What Is Harmony – Cross-Chain Ethereum Applications 2022

Harmony is the foundation of success

The Gitbook document (which can be found here) contains an introduction as well as resources for a wide range of audiences: general – technical aspects, application showcases, ecosystem partners, and community channels; specific – community channels.

Developers: web3 toolkits, deploy instructions, open bounties, and hackathon rewards are all available to harmony users!

Token wallets, delegator economics, validator setup, and network governance are all covered.

Bridge to All Chains

Grants – Over $300 million has been spent on bounties, grants, and DAOs.

Grants and Bounties on NFTs totaling $13 million

Grants and Bounties on Wallets totaling $20 million.

Roadmap – Ad Campaign Strategy and Launch Dates

Open Development Sources Can Be Found Here

What Is Harmony In Depth?

A blockchain for decentralized apps that is both fast and safe. Harmony’s production mainnet is comprised of four shards of 1000 nodes, each of which can produce blocks in two seconds with finality.

While enabling stake delegation, incentive compounding, and double-sign cutting, their Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS) protocol helps to decentralize the network.

Harmony aspires to create an open network of nodes that are controlled and regulated by a big group of people. Pangaea is the name given to this node community.

Is it possible to be decentralized yet? There can’t be a consensus until everyone participates. The number of Harmony nodes has grown to 1,000 – with 800 of them being maintained by the community (data in the whitepaper, probably outdated) – in parallel with the number of Bitcoin and Ethereum nodes, which number thousands.

Pangaea is made up of volunteers and validators from more than 100 countries, with the majority of them having never before operated a node.

Innovations that are significant

Architecture that is completely scalable

The Network’s sharding works not only on network communication and transaction validation, but also on the state of the blockchain, as seen in the following diagram. As a result, Harmony is completely scalable on all three parts of the blockchain: the network, storage, and transaction processing (or “transaction processing”).

Random Sharding with a High Level of Security

In the network’s sharding mechanism, the network validators are allocated randomly and swapped around shards, making it resistant to shard assaults and hence provably safe against them. Using a distributed randomness generating technique (based on VRF and VDF), which is unexpected, unbiased, verifiable, and scalable, the randomness utilized in the sharding process is generated. Cuckoo Rule is used to reshard the network in a non-disruptive way in order to protect against byzantine attackers who are steadily adapting to the network’s configuration.

Consensus reached in an efficient and timely manner

The consensus mechanism used by Harmony is known as Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance, or FBFT. Based on the well-known PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) method, which has been the cornerstone of distributed systems and consensus research for the last 30 years, FBFT is a very efficient and quick consensus algorithm.

Because of the use of aggregated BLS (Boneh–Lynn–Shacham) signatures, Harmony’s FBFT can validate blocks in as little as 2 seconds, according to the company. In addition, FBFT is highly efficient in network message processing and block proposal pipelining, allowing the consensus to expand to hundreds of validators at the same time without sacrificing performance.

Proof-of-Stake (PoS) that is effective

Unlike typical blockchains, which need Proof of Work (Proof of Work) to attain consensus, Harmony is a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, which is both energy efficient and low-cost for node runners to operate on top of. The technique of selecting validators is referred to as Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS), which is the first Proof-of-Stake mechanism that is focused on sharding and avoids stake centralization.

Validators who have a significant quantity of staked tokens are forced to operate more nodes to sustain the network, whilst validators who have a smaller amount of stake are obligated to run fewer nodes. Furthermore, EPoS is capable of distributing stakes across all shards in a random and equitable manner, ensuring that no shard is less safe than the others.

Infrastructure for Scalable Networking (INFRASTRUCTURE)

The network’s layer is built on top of libp2p, which is the industry-standard peer-to-peer protocol. For network message broadcasting, we utilize the gossip protocol from libp2p, and for decentralized state synchronization, Harmony one uses the stream protocol from the same library. Adaptive Information Dispersal Algorithm is used to swiftly and efficiently broadcast huge blocks of data in order to achieve high performance. RaptorQ fountain code is used to achieve high performance. Another architectural aspect of Harmony is the use of Kademlia routing to enable cross-shard transactions that grow logarithmically with the number of shards.

Transactions involving many shards that are asynchronous

Using Harmony, you may do cross-shard transactions in order to enable composability of assets and smart contracts across shard boundaries. Harmony’s receipt-based asynchronous cross-shard communication system ensures eventual consistency, which eliminates the possibility of double-spending across shards.

What third-party applications are compatible with Harmony One?

You may get a list of decentralized apps operating on Harmony One by searching for DApps on the web.

What exactly is staking?

In order to participate in staking without having to operate a validator, delegation is the most effective method of earning block rewards while remaining anonymous. Staking refers to the act of delegating tokens in order to get benefits.

In order to delegate their tokens to existing validators, Harmony ONE holders may use Harmony’s staking explorer, which can be found here: A percentage of the block reward generated by the delegated tokens will be credited to the delegated tokens if they are delegated to a validator who has been chosen by the community (according to section ).

Block Reward may be found at https://staking.harmony.one/
A separate reward fund for the delegator is maintained for the purpose of storing earned block rewards, which may be withdrawn instantly and credited to the delegator’s account balance. In addition, the block rewards may be staked again in order to benefit from the compounding impact of staking.

