HARMONY “A sharding-based blockchain that is fully scalable, provably secure, and energy efficient”

Bharathi Lakshmi
7 min readAug 26, 2019

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In today’s world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies we have numerous platforms that allow users to make transfers of various cryptocurrencies instantly. But over time, these platforms began to have certain scalability difficulties, since the blockchain is responsible for storing all the data related to each of the platforms that are within it. So while thousands of transfers are being executed at every moment, the blockchain becomes very heavy and slow, causing these platforms to not be able to make all those transfers on time, making people get their payments after many hours or days, being problematic for many of the people who invest and undertake in the crypto world.

That is why, as a result of this problem, a great initiative called Harmony is born, which aims to solve all the scalability problems that are present when transfers are made within the blockchain and the perfect solution that Harmony offers, has to do with the implementation of the Sharding System.

Before continuing to explain more about Harmony, it should be noted that the Sharding system consists of dividing the computational responsibilities of a database into several smaller databases, thus distributing the information from the main database and reducing its total load. In this way, the use of Sharding is very feasible since it would help to achieve a much faster scalability and thus process all the data efficiently within the blockchain.

Continuing, Harmony is an innovative and decentralized blockchain that has the peculiarity of using the sharding system in its infrastructure in order to improve all the scalability failures that are present in the blockchain. Through the Sharding system, Harmony intends to cover a greater number of transactions per second without the blockchain becoming saturated in these processes. In this way, Harmony is the perfect solution since it is a fully scalable blockchain, as it is also demonstrably safe and very capable of supporting the emerging decentralized economy, becoming a high-performance and low-consumption network.

On the other hand, Harmony Blockchain intends to enable certain applications that on previous occasions have not been feasible in the blockchain, these include: decentralized high-volume decentralized exchanges, interactive fair games, Visa-scale payment systems, and Internet-of-Things transactions.

Harmony Blockchain has multiple features that makes it unique and innovative compared to other blockchain and these features are the following:

Fully Scalable:

Harmony is a fully scalable blockchain since this wonderful blockchain fragments through sharding, all the processing and maintenance data that is registered within the blockchain, from the validation of transactions to the network communication, as well as the status of the blockchin.

Secure Sharding:

Harmony has a fragmentation process that is demonstrably safe for all users, since it implements the distributed randomness generation (DRG) process which is unpredictable, insensitive, verifiable and scalable. This allows to grant a wide security to all the users, as well as to be able to efficiently perform all the opreaciones within the blockchain.

Efficient and Fast Consensus:

Within the blockchain, the consensus protocol turns out to be a component of utmost impotence since it is what determines the security and speed of the consensus valuers of a blockchain. And that’s where Harmony Blockchain decides to rely on the PoS and not the PoW as the majority of the existing blockchain based on the sharding system. The PoS stands for Proof-of-Stake and this proves to be more energy efficient unlike the PoW.

Adaptive-Thresholded PoS:

In the blockchain the voting price is algorithmically set to be small enough and thus prevent malicious users from concentrating their voting power in a single shard. In that sense, Harmony Blockchain adapts a PoS-based model with the intention of guaranteeing security to all its users and not being affected by other malicious users who want to abuse their voting actions in a single shard.

Scalable Networking Infrastructure:

Harmony Blockchain presents an infrastructure based on RaptorQ fountain code which helps to quickly propagate blocks within shards, as it also helps spread it across the network using the Adaptive Information Dispersal Algorithm, all this being very beneficial for Harmony users. On the other hand, Harmony also adopts Kademlia routing, which helps cross-shard transactions scale logarithmically with the number of shards within the network.

Consistent Cross-Shard Transactions: ​

Harmony Blockchain allows cross transactions of shards with other shards through direct communication. On the other hand, Harmony intends to use an atomic locking mechanism in order to ensure that cross-shard transactions are performed correctly.

Open infrastructure for the world’s data:

Open infrastructure for the world’s data:

Harmony Blockchain offers an open infrastructure for the world’s data where all the transactions of this blockchain will be carried out in a transparent way, giving confidence and security to all Harmony users.

Global-scale marketplace platform:

Harmony Blockchain aims to be the best platform in the market on a global scale, since it can integrate precise and fast digital transactions without using third party platforms.

Enabling decentralized and trustless economies:

Harmony Blockchain offers decentralized and trusted economies, where all users can entrust the payment to Harmony thanks to the blockchain technology system and thus be a more comfortable process for all Harmony Blockchain users.

Bharathi’s Design is a Creative Agency that offers its design and advertising services through the internet, where the agency has a considerable number of clients and also the option that its clients can pay for the services through the various cryptocurrencies that are found along the blockchain. Eventually many clients worldwide request Bharathi’s Design services and among them, a large number of customers who choose to pay with cryptocurrencies. At first the agency did not take great importance that almost all cryptocurrency platforms take a long time to make payments and over time it has become cumbersome for the agency and also for clients because their orders suffer from a delay due to the slow payment of cryptocurrencies.

Inquiring, the creative team of Bharathi’s Design discovers Harmony Blockchain, an innovative blockchain that fights against the scalability failures existing in transfers and late payments, using the sharding system. After reading more about it and knowing all the benefits that Harmony offers, Bharathi’s Design agency decides to use the services of Harmony Blockchain so that both parties benefit, the clients and the agency.

To conclude, Harmony blockchain arrived to revolutionize the world of blockchain with its incredible weapon that is sharding, since without a doubt Harmony intends to solve the problem that is seen day by day in various blockchain platforms, which are related With the numerous amounts of data they need to process and not having a system based on sharding, these platforms become saturated and end up delaying all these processes, making people feel annoyed by the wait. That is why, Harmony is the perfect solution thanks to its technology based on sharding, where the computational load is lighter due to the different nodes that the platform has in use through sharding. On the other hand, Harmony is undoubtedly a demonstrably secure and scalable blockchain for all users who decide to trust them.

Do not hesitate and give Harmony Blockchain a chance!

My Video about Harmony Blockchain

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