What Is Harmony And Is It The $ONE?
Harmony is a sharded, PoS, BFT consensus based layer-1 blockchain that’s acheived 2-second block finality with a network of over 1000 decentralized nodes.
Similar to Ethereum and Cardano, Harmony is a smart contract platform that aims to be the most secure, efficient, and truly decentralized blockchain in the space. It aims to achieve this by focusing on sharding, which allows the creation of blocks in a matter of seconds. Its design aids in the creation and use of dApps.
The Harmony team took on this project because they aimed to solve the large problems of decentralization as it relates to scalability.
Harmony is led by Stephen Tse who’s approached solving this problem by bringing the best research to production (he has a Ph.D. in Cryptographic Protocol) and executing on their vision outlined in their whitepaper.
Harmony’s Whitepaper
Harmony’s whitepaper has called out a couple of crypto platforms where the problems of scalability and decentralization arise.
As the first mover, Bitcoin (BTC) rose to popularity becoming the mainstream blockchain today. But because of this massive adoption, its performance bottleneck has become evident with a ceiling of ~7 transactions per second (TPS) and an expensive payment system likely due to its PoW consensus.
Ethereum (ETH) also hasn’t solved its scalability problem either, as it’s limited to ~15 TPS which has failed to support higher throughput applications such as games and decentralized exchanges. Most people are aware of the high gas fees associated with ETH hence why people are considering moving over to other platforms like Cardano and Solana.
Zilliqa has a sharding approach to help with scalability but theirs may fall short in two ways.
- It doesn’t divide the storage of blockchain data at a consensus level also known as deep sharding, which actually limits which machines get to participate within the network thus reducing decentralization.
- Zilliqa’s sharding approach may not be the most secure since it might be susceptible to a single shard takeover attack. The main reason for this is due to its reliance on Proof of Work as its randomness generation mechanism.
Harmony Breakthroughs
Harmony has tackled the problem of scalability by relying on random state sharding or distributed randomness generation (DRG).
Besides network communication and transaction validation between shards, Harmony also shards the blockchain state, which allows all machines to participate in the network and maintains true decentralization. Remember that deep sharding goes beyond the transaction layer and into the consensus layer.
This type of sharding allows nodes to securely locate other nodes that are relevant to a specific transaction thus acheiving consensus faster. This means that all nodes don’t need to store data on the entire blockchain state because they’ll only be validating relevant transactions. Thus allowing all computers, even personal ones, to join the network leading to a greater level of decentralization. Horizontal sharding increases the level of parallel processing allowing for more transactions to take place per second leading to a high network throughput thus helping to solve the problem of scalability while still remaining decentralized.
Now that Harmony has solved the problem of scalability through sharding, they also have made it provably secure through a process known as distributed randomness generation (DRG). DRG is a process that is unpredictable, unbiased, verifiable, and scalable. It also allows for resharding of the network in Harmony’s case (Every 1-Epoch/day) in a non-interruptive way that protects again slowly adaptive byzantine adversaries aka hackers.
A hacker is less likely to predict and attack a particular shard because of DRG and likewise, a takeover of a particular shard is less likely as well.
Lastly, Harmony has placed an emphasis on reaching consensus efficiently which has led to a whopping 2-second finality!
Unlike other sharding-based protocols that rely on PoW to select validators, Harmony has developed a new staking mechanism called Effective Proof of Stake (EPoS) which not only is more energy efficient but also maintains the dentralization aspects of the blockchain.
Recent Developments
Harmony Bridge
Harmony’s construction of its two-way Horizon Bridge with Ethereum was completed in late 2020 and is just the beginning of several cross-chain initiatives.
The bridge simply allows for Ethereum ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens to be moved over to Harmony, and back if necessary.
One of the main advantages of Harmony is that the solidity language is offered natively on Harmony which allows developers from Ethereum to play on Harmony’s protocol as well. Solana, for example, is another protocol that also has a bridge to Ethereum but operates on different programming languages such as C or Rust which may not throttle adoption but is something to point out.
Keeping in line with it’s ongoing plan for cross-chain infrastructure in 2021, Harmony’s Horizon bridge is fully trustless and relies on its innovative use of gas-efficient light clients and block relays.
Partnership With The Sandbox
Harmony intends to become one of the first PoS blockchains that allows faster and cheaper trading of NFT’s (ERC-721 and ERC-1155).
One of the ways to accomplish this is by partnering with projects like The Sandbox to support continual growth of blockchain gaming communities utilizing the aforementioned Horizon Bridge.
In the future, communities and developers may move their assets and games from ETH to Harmony to take advantage of its low cost yet scalable infrastructure, 2-second finality and secure PoS sharded network.
Harmony’s strategic partnership with The Sandbox aligns with Stephen’s belief that “NFT’s are a really lightweight way for a community to come together and create value.”
Viperswap aka the Harmony Uniswap
Viperswap is a multi product cross chain DeFi protocol built on Harmony. Not only that, but it happens to be Harmony’s first!
One interesting thing to note about Viper Protocol is that its a fork of Uniswap, hence the above sub-heading.
Launched in March 2021, in just 20 days, Viper reached a market cap of $150M!
According to the Viper team, some of the main reasons that Viper was built on Harmony first is mainly to take advantage of its speed, low cost and the compatibility of EVM-Ethereum tooling.
With several other DEX’s being launched everywhere at the moment on other chains such as BSC, competition remains low on Harmony. There’s potential for other chains like BSC and SOL to later answer for their lack of decentralization which could result in other platforms moving to Harmony later.
In Conclusion
Harmony isn’t the most popular coin but as cliche, as it sounds “has really good fundamentals.” Their vision to bring open consensus to 10B people is backed by a really smart team and has answered the hard questions regarding decentralization and scalability 2 years ahead of other blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
With its aim in 2021 to build more bridges (with Bitcoin and Terra) as well as create more partnerships to complement its cross-chain infrastructure, Harmony appears to be a project with long-term appeal regardless of its state of marketing efforts and current token price.
Are you aware of the hidden gem that is Harmony $ONE?
Originally published at https://glenngabriel.com on April 30, 2021.
