as decentralized exchanges and gaming need a high throughput performance to achieve optimum efficiency. 

Coming up with new tech such as directed Acyclic Graph or trying to replace consensus models can be welcomed by other blockchain networks. However, those mitigations only solve either decentralization at the expense of security or security at the expense of decentralization of its Kernel-designed feature. 

On the other hand, Harmony is trying to achieve security and decentralization by creating shards of validators. Creating Shards of validators aims to process parallel transactions. 

 

How does sharding in Harmony work?

Sharding is a process used by blockchain developers to increase transaction speed on blockchain platforms. The more the number of shards that a blockchain platform has, the more it increases its transaction speed. 

One of the familiar platforms that used sharding to increase the transaction speed is Zilliqa. Each shard on Zilliqa processes a fraction of the total number of transactions taking place on the Zilliqa blockchain platform. As a result, Zilliqa tends to harvest large from a high number of Shards on the platform. 

However, according to developers, the sharding process doesn’t include divisions of storage in the blockchain. As a result, devices that have limited access are prevented from participating within the network. Also, these devices will be at the mercy of single-shards takeover attacks. 

In a quest to mitigate this problem, Harmony proposes the deep sharding state of the network;

The proposal comprises sharding on the consensus layer and transactions

• The nodes identify other nodes that will play a bigger role in transactions and also make transactions part of the consensus-building process. 
• Improve the capacity of parallel processing, and consequently the throughput performance of the blockchain platform. 
• Eliminate the need of storing the blockchain state by nodes, thus allowing devices with a small capacity to as well become nodes on the platform. 

How Does Harmony’s Sharding Protect Itself?

If there weren’t random assignments of nodes to shards, the whole sharding system would be messy with malicious code attacks. As a result of randomizing, it becomes challenging to find the exact shard that the code is attributable to. 

Harmony uses a Distributed Randomness Generation that was developed by its developers after they devoted their time to studying peculiar solutions used by RapidChain and OmniLedger. 

The Harmony took a step further by creating a unique system;

• Combined the strengths of Verifiable Random Function that is implemented in Algorand, and proposes Ethereum 2.0. 
• Harmony’s solution is faster, verifiable, and unbiased in comparison to RandHound DRG by OmniLedger. RandHound DRG by OmniLedger is slow for large decentralized systems. 
• Harmony implemented BFT Consensus by providing finality to random the number.

How does Effective Proof of Stake work?

Effective Proof of Stake is peculiar to the Proof of Stake Validator and also the delegator model. Validators stake the Harmony Token One in a quest to process nodes and transactions through its election process. On the other hand, Delegators stake Harmony token one behind the validator. In return, it receives future block rewards and transaction fees. 

The moment it gets elected and has a shard assigned to it, a validator creates some blocks and thereafter shares the rewards with delegators.  

What sets Effective Proof of Stake from the rest is its rewards system. Its system helps to prevent the possibility of failure of the single points. 

What Is the FBFT Consensus?

FBFT refers to Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance (FBFT). It came as a response to Zilliqa’s Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) mode which is popular for increasing the complexity of the communication process;

• Harmony’s validator node doesn’t engage in the process of vote broadcasting.
• The beacon Chain for Harmony foresees DRG’s random number generation. 

The Role of ONE Token

The role of ONE Token (One Harmony Token) is to keep the cogs of Harmony’s ecosystem up and running. This is achieved by enabling participation and also makes it serve as the payment system on the blockchain platform. 

This is achieved through;

• Using one as a stake in the consensus model.
• Using tokens to pay for expenses such as storage fees, gas fees, and transactions fees
• Giving holders to have voting rights during the governance system of the blockchain. 

(с) The article is written by Patricia Adelite, 2022