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 sharding 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 sharding infrastructure was introduced to remediate the scalability problem faced with the Ethereum network. A number of 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.
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.
Harmony’s Tech Features
The platform in its unique design features a consensus protocol, a deep sharding system, cross-chain interoperability, and a Distributed Randomness Generation (DRG) which is the major contributor to its outstanding functionality.
A very notable technical mechanism Harmony deploys is the Sharding process. The Sharding system focuses on the efficiency of transactions and consensus layers within the Harmony ecosystem. It uses shard 0, shard 1, shard 2, and shard 3 to support 250 validators each.
The system basically enhances the platform’s functionality and processing capacity for a faster, more secure, and less costly transaction experience.
FBFT Consensus
FBFT Consensus, or Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance, is a mechanism that simplifies the communication processes on the platform.
This model ensures that the appointment of validators on the network is determined by the number of tokens in possession. In other words, an increase in the number of tokens owned will automatically grant higher chances in the selection of validators which eliminates the need for a vote broadcasting. The concept features a simple multi-signature design and process.
Cross-Shard Communication
Cross-shard communication is a major tech feature of Harmony that typically reduces the degree of complexities emerging while running the platform’s communication protocol.
The system relies on a distributed hash table and routing protocol dubbed Kademlia. This concept facilitates the communication system within shards as it allows nodes within a shard to send and receive information within themselves through a shard ID. Thereby, it is getting rid of the need to broadcast information across other shards
Distributed Randomness Generation (DRG)
The Distributed Randomness Generation (DRG) model requires that random numbers determine the assignment of nodes into shards. It is a random-based sharding solution that uses verified random numbers to appoint the sharding assignment for each node on the network.
Ethereum’s Integration
The high gas fee on the Ethereum network has caused lots of restrictions to the development of certain technologies within the ecosystem. Even the growth of the blockchain is becoming affected as users tend to divert to other alternatives when they cannot afford its high gas fee.
Ethereum network has not been able to support decentralized applications due to its limited scalability capacity. Thus, Harmony in its unique functionality has sought to remediate these challenges on the Ethereum network.
The platform has introduced an optimal scalable next-generation sharding-based protocol to curtail the limitations on Ethereum. Hence, it provides a secure and energy-efficient platform hosted on the Ethereum blockchain and capable of supporting decentralized applications.
ONE Token
ONE token is the Harmony blockchain’s native token that governs a notable extent of the activities running on the platform. The token’s name (ONE) was derived from the platform’s vision “For One and For all”. The token is used to secure the network, conduct transactions on the network, as well as reward users of the platform.
The platform allows an easy and secure entry of validators into the protocol. The condition of staking is a minimum of 10,000 ONE tokens. These validators then receive rewards depending on the portion of ONE token that is staked. They get rewards on a certain percentage of the token. Manipulative stakers who double sign are slashed out a great portion of their stake and eliminated from the network.
ONE token is available for purchase on the leading cryptocurrency exchange, Binance. However, it is most preferable for residents of countries outside the USA. Meanwhile, USA residents have the option of purchasing the token on Gate.io.
Use Cases of Harmony
Harmony has had a great impact on the world of DeFi since its evolution. The platform focuses on enhancing decentralization to boost the DeFi ecosystem on reaching gross adoption. It is basically useful to build decentralized applications, thus featuring solutions that are capable of powering the creation of dApps.
Further, Harmony (ONE) offers an extremely scalable service to users while providing a very fast and efficient consensus program for users. It also enables the execution of ultra-fast transaction processes with easy communication protocol within the network.
Notably, Harmony is famous for the top-notch security it offers while running transactions on the network.
Conclusion
Harmony in its design has proven to be unique among others. It has attracted the interest of a significant number of investors. The rate of adoption on the network after it launched its mainnet in mid-2019 has grown on a massive surge.
The model it adopts predicts a successful future for the network regardless of the competition surrounding it in the crypto market.
Harmony is one of the notable facilitators to the growth of the decentralized finance ecosystem and is efficient in its services.