Introducing Harmony: Open Concensus for 10 Billion

Introduction

Cryptocurrency has been a real game changer in the digital world. Over the last couple of years, billions of people with good knowledge of how the internet and computer works could put this new technology to good use and benefit hugely from it. This is because in today's world everything is digital and about technology, people are now using their computers to work from any location and earn a living.
Since the advent of cryptocurrency, statistics shows that these currencies have help curb poverty in the world (especially in the developing countries). All these couldn’t have been made possible without the help of Blockchain technology.

Blockchain technology in a layman’s term, is the backbone on which every cryptocurrency operation is structured. Before the advent of blockchain technology, we frequently hear of fraudulent cases that do occur during transactions. Despite being a new technology, blockchain has the high potential of eliminating the occurrence of fraud in financial transactions, because it works on a decentralized system which means it is tough for it to suffer cyber-attacks. They are a good number of this currencies which are already taking over the market. The most notable of the cryptocurrencies powered by blockchain is the Bitcoin which was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency ever produced, and it was endowed with numerous features but had some challenges such as scalability, large amount of electricity consumption, to mention a few. These challenges has threatened to stunt the growth of the whole network.
In recent years other alternate coins have been springing up to solve this issue but to no avail, bringing a huge question mark to the whole credibility of the crypto-network, until recently.

HARMONY: The New Gamechanger in The Crypto Industry

Harmony was invented by Stephen Tse in 2018. Harmony is a recent sharding-based blockchain project which is aimed at bringing something new to the world of crypto. Harmony provides the world with a scalable and secure blockchain system that is able to support the emerging decentralized economy. Harmony will enable applications which were not previously feasible on blockchain. Harmony strives to scale trust for billions of people and create a radically fair economy. Since its existence harmony has helped curb the existing problems in the crypto world. It has helped solve the problem of scalability which has been the major challenge in the cryptosphere for the past 12 years. Harmony shards not only the network communication and transaction validation, but also shards the blockchain state, and it as also brought about efficiency in the crypto industry.

BENEFITS OF HARMONY

There are numerous benefits of Harmony, below is a brief review of some the amazing features and benefit Harmony promises to provide.

• Scalability:

Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum with limited throughput of (-7 and -15 respectively) transactions per second (TPS), Harmony have brought a new way in which people can make countless transactions per second which will help save time and ease stress. This makes Harmony a fully scalable blockchain.

• Secure Sharding:

Harmony’s sharding process is provably secure thanks to the
distributed randomness generation (DRG) process which is unpredictable, unbiaseable,
verifiable and scalable. Harmony also reshards the network in a non-interruptive manner to
Prevent against slowly adaptive byzantine adversaries.

• Efficient and Effective Consensus:

Unlike other sharding-based blockchains which require PoW to select validators, 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 of stakes required for a node to join the network is adjusted based on the volume of total staking in a way that malicious stakers cannot concentrate their power in a single shard. Moreover, 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.

• 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.

HARMONY: THE CONTEMPROARY CONSENSUS MECHANISM

The consensus protocol is a key component of any blockchain. It determines how securely and
quickly blockchain validators reach consensus on the next block. The first blockchain consensus protocol which powers Bitcoin is Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus or Chain Based consensus. This consensus mechanism was not scalable for a blockchain system with hundreds or thousands of nodes due to its low communication complexity. Due to this, various cryptocurrencies proposed to replace the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus with the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus. Harmony was able to bring about that change and it consensus protocol is linearly scalable in terms of communication complexity. Because of this new feature it was given another name which is; Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance (FBFT).

SHARDING A SOLUTION TO SCALABILITY

Sharding is a concept that is widely used in databases, to make them more efficient. A shard is a horizontal portion of a database, with each shard stored in a separate server instance. This spreads the load and makes the database more effiecient.
In the case of blockchain, each node will have only a part of the data on the blockchain, and not the the entire information, when sharding is implemented. Nodes that maintain a shard maintain information only on that shard in a shard manner, so within a shard, the decentralization is still maintained.
Zilliqa was the first sharding-based public blockchain that claimed a throughput of 2,800 Transaction Per Second (TPS). Zilliqa uses PoW as identity registration process
(i.e. Sybil attack prevention). This was not still up to expectation not until the advent of Harmony which brought about a 118,000 TPS.
Harmony draws its inspiration from other cryptocurrencies which have already been in existaence and designed a PoS-based full sharding scheme that’s linearly scalable and provably secure. Harmony contains a beacon chain and multiple shard chains. The beacon chain serves as the randomness beacon and identity register, while the shard chains store separate blockchain states and process transactions concurrently. Harmony proposes an efficient algorithm for randomness generation by combining

HOW IMPORTANT CAN HARMONY BE TO OTHER PROJECT?

Security is a key consideration when it comes to public blockchains. Past experiences shows that Bitcoin and Ethereum require the miners to compute a cryptographic puzzle (PoW) before they can propose a block. And also sharding-based blockchains like Zilliqa also had this issue because te were using PoW to prevent Sybil attacks. Harmony adopts a different approach with proof-of-stake (PoS) as the Sybil attack prevention mechanism. This is a core fact which in today’s cryptosphere has already materialize.

HARMONY ONE TOKEN

This token serves as the lifewire of the Harmony’s ecosystem, by playing a big role in serving as the payment vehicle for various activities on the network such as; payment of various fees, it is also used as a stake in the consensus model used with harmony, and also it serves as a voting right to the holders of the token.

HARMONY ONE Use Case

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Spring bank was the best commercial bank in its district. it was known for its large banking hall and good customer service (which consisted of over 15 bankers attending to customers from the counter, this gave them the added advantage over other banks in the district. It helped them in having a large customer base. They later started receiving complains from customers how their customer service have become bad, and it even got to the point even the shareholders started complaining that the turnover was beginning to diminish. This happened as a result of having too many customers that even the 15 counter bankers were not enough to attain to the customers, this made the banking hall to be congested and was no more conducive. These went on for a while not until the IT manager introduced Harmony one to the board of directors, the bought into the idea and adopted it into their system. After adopting Harmony one their bank started booming again because harmony is very scalable which means more than an hundred thousand transaction can occur at once and the network is really fast.

CONCLUSION

We are in a world in which competition is inevitable. All that is to be done is to produce a unique product with the right qualities that will be able to solve the society’s problem and you’re set to go. This is what Harmony has been able to do. Harmony can be said to be the best innovation the cryptoworld has seen for decades now.

For more information about Harmony, Visit:

Harmony Website
Harmony Whitepaper
Harmony Onepager