Your delegated tokens are also connected with lowering the risks involved with the validator’s validation. As a delegator, you should carefully choose validators based on their past performance data, such as annual percentage rate (APR), uptime percentage, and commission percentage. To reduce the possibility of apathy or indecision, you should disperse your delegations across a number of validators in order to spread the workload.

Features Of Harmony

State sharding that is secure and random

The network has overcome the blockchain trilemma by bringing the most up-to-date research to the production environment. Sharding has been shown to allow blockchains to grow without affecting security or decentralization.

The blockchain states, as well as the network’s nodes, are broken up and divided into shards, which allows harmony to scale linearly in all three components of the system: computers, transactions, and storage.

If in harmony they want to avoid single shard assaults, they need to have a big enough number of nodes per shard and enough cryptographic randomness to re-shard the network on a frequent basis. Each shard has a quarter of the total number of nodes, providing a strong security guarantee against Byzantine behavior. They employ a Verifiable Random Function (VRF) to ensure that shard membership is unbiased and unexpected.

Consensus reached in a short period of time with immediate finality

When it comes to quick consensus of block transactions, Harmony has innovated on the battle-tested Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) algorithm. In the Harmony Mainnet, Harmony’s Fast BFT (FBFT) results in cheap transaction costs and one-block-time finality due to Harmony’s Fast BFT.

To commit blocks in a single round of consensus messages, harmony employs Boneh–Lynn–Shacham (BLS) constant-sized signatures, which have a fixed size. Using view changes in production against antagonistic or unavailable leaders, they reach 2-second block time with view changes.

The Mainnet was officially launched in June of this year. Harmony’s network has generated more than 30 million blocks, resulting in more than 450 thousand transactions in native ONE tokens that are openly traded.

Effective Proof of Stake and Token Economics

Harmony has developed a revolutionary Proof-of-Stake (PoS) method for network security and economics that is both secure and cost-effective. Harmony’s Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS) algorithm eliminates centralization while still distributing rewards evenly among thousands of validators at the time of validation.

In Harmony’s staking technique, delegating and compounding rewards are both supported. EPoS punishes validators who double-sign and penalizes nodes that have been elected but are unable to participate in order to maintain 100 percent uptime while maintaining completely open participation.

The yearly issue of tokens is limited to 441 million according to the Harmony Economics Model (about 3 percent rate in long term).
Harmony’s paradigm provides validators with a straightforward and predictable result. All transaction fees are used to balance the issuance, which naturally results in zero inflation when Harmony’s network’s utilization reaches a certain threshold.

Fees for Transactions

As with Ethereum, users must spend a set quantity of tokens to get their transactions processed and added to the network. Because Harmony is completely EVM-compatible, users may immediately apply Ethereum’s pricing scheme to Harmony. A regular token transfer, for example, costs 22000 gas. The gas price may be as cheap as 0.000000001 ONE (or 10 Gwei in Ether) due to Harmony’s high TPS and efficient network. A regular transfer costs about 0.000021 ONE. In general, Harmony network transactions cost roughly $0.000001.

Harmony can afford such a cheap price on two reasons. First, Harmony is a Proof-of-Stake chain, hence operating a node is significantly cheaper than PoW chains.
It can presently process thousands of transactions per second. So consumers don’t have to pay large fees to have their transaction handled quickly. Harmony anticipates low fees to continue as long as the Harmony network is not completely used, and even then, they can remedy the issue by adding additional shards to increase transaction processing capability.

Effective Proof-of-Stake

It is one of the first operational mainnets to have a fully sharded Proof-of-Stake (PoS) architecture. Blocks are generated every 5 seconds across the 4 shards of the Harmony mainnet, and cross-shard transactions are completed in 2 block times.

The Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS) method developed by Harmony is the first staking mechanism on a sharded blockchain to provide both security and decentralization at the same time. EPoS allows for staking from hundreds of validators, and the unique effective stake method decreases the likelihood of stake concentration by reducing the inclination for stake centralization. Stake delegation, reward compounding, double-sign slashing, and unavailability checking are all supported, as is unavailability checking.

Early stakers are rewarded with larger payouts under Harmony’s token economics model, which helps to bootstrap the network to its maximum potential. For individuals interested in becoming validators or delegators, this guide will assist you in getting started and learning about how everything works in the process.

Harmony’s Tokenomics

ONE has a maximum supply of 12,600,000,000 tokens.

More Information

Crypto Startup School

Learn how to start a cryptocurrency firm from the ground up. Videos from the Crypto Startup School, which took place in the spring of 2020, are now accessible to anybody who wants to see them. Make use of the hours of free videos and reading resources provided below to help you navigate the idea labyrinth and get started on your crypto initiatives. https://harmony.one/school.

The Crypto Thesis for the past Year (2021)

An analysis of the important trends, people, businesses, and projects to monitor across cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, and Ethereum, with projections for 2021, according to the Messari study. https://harmony.one/theses.

Non Fungible Tokens

When it comes to understanding and doing more with non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the NFT Canon is the go-to resource for artists and creators, developers, enterprises and institutions, communities, and other groups. You can find it here. It is a curated list of readings and resources on all things NFTs (inspired by the a16z), and it is organized from the big picture of what NFTs are and why they matter to the specifics of how to mint, collect, and do more with them — including various applications in the fields of art, music, gaming, and social tokens. https://harmony.one/nfts