Harmony (ONE)

Harmony is a blockchain platform designed to enhance the creation and use of decentralized applications (DApps). It emphasizes random state sharding, facilitating the rapid creation of blocks. Harmony integrates existing networks to enable seamless cryptocurrency transactions, aiming to provide a fast and open blockchain environment for DApps.

Overview

What is Harmony?

Harmony, launched in May 2019 on the Binance Launchpad, is a decentralized blockchain platform that bridges scalability and decentralization. Operating under the motto "decentralization at scale," Harmony focuses on data sharing and creating marketplaces for fungible and non-fungible assets. It promises high throughput with low latency and fees to support the foundation of future decentralized economies.

Ticker	ONE
Category	Protocol
Website	https://harmony.one/
Twitter	@harmonyprotocol
Telegram	harmony_one
Reddit	https://www.reddit.com/r/harmony_one/

Goals of Harmony

Harmony aims to overcome the structural limitations hindering cryptocurrencies from evolving into true digital money. It tackles scalability issues by implementing deep sharding technology, covering transaction validation, network communication, and the blockchain state. This approach enhances consensus, networking, and systems to boost performance while maintaining decentralization. Harmony aims to achieve higher transaction throughput, distinguishing itself from platforms like Ethereum by preserving security and decentralization through the use of shards (groups) of validators for simultaneous transaction processing.

Harmony's consensus protocol emphasizes speed and energy efficiency. The Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocol (FBFT) facilitates parallel transaction processing, scaling with network size and addressing connection latency. The network's design promotes swift consensus and message exchange, allowing a broader range of devices to participate, thereby enhancing decentralization. The deep sharding process utilizes an adaptive proof-of-stake model based on distributed randomness generation (DRG), ensuring security, verifiability, and scalability.

Platform strengths

Secure, random state sharding

Harmony addresses the blockchain trilemma by implementing secure sharding, which scales networks without compromising security and decentralization. The platform divides network nodes and blockchain states into shards, achieving linear scaling in machines, transactions, and storage. Each shard consists of 250 nodes, providing strong security against Byzantine behaviors, with cryptographic randomness ensuring unbiased shard membership.

Fast consensus with instant finality

Harmony's Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance (FBFT) enhances consensus speed, resulting in low transaction fees and instant finality on the Harmony Mainnet. The use of Boneh–Lynn–Shacham (BLS) signatures allows blocks to be committed in a single round of consensus messages. The network achieves an 8-second block time, adapting to adversarial or unavailable leaders, with Harmony Mainnet launching in June 2019.

Effective Proof-of-Stake and token economics

Harmony's Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS) mechanism enhances network security and economics by reducing centralization and distributing rewards to thousands of validators. The staking mechanism supports delegation and reward compounding, ensuring 100% uptime and open participation. EPoS penalizes nodes that double-sign or are unavailable. The Harmony Economics Model caps annual issuance at 441 million tokens, with transaction fees burnt to offset issuance, leading to zero inflation with increased network usage.

Team

Stephen Tse, founder and CEO of Harmony, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in cryptographic protocols. Rongjian Lan, previously a search infrastructure engineer at Google, has published extensively on spatio-temporal querying. Sahil Dewan, a Harvard Business School graduate, has experience with blockchain and cryptocurrency projects. Nick White, now external to Harmony, holds degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University and has researched artificial intelligence.

Tokenomics

Harmony began as a startup in 2018, raising USD 18 million in April 2019 from investors like Consensus Capital and Lemniscap VC. It offers an ecosystem supporting adoption across various markets, focusing on data sharing, decentralized marketplaces, supply chain tracking, ad exchanges, credit rating systems, and gaming. Harmony (ONE) has a maximum supply of 12.6 billion tokens, with the circulating supply around 9.49 billion as of February 2021. The token distribution includes 22.4% for the initial seed sale, 12.5% for an additional Launchpad sale, 16.9% for the founding team and developers, 26.4% for protocol development, and 21.8% for ecosystem development.