What is Harmony?
Harmony is a comprehensive, very robust platform that can support more than 10B people, offering a safe, fast and dynamic experience to all users.Harmony is already applicable to many projects from games, cryptocurrency exchanges, banking networks, airlines, artificial intelligence, real-time data processing and storage, among others.In the Harmony network we are talking about a consensus established in seconds, thanks to each fragment containing several nodes of the network. Therefore the network becomes more secure and reliable.Harmony takes the terms scalability and performance to a higher level, using an innovative consensus protocol based on fragments which increases in proportion to the number of nodes in the network.
Thus, applied to the blockchain, sharding proposes to vastly improve on the scalability of blockchains due to the fact that each node only has to carry a portion of the data in order to complete transactions as opposed to traditional blockchains which require all nodes to carry all data on the blockchain.
However, while sharding promises to drastically increase the number of transactions and so ensure scalability, the largest concern which has been a hindrance to its real world blockchain application is its security concerns.
Harmony is based on sharding and a balanced between speed and fair consensus for achieving the best results for real world use cases. With sharding, the computational load on the database is divided into smaller chunks of validators. The Mainnet will thus be able to deliver an unprecedented 118,000 TPS with scalability and security, which will equip it to handle real world operations in fintech and other industries.
The Harmony Mainnet was launched on June 28, 2019 on the world’s first, fully sharded blockchain. With 600 nodes, it figured among the top 15 networks.
Since centralization goes against the nature of blockchain, the way the committee validators get selected is important. In Polkadot, the highest staker or bidder gets in. In Ethereum 2.0, there is random selection. In EOS or Tron, votes from toke holders decide the validators.
Harmony has introduced the Effective Proof of Stake (EPOS) concept. It combines the highest bidding model with a formula to calculate the “effective” stake – this formula decreases the influence of high ranked validators, while it increases the weight of low ranked validators, thus equalizing the playing field in a way.
Harmony utilizes deep sharding which not only shards network communication and transaction validation, but it shards all the way to the blockchain networking layer which is exponentially faster than the traditional way of reaching consensus on the blockchain. Moreover, Harmony’s sharding process is highly and provably secure as a result of its Distributed Randomness Generation process which is unpredictable, verifiable and scalable.
To add to its attraction as a fully scalable sharding based blockchain, it utilizes Proof-of-Stake instead of a Proof-of-Work Consensus model and so it is very energy efficient and also allows for fast reaching of consensus among validator nodes. Harmony is also able to propagate blocks quickly within shards by using an Adaptive information dispersal algorithm.
Its Journey Through Failure in Search Perfection
However, the pioneer blockchains as obtainable in Bitcoin, Ethereum and even newer blockchain solutions which profess to solve the problems of the first two have failed in the attempt to build a blockchain of the future which will unleash the true potential of decentralized technology. One of the hallmarks of the blockchain of the future is the ability to scale, that is, the ability to cater for as many users that may care to leverage its platform. Bitcoin and Ethereum fail woefully at being scalable. Bitcoin’s transaction capability of only 7 Transactions Per Second (TPS) and Ethereum’s wholly unhelpful improvement to 15 TPS constituted a very serious obstacle to the probability of these two blockchains being the base for a decentralized economy which will no doubt involve thousands (if not millions) of transactions per second from users all over the world. Perhaps Ethereum’s failure at being scalable can never be more evident than with the CryptoKitties disaster of 2017.
Harmony is a provably fast and secure blockchain which implements revolutionary innovations that finally deliver the first ever high transaction throughput, low latency, provably secure and low fee platform that is poised to power the decentralized economies which have for too long remained a coveted future to be looked forward to. Development from before the dawn the history has always been about developing available means into veritable tools for advancement of humanity. We fly today because someone set out with the conviction that driving was not just enough and thus developed the first plane, today the technology has so developed that supersonic flights are possible.
The Harmony Team has been dedicated to work, it has not been dedicated to getting money. I have not seen articles referring to any ICO or anything like it. There is only evidence and alliances between companies and projects that believe that dreams are possible.
Harmony is not the result of improvisation, it is a well thought out project that can revolutionize the world. Harmony is now available to all those who wish to add and not subtract. The Harmony team wishes, from what I have read, for everyone to do tests, and then do more tests, give comments, provide suggestions.
Harmony can give humanity a true digital freedom, where corporations cannot hijack the right to interact, where intermediaries must give up their position and get involved in this blockchain revolution if they don't want to disappear.
More Information and Resources
https://harmony.one/