We all, as human beings, seek harmony throughout our lifetime. Some happy ones somehow find it - and some of them even make a fortune writing bestsellers about the harmony search process.
But what if we tell you that harmony is just a couple of clicks away? Meet the Harmony blockchain project. It is the ONE. Well, ONE is Harmony’s coin name. Scroll down to learn more!
What is Harmony?
This is a so-called cross-chain blockchain project. Cross-chain means that it is designed to be a bridge between different blockchains. One of its applications is NFT. Harmony says, there are 2 312 artists who have made $602 000 in their NFT art sales so far.
Harmony states that its mainnet runs ETH apps with just two seconds of transaction speed and a hundred times lower gas fee.
Besides being a cross-chain, Harmony ONE coin’s blockchain is Proof-of-Stake. That means few things:
- You can not mine it
- You can stake it with Guarda Wallet and get more tokens
- The blockchain is really fast
Well, technically it is not the blockchain itself being fast, it is all about transaction speed. Who loves fast transaction speed? Obviously, everyone, what a question that is. But who especially loves it? Yes, it is business! So, Harmony protocol is another gem in the crypto ocean that can be usefully utilized by corporate users.
Harmony History
It was founded in sunny California, USA by a few ex-FAANG* professionals. Their dream was to change the industry by creating a new interoperable blockchain that would solve the scalability issues of current blockchains.
*FAANG is an acronym for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google. It first started as FANG - Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google, then Amazon was added. After that, such an acronym became viral. Some expand it to include both Tesla and Microsoft. But the idea is that all top-tier American tech companies are meant by
How Does Harmony Cryptocurrency Work?
Their mainnet supports four pieces of 1 000 nodes, producing one block in just two seconds. That is pretty fast. They call such pieces shards in Harmony. The process of dividing nodes into shards is sharding. The process of rearranging nodes between shards is resharding.
Harmony’s goal is to create an open network of nodes. It is designed to be operated and governed by a large community. They call such a community Pangaea. The same name had the united continent of the Earth many million years ago. Americas, Africa, and other continents were parts of Pangaea back in the day.
So far 800 nodes are run by the community. Pangaea consists of volunteers and validators from more than 100 countries, Harmony states in its official documents.
Key Features
As Harmony blockchain mentions on its official website, Harmony key features are:
- Fully scalable architecture.
- Secure random sharding.
- Efficient and fast consensus.
- Effective Proof-of-Stake.
- Scalable networking infrastructure.
- Asynchronous cross-shard transactions.
Architecture scalability is powered by the network’s sharding concept. It is applied not only on the network communication and transaction validation but also on the blockchain state. This makes Harmony fully scalable on all three blockchain aspects: network, storage, and transaction processing.
Harmony is run under a Proof-of-Stake consensus. Such consensus is energy-efficient and low-cost for node runners. They call it Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS). The Effective goes because of the sharding focus of the mechanism. This is introduced to stimulate stake distribution to be more decentralized.
The main difference of EPoS compared to a classical PoS is the obligatory ratio between the staking amount of a validator and the number of nodes he runs. The more tokens a validator is staking - the more nodes he has to run. Sounds like some of the European countries’ fine policies. The more a citizen’s salary is - the bigger fine he gets if he obeys a law.
EPoS is set to randomly and evenly distribute the stakes among all shards so every shard is equally secured.
But what are the shards and how do they work?
Deep Sharding
A shard is a synonym for a piece or a part. By sharding Harmony means dividing its nodes in four equal groups. Hence, there are 1 000 nodes total divided into four shards making one shard consisting of 250 nodes. Moreover, the exact nodes within shards are regularly and randomly mixed. This number is set to be exactly so to increase the security of the system and to add more scalability.
The randomness used in the sharding is obtained with a distributed randomness generation algorithm (based on Verified Random Function) which is unpredictable, unbiased, verifiable, and scalable. Harmony rearranges the network in a non-interruptive manner using the so-called Cuckoo Rule’ to prevent slowly adaptive byzantine adversaries.
We will explain to you this rule and a few other tech specifics behind Harmony ONE coin in the following article. Stay tuned.
FBFT Consensus
Harmony’s consensus algorithm is called Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance or FBFT. FBFT is a highly efficient and speedy consensus algorithm built upon the famous PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) algorithm which is the cornerstone for distributed systems and consensus research for the past 30 years.
Harmony’s FBFT is able to confirm blocks within 2 seconds thanks to the adoption of aggregated BLS (Boneh–Lynn–Shacham) signature. FBFT is also highly optimized in-network message processing and block proposal pipelining so that the consensus can scale to hundreds of validators at the same time.
Cross-shard Communication
Harmony ONE coin supports cross-shard transactions to achieve the composability of assets and smart contracts between shards. They designed a receipt-based asynchronous cross-shard communication mechanism that achieves eventual consistency. So no double-spending is possible between shards.
How to buy Harmony (ONE)?
There are dozens of platforms where to buy Harmony ONE coins. Most large crypto exchanges can provide you with that. So does Guarda Wallet.
Where to store Harmony?
You can try to store it at a non-custodial Guarda Wallet. Moreover, it is quite rewarding to not simply keep it in the wallet but to stake it. The details are in the next section.
Here is how to receive ONE token:
- Register or login at the wallet
- Find and add Harmony wallet
- Send your ONE to the given wallet address from anywhere
Staking Harmony ONE token
It is as easy as ONE, two, three. Especially when you stake it with Guarda Wallet.
Some details:
- Minimum stake is 100 ONE
- Own validators that are online 100% of the time
- 9.16% annual yield
- 1,300+ current stakers
Please, note that it takes up to seven epochs (or six days) to unstake your funds. Follow this link to learn all the Guarda Harmony staking numbers and calculate your staking reward.
How to start staking Harmony cryptocurrency with Guarda:
- Open your Harmony wallet on Guarda
- Click Staking, then click Deposit For Staking
- Type in how much ONE you want to stake
- 100 ONE is the minimal amount
- Click Next and confirm the information
- Start getting your rewards
Harmony Future (Roadmap)
Harmony aims to become the most popular financial cross-chain blockchain by the end of the year. We will see how it goes. So far the plan is to develop the project within these three points:
- Adoption. They want to increase it by conducting hackathons and workshops. The main focus is reaching more developers and partners first.
- Interoperability. New financial applications of the Harmony Network are believed to appear through cooperation with Bitcoin and Ethereum. That should bring more acceptable assets to become utilized by Harmony.
- Decentralization. Validator community growth as well as network protocol features. As they say on their official page - “External voting power and resharding will guarantee our long-term governance”.
Conclusion
Harmony ONE coin and the blockchain itself look quite promising in terms of its transaction speed, secureness, and staking reward opportunities. Their 2021 roadmap is achievable. Let’s see what comes next.
What certainly comes next is reduced down to only 3.75% ONE staking fee when staked on Guarda’s validator. So, the reward stakes are doubled on the house this September. The all-time low fee for the all-time best readers.
