What is Harmony? Harmony is a layer 1 blockchain developed by Stephen Tse and co-founders Rongjian Lan, Nick White and Sahil Dewan, all of whom previously worked at Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook. Harmony launched mainnet in June 2019 and was Launchpad on Binance. Harmony’s goals include cross-border utility, decentralized development, and auditable privacy. So what makes Harmony stand out? Let’s find out with Weakhand.
To understand more about Harmony, please read the articles below:
- What is Blockchain Layer 1? The Importance of Layer 1 in the Crypto Market
- What is Algorand (ALGO)? Algorand Cryptocurrency Overview
- What is Klaytn (KLAY)? Klaytn Cryptocurrency Overview
What is Harmony?
Overview of Harmony
Harmony is a layer 1 blockchain 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, allowing block creation in seconds.
Harmony is compatible with Ethereum’s new EVM, with transaction speeds of up to 10 million transactions per second and latency of only 100 microseconds.
Harmony provides a scalable, secure, and decentralized blockchain system that supports all types of applications, including data marketplaces, games, and financial transactions.
Harmony uses a technique called state sharding, which splits the chain into parallel data storage and transaction processing segments, to support fast transactions. Harmony currently supports a thousand nodes across four shards, working to produce new blocks every two seconds finitely (without the threat of a competing fork).
Harmony has designed a new Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism called Efficient Proof-of-Stake (EPoS) for security and economics, reduces centralization and distribute rewards equitably equal for thousands of authenticators.
Harmony highlights
- Extend: Harmony shards not only authenticate communication but also shard the blockchain state. This makes Harmony a fully scalable blockchain.
- Sharding is safe: Harmony’s protection process is proven secure thanks to its distributed random generation (DRG) process that is unpredictable, unbiased, verifiable, and scalable. Harmony also reshares the network in an uninterrupted way to prevent Byzantine adversaries from adapting slowly.
- Efficient and quick consensus: Harmony is based on EPoS and is therefore energy efficient. Achieve consensus with the linearly scalable BFT algorithm 100 times faster than PBFT.
- Scalable network infrastructure: Harmony can transmit blocks quickly in shards or across the network using an adaptive information dispersion algorithm.
- Consistent Cross-Shard transactions: Harmony supports cross-shard transactions with shards communicating directly with each other. A mechanism used to ensure consistency of transactions between shards.
Harmony technology
Harmony uses the Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerant (FBFT) consensus protocol combined with random sharding and Boneh–Lynn–Shacham (BLS) constant-sized signatures allowing Harmony to achieve finality within a block or interval two seconds.
Harmony uses a new efficient proof-of-stake consensus mechanism (EPoS). Harmony’s EPoS is based on the staking amount (first option) per epoch (~1 day), but Block rewards are based on the average stake of all validators. This discourages the centralization of too many tokens in any one node or group of nodes, increasing decentralization and preventing a single shard attack.
The random state of Harmony sharding exists in three dimensions: state, network, and transactions. allows transactions to be confirmed in parallel, increasing transaction validation speed.
Harmony’s distributed randomness (DRG) protocol combines both a verifiable random function (VRF), which is based on a validator’s private key, and a verifiable delay function (VDF) that delays reveals randomness. This means that the person proposing the malicious block cannot know in advance what the random number will be and therefore cannot propose the malicious block.
Harmony’s ecosystem
Like all Layer 1s, Harmony has a complete ecosystem: Wallet, Bridges, Analytics, DeFi, Metaverse/NFT, Infrastructure, …
Harmony’s Development Roadmap
Q1/2021
- Layer 2 protocol – endpoint: Web3.js, Metamask, Wallet. Bridge.
Q2/2021
Q3/2021
- Building 1Wallet, an open source, decentralized wallet.
- Cross-chain API, $1M Hackathon
Q4/2021
Q2/ 2022
- Trustless Ethereum Bridge: building a decentralized, secure, cheap gas Ethereum bridge.
- Cross-Shard Communication: allows smart contracts on different shards to interact with each other. The solution will improve Harmony’s network performance and open up new application possibilities for developers.
- Game: set one SDK to help game developers easily integrate their games into Harmony. The plan focuses on partnering with game studios and publishers that are ready to launch titles.
- 1Wallet: 1Wallet is a decentralized, open source wallet that allows users to store private keys on their mobile devices, aiming to provide a better user experience through social features. Users will be able to chat with their friends, create multiple signatures through group chats, and send tokens and NFTs using contact names or QR codes.
Q3/2022
- Bridge restoration strategy.
- GetBlock Block Explorer: Harmony funded the GetBlock team in Q3 to build an explorer for Harmony’s ONE and HRC20, HRC721, and HRC115 tokens.
- 1Wallet launch: 1Wallet beta testing completed.
