Blockchain projects aimed at addressing the blockchain's major shortcomings have always been of interest to researchers and investors. Security issues, decentralization issues, scalability issues ... are always noticed in the community because of its urgency. However, whether it is Bitcoin or Ethereum or EOS, it is not yet possible to be a complete blockchain to meet these conditions. It is impossible, when no project has found the optimal solution. And Harmony, a project with an experienced and enthusiastic team about blockchain affirms, the mission of Harmony is born to accomplish the impossible.
Harmony is a high-throughput, low-latency and low-fee consensus platform (with 10 million TPS, 100-millisecond latency, and less than 0,1% transaction fee). Harmony builds a high-performance consensus platform that aims to transform the world into an open marketplace, and supports the coming decentralized economy for everyone.
Harmony Protocol aims to scale blockchain to 10M transactions/second and 100-millisecond latency. Harmony will bring 1,000x speed and capacity to the next generation of the decentralized economy, enabling marketplaces for 10B people and 100B devices.
Harmony aims to provide a scalable, secure, and decentralized blockchain system that supports all kinds of applications, including data marketplaces, gaming, and financial transactions for billions of people around the world.
The value Harmony brings is to utilize sharding technology and advanced network solutions to thoroughly and effectively address the applications that the blockchain market is targeting. It is scalable for Dapps and powerful game development without fear of network bottlenecks, fast payment systems at large scale…
In the context of cryptocurrencies, the consensus algorithms are a crucial element of every blockchain network as they are responsible for maintaining the integrity and security of these distributed systems. As we know, Bitcoin was created by Satoshi Nakamoto using that consensus algorithm, Proof of Work (PoW) as a way to overcome the Byzantine faults.
Another type of consensus protocol, is called PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance)
Harmony's consensus protocol (improved on PBFT), is linearly scalable in terms of communication complexity, and call it Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance (FBFT). In FBFT, instead of asking all validators to issue their votes, the leader will perform a multi-signature signing process to collect the authentication votes.
Harmony's consensus protocol allows us to effectively handle connection latency and allow our throughput to expand according to the size of the network.
Sharding is a technology that many people care about the scalability of the blockchain. Many projects have approached this concept to build their own blockchain to solved scalability, notably Zilliqua (2,800 TPS), Quarkchain (14K TPS), MultiVAC (30K TPS). And Harmony with testnet achieved an impressive 118K TPS.
The sharding approach of Harmony inspired by Omniledger and Rapidchain, which is incorporates staked voting and secure randomness
Harmony contains a beacon chain and multiple shard chains.
+The beacon chain serves as the random beacon and identity register
+The shard chains store separate blockchain states and process transactions concurrently.
Harmony combining Verifiable Random Functions (VRF) and Verifiable Delay Functions (VDF). Harmony also incorporates PoS in the sharding process, which shifts the security consideration of a shard from the minimum number of nodes to the minimum number of voting shares.
● Fully Scalable: Harmony shards not only the network communication and transaction validation, but also shards the blockchain state.
● Secure Sharding: Based on the distributed randomness generation (DRG) process which is unpredictable, unbiaseable, verifiable and scalable.
● Efficient and Fast Consensus: Harmony is based on PoS and thus energy efficient. Consensus is reached with a linearly scalable BFT algorithm that’s 100 times faster than PBFT.
● Adaptive-Thresholded PoS: The threshold is low enough so that small stakers can still participate in the network and earn rewards.
● Scalable Networking Infrastructure: With RaptorQ fountain code, Harmony can propagate blocks quickly within shards or across network by using the Adaptive Information Dispersal Algorithm. Harmony also adopts Kademlia routing [37] to achieve cross-shard transactions that scale logarithmically with the number of shards.
● Consistent Cross-Shard Transactions: Harmony supports cross-shard transactions with shards directly communicating with each other. An atomic locking mechanism is used to ensure the consistency of cross-shard transactions.
-Obviously, Harmony has an impressive development team that has worked at Google Maps, Apple Siri, and AWS Infrastructure in many different areas: AI and machine learning, to blockchain, VR, and compilers ... The biggest difference from the team, Harmony's collaborators is working collaborations from many countries and multi-disciplines that have experience with many of the world's leading technology companies.
-Although the idea of sharding technology is not new, Harmony's approach to sharding technology with testnet has achieved impressive results (114k+ TPS with 44000 nodes). With vision and aims to bring 1,000x speed and capacity to the next generation of the decentralized economy, enabling marketplaces for 10B people and 100B devices, this seems to be a strong attraction for investors as well as blockchain experts (raise 18m$ in seed round). Harmony is gathering and committed to creating a new global-scale infrastructure into transport networks, consensus protocols and system tools.
-Harmony has MVP and testnet. This is the result of serious work research, as well as bringing trust to the community about the goals that the project aims to.
In Harmony’s MVP: Users can create wallets, receive testnet tokens and send transactions
User also can view the latest blocks that are confirmed by the network, individual blocks, transactions and accounts via Block explorer.
Check it here: https://devnet.harmony.one/testnet/#wallet
The main objective of this project is to balance three components, especially improves the scalability of the blockchain. However, the competition is this field is very strong. There are several blockchain projects having the same idea (Zilliqa, QuarkChain, MultiVAC). As a result, it will be very challenging for Harmony team to leave an impression on community.
Another disadvantage of Harmony is that block rewards are not well defined in their whitepaper. Their team still hasn’t defined clearly how much rewards would be given to their users.
We all know that the most important thing of blockchain technology is security. Therefore, it will be very important to balance three elements, if Harmony pays more attention to improve their scalability, it won’t be an effective blockchain.
The market downtrend, many investors lacked confidence in blockchain projects is also a big challenge for Harmony.
Finally, there is not much information about their Token sale, which makes it hard for small investors to get access to this project.
Harmony is an ambitious project, which brings great excitement to investors about the real project of great potential for future development. With a team of passionate, great vision, Harmony creates great trust for the community about what blockchain can bring and practical application in life. It will be a long way for Harmony to approach and implement the ambitions of the project, but the community still believes in this bold project that will succeed in the near future.
More info about Harmony:
• Website: https://harmony.one
• Telegram: https://t.me/harmony_one
• Medium: https://medium.com/harmony-one
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/harmonyprotocol
About Syndicator Org:
• Website: https://syndicator.in
• Telegram: https://t.me/Syndicator_Official
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/syndicator_org
