History of Harmony
A veteran engineer in cryptographic
protocols, Stephen Tse, founded Harmony in 2017. The purpose was to provide an
open, decentralized, and trustless blockchain platform for the global users of DeFi.
Alongside Tse, there was a team of 20 other members who joined efforts in the
evolution of the project. This team of founders involved experts with diverse
experience in software development, machine learning, artificial intelligence,
virtual reality, and blockchain technology.
With efforts to boost the adoption of the
platform and gain more collaborators, the team began to hold consistent meetups
in San Francisco. It started gaining the interest of multiple investors months
after the launch and raised over $18 million after its fundraising project in
2019.
Harmony has been able to raise a
progressive offline and online community. The project has been accommodating an
increasing number of new users since its launch.
What Is
Harmony (ONE)?
The growth of the DeFi ecosystem has been
on a consistent rise as new innovations seem to be making the community more
interesting for enthusiasts. Here is a guide on a scalability-focused
blockchain project Harmony (ONE).
With many blockchain projects striving to
give the best of services to DeFi users, Harmony (ONE) is one of those
outstanding blockchain-based projects innovated to boost the efficiency of
decentralization at scale.
Harmony is a blockchain project that
allows users to create decentralized applications while utilizing the best of
scalable and interoperable services. It opts to serve the decentralized
ecosystem with a satisfactory and equated intensity of scalability and
decentralization.
The platform basically aims at providing
the option of creating marketplaces of fungible tokens and non-fungible assets,
following an avenue for data sharing with user privacy. It has sought to
introduce a sharing infrastructural system to facilitate proven security and
speedy transactions for users.
Harmony is one of the communities hosted
on the Ethereum (ETH) network. Thus, it considers it necessary to offer
solutions to notable challenges limiting Ethereum. Harmony’s powered sharing
infrastructure was introduced to remediate the scalability problem faced with
the Ethereum network. Several blockchain projects have sought to attend to
these challenges. However, it has mostly proven of no or little impact on the
network. Hence, Harmony has proven to be unique and outstanding among others
and an option for scalable and ultra-fast transactions.
What Is
Harmony Trying to Achieve?
Higher transaction
throughput is what should set Harmony apart from the likes of Ethereum and
other blockchain solutions which are forced to achieve performance gains by
sacrificing other features. Harmony developers describe competing solutions as
unable to resolve scalability issues or provide support for applications which
require high throughput performance, such as with gaming or decentralized
exchanges. Similarly, blockchains such as EOS or IOTA tried replacing consensus
models and introducing new tech, such as directed acyclic graph (DAG). All of
these came at the expense of security and/or decentralization which Harmony
aims to preserve by creating shards (groups) of validators that would be able
to process transactions simultaneously. Based on this, the total transaction
throughput should increase in a linear manner and in parallel with the growth
in the number of shares. In September 2018, Harmony’s test net managed to
achieve 118,000 TPS with some 44,000 nodes, with the hope to close the gap to
the Visa’s 2,000 TPS daily.
Harmony’s
consensus protocol goes for speed and energy efficiency. Much of the Harmony’s
scalability and throughput promises rest on the ability of its Fast Byzantine
Fault Tolerant protocol (FBFT) to employ parallel transaction processing to
scale with the size of the network and effectively tackle its connection
latency. Its network topology is designed to enable faster consensus reaching
and message exchange. At the same time, Harmony features a kernel designed to
run its protocol in a manner which allows a wider range of devices to
participate in the consensus building, thus strengthening its decentralization.
The deep sharing process itself relies on an adaptive proof-of-stake model
based on distributed randomness generation (DRG) procedure, which is described
as secure, easily verifiable, and scalable.