- Horizon bridge rehabilitation plan.
- Protocol development.
- Cross-chain communication
Q4/2022
- Cross segment transactions.
- Provides interoperability with local RPCs instead of a full node, which will reduce friction, load, and network overhead
- Status synchronization.
Q1/2023
- State pruning,will reduce storage requirements for nodes and improve,network efficiency while cutting costs.
- Transactions between shards, will scale Harmony horizontally, allowing transaction processing across multiple shards.
- Lightweight client, which will improve access to the Harmony network.
- Rotate the leader, which will further decentralize the network as “external validators” will be able to participate in block production and have a larger voting share for validation.
- State synchronization, will allow full nodes to exchange state data more effectively, improving network speed.
Core Team
Stephen Tse – Founder
- Stephen Tse graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in 2000, double majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science; In 2022, he will graduate with a Master’s degree in Computational Algebraic Geometry from the University Simon Fraser; In 2007, Stephen obtained his PhD in Cryptographic Protocol, Type Theory, Field Function Compiler University of Pennsylvania.
- Stephen Tse has worked and held positions: Senior Engineer at Google; Founder at Spotsetter (acquired by Apple) – a Social Search Engine serving personalized location results across mobile, web and wearable platforms with autocomplete; Principal engineer at Apple; Founder at Voice AI.
- In 2017, Stephen Tse was Founder Harmony is an open and fast blockchain for cross-chain DeFi, NFTs and DAOs.
Rongjian Lan – Co-Founder & CTO
- Rongjian Lan graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Beijing University of Science and Technology; Rongjian Lan earned a PhD in Computer Science from Maryland University.
- Rongjian Lan has worked and held the following positions: 2 years working at Joobali in charge of the San Francisco Bay area as Co-Founder & Chief Architect; 4 years working at Google as a Software Engineer; Co-Chair of ABC Blockchain Fund; More than 4 years working at Harmony as Co-Founder & CTO.
- Currently, Rongjian Lan is Co-Founder & CTO at Stealth Startup.
Nick White – Co-Founder
- Nick White holds a Bachelor’s degree and a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
- Nick White spent 1 year working at Zeroth.ai as a Senior AI Expert; June 2018 – December 2020 Nick White is Co-Founder at Harmony.
- From April 2021 until now, Nick White has worked at the Celestia blockchain platform as COO.
Sahil Dewan – Co-Founder
- Sahil Dewan earned a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Punjab Technical University; Holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration from Harvard University.
- Sahil Dewan worked at AIESEC India as Chairman, President and Director; Founder & Director at FuturEd, a startup consulting organization; July 2018 – November 2021 is Co-Founder at Harmony.
- From June 2022 – present, Sahil Dewan works at Karma3 Labs as Founder.
Investor
Harmony raised $18M in the presale round by investment funds: Lemniscap, Consensus Capital, Binance Lab, Hashkey Capital, AU21 Capital, Continue Capital.
Harmony launchedpad on Binance and raised $5M.
Tokenomics
Information about ONE Token
- Token Name: Harmony
- Code: ONE
- Blockchain: Harmony Blockchain.
- Total supply: 13,156,044,839
ONE Token Allocation
- Seed Round: 22.4% equivalent to 2,822,400,000 ONE.
- Public Round: 12.5% equivalent to 1,575,000,000 ONE.
- Team: 18.9% equivalent to 1,132,424,000 ONE.
- Development: 26.4% equivalent to 3,323,376,000 ONE.
- Ecosystem: 21.8% equivalent to 2,746,800,000 ONE.
ONE Token Release
- Seed Round: 25% TGE, 25% vesting every 6 months.
- Public Round: 100% unlocked.
- Team: Lock for 8 months, then vesting 2.78%/month.
- Development: 16.6667% TGE, then vesting 16.7%/month.
- Ecosystem: 8.2% TGE, vesting 2.7%/month January – August, then vesting 0.9% monthly.
ONE Token Use Case
- ONE Token is used to stake and become Validators in the Blockchain network.
- Validators will receive ONE Token as a reward for their contributions.
- ONE Token is used to pay fees in the network, including transaction fees, gas fees and storage fees.
ONE Token Exchange
ONE token is currently traded on many exchanges: Binance, MEXC, Bybit, Houbi, Gate, Kucoin, OKX, ….
Harmony Project Information Channel
- Website: https://harmony.one/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/harmonyprotocol
- Discord: http://harmony.one/discord
- Medium: https://medium.com/harmony-one
- Telegram:
Summary
Harmony is a smart contract platform compatible with EVM. Harmony is the first sharding-based Layer 1 on the mainnet, allowing transactions to be confirmed in parallel, increasing transaction validation speed, cheap costs, and security.
Hopefully this article provides readers with useful information about the Harmony project and ONE token.