Harmony Is More Important Than You Think

What is Harmony?
Harmony is the next generation sharding-based blockchain that is fully scalable, provably secure, and energy-efficient. Harmony approaches the obstacles of existing blockchains by fusing the best industry research results and engineering practice in an optimally harmonized system. Harmony is founded by a diversified and skilled team that includes expertise in blockchain, machine learning, and scaling of technology products. Built by a team of engineers from Google, Apple, Amazon, Harvard, and Stanford. Harmony provides a consensus protocol over the open internet that can facilitate around 10 million transactions per second (TPS) with a 100-millisecond latency and a maximum fee of 0.1%.
Specifically, Harmony makes innovations in the following aspects:
- Fully Scalable: Harmony shards not only network communication and transaction validation like Zilliqa, but also shards the blockchain state. 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, unbiasable, verifiable and scalable. Harmony also re-shards the network in a non-interruptive manner to prevent against slowly adaptive byzantine adversaries.
- Efficient and Fast Consensus: Unlike other sharding-based blockchains that require PoW to select validators, Harmony is based on PoS and thus energy efficient. The 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 the network by using the Adaptive Information Dispersal Algorithm. Harmony also adopts Kademlia routing to achieve cross-shard transactions that scale logarithmically with the number of shards.
- 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.
Partnerships
Harmony continues to expand it’s network and technology with strategic partnerships, helping solve the issues encountered with current blockchain technology. While only a few of Harmony's partnerships are listed in this article, the list continues to expand as harmony drives it harmonized open consensus platform to the scale of 1000x the world’s decentralized economies.

Animoca Brands, a global developer leveraging popular brands, gamification, AI, blockchain, and mobile technology. Harmony and Animoca jointly acquired Sequoia-funded digital collectible startup Quidd to grow the sale of crypto collectibles. The crypto-collectibles application CryptoKitties at one point peaked at 14,000 users, which strained the Ethereum network that only supports 14 transactions per second (TPS). This is where the acquisition of Quidd comes in, which claims to have over 200,000 users. To achieve this, the companies will be relying on the capabilities of Harmony’s blockchain, which can reportedly support 10,000 TPS. This capacity is capable of supporting Quidd’s current user base and can even scale up as necessary to accommodate a growing number of users via sharding.

Lympo, an incentivizing application that monetizes sports and health data via blockchain. Lympo CEO Ada Jonuse said, “adding that cooperation will enable secure and scalable health data sharing targeting millions of new users.” Harmony’s blockchain is based on a system called Deep Sharding, the process involving breaking up a large database into smaller, more manageable segments to speed up transactions on the network.

NOIZ Chain, a startup building a blockchain-powered ad exchange. NOIZ is monetizing consumer data through a marketplace in which this data can be sold and purchased. The use of Harmony smart contracts within the NOIZ platform makes it incredibly easy to manage advertising contracts with publishers. Not only does the use of the Harmony blockchain allow the creation of a tokenized economy and removes middle-men on the NOIZ platform, but it also helps to address the challenges faced in online advertising.

Contentos, a blockchain startup aiming to develop a decentralized digital content ecosystem that empowers all members, including creators, consumers, and advertisers, to earn fair compensation for their contributions. One of the future use cases in this partnership is by partnering with Contentos, developers building games on Harmony blockchain can integrate built-in streaming options that directly connect to Contentos’s platform. As a result, gamers using Harmony-based dApp games could have an option to develop alternate sources of income by streaming their gameplay in Contentos and start earning revenue from ads, paid subscriptions or tips/donations from viewers.

Hydro Protocol, a blockchain startup that empowers DeFi developers to create dynamic marketplaces for decentralized assets. Hydro is multi-chain compatible, it enables Harmony dApp developers to capture opportunities on a wide variety of blockchains or trading pairs e.g. with ONE, BNB, BTC, ETH, etc in the platform for traders, market makers and users to flourish. This provides a more secure and user-friendly option than DEXs or wallets who use proxy tokens to add assets from other networks or blockchain projects. The use of the Hydro Protocol is not just confined to building decentralized exchanges. DApp developers building on Harmony can directly integrate a Hydro widget by simply copy-pasting one line of code in their application.

Shyft Network, a blockchain startup building a decentralized network of networks, enabling anyone to develop applications and infrastructure for global citizenship, trusted data and regulatory privacy. By partnering with Shyft, developers can integrate Shyft’s opt-in framework in Harmony dApp’s to protect the user’s identification data by encrypting and saving it in the blockchain.

Carbon has also become an official partner of Harmony to develop a Fiat Gateway and a Harmony-native stablecoin. With Carbon, Harmony dApps can enable any purchases in $ONE tokens using Apple Pay and credit cards in a few lines of code in under one minute. The Harmