All You Should Know - What Is Harmony One

What is Harmony One?

Harmony is a fast and open blockchain that allows Ethereum apps to run with 2-second transaction completion and 100 times reduced fee. Harmony (ONE) is a blockchain-based platform designed to address the problem of delivering both scalability and decentralization at no expense of one another.

This strikes a balance between these three important pillars through secure, random state sharding. The use of 250 nodes per shard plus cryptographic randomness to re-shard on a regular basis ensures security against single shard assaults. 

Harmony (ONE) Features

Harmony is a next-generation sharding-based blockchain that is fully scalable, provably safe, and energy efficient. Harmony solves existing blockchain difficulties by combining the greatest research findings and engineering practices in an ideally tailored architecture.

Harmony achieves advancements in the following areas:

1. Fully Scalable: 

Harmony is a completely scalable blockchain, like Zilliqa, shards not only network communication and transaction validation, but also the blockchain state. 

2. Secure Sharding:

The distributed randomness generation (DRG) process, which is unexpected, unbiased, verifiable, and scalable, makes Harmony's sharding process provably secure. Harmony also re-shards the network in a non-interruptive manner to prevent byzantine attackers from slowly adapting.

3. Efficient and Fast Consensus:

Harmony is built on Proof-of-Stake (PoS), which is energy efficient, as opposed to other sharding-based blockchains that demand Proof-Of-Work (PoW) to choose validators. A linearly scalable BFT technique that is 100 times quicker than PBFT achieves consensus.

4. Adaptive-Thresholded PoS:

To prevent malevolent stakers from concentrating their power in a single shard, the threshold of stakes needed for a node to join the network is modified based on the amount of total staking. In addition, the threshold is low enough to allow even tiny stakeholders to benefit from the network.

5. Scalable Networking Infrastructure:

Utilizing the Adaptive Information Dispersal Algorithm, Harmony may quickly spread blocks inside shards or across networks using RaptorQ fountain code. Kademlia routing is also used by Harmony to achieve cross-shard transactions that scale logarithmically with the number of shards.

Harmony provides the world with a scalable and secure blockchain system capable of supporting the burgeoning decentralized economy by innovating on the protocol and network layers. Harmony will enable hitherto unfeasible blockchain applications, such as high-volume decentralized exchanges, interactive fair games, Visa-scale payment systems, and Internet-of-Things transactions. Harmony aspires to increase trust for billions of people and to build a profoundly equitable economy.

Consensus Mechanism

A crucial component of any blockchain is the consensus protocol. It governs how quickly and securely blockchain validators reach consensus on the next block. Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus was the initial blockchain consensus protocol that powered Bitcoin. PoW is a method in which miners compete to solve a cryptographic puzzle; the winner gets to propose the next block and collects token rewards. PoW's security assumption is that honest nodes hold more than half of the hashing power. With such an assumption, the rule for consensus is that the longest chain is the canonical one, which is why PoW consensus is also known as chain-based consensus. 

Sharding

Since late 2017, blockchain sharding has received a lot of attention as a scalability option. In both industry and academics, various sharding solutions have been presented. Zilliqa was the first sharding-based public blockchain, with a throughput of 2,800 TPS (transactions per second). Zilliqa's identity registration process is based on PoW. Zilliqa's network is divided into a single directory-service committee and several shard committees (network sharding), each with hundreds of nodes. Transactions are divided into shards and handled individually (i.e. transaction sharding). The directory-service committee collects and merges the generated blocks from all shards. Because each node must hold the whole blockchain state in order to process transactions, Zilliqa is not a state-sharding solution.

Shard Chain and Beacon Chain

A shard chain is a blockchain that processes, validates, and stores its own transactions. A shard only processes transactions that pertain to it. Despite its independence, a shard chain will communicate with other shard chains via cross-shard communication. The Harmony beacon chain is a unique blockchain that performs additional functions compared to shard chains. The beacon chain is, in effect, a shard. Like other shard chains, the beacon chain is responsible for two more crucial functions: generating the random number and receiving stakes. The beacon chain is where stakers deposit their tokens to become validators. The beacon chain's validators are determined in the same way as the other shard chains are.

Harmony Strategy 

Harmony aims to be the dominant blockchain for cross-chain assets, collectibles, identification, and governance by 2022. Harmony's primary themes are

1. Adoption:

Harmony provides value to users through developers and partners. Hackathons and workshops at Ethereum events are used to broaden Harmony's reach.

2. Interoperability:

Harmony is collaborating with Bitcoin and Ethereum to develop broader assets. Cross-shard and cross-chain transactions in Harmony will enable new finance applications.

3. Decentralization:

Harmony's validator community and network features are expanding. Harmony’s long-term governance will be ensured through external voting power and re-sharding.

4. Zero-Knowledge Proofs:

Harmony is researching and prototyping 100x benefits, magical use cases, and universal constructions.

ONE Token Utility

The ONE token serves as a stake in the Harmony consensus model. Holders can earn block incentives and are encouraged to keep the system running smoothly. Tokens are used to pay for expenses such as transaction fees, storage fees, and gas fees. Holders of the ONE token are awarded voting rights as part of the platform's governance mechanism.

Why did Harmony Crash?

According to CoinJournal, they were a massive hack that resulted in a loss of more than $100 million. North Korean hackers, according to US investigators, were behind the Horizon Bridge hack. As a result, the network's total value locked (TVL) fell from over $1.3 billion to less than $30 million. This explains why the price of ONE has plummeted in recent months. Only five applications in its ecosystem have a TVL of more than $1 million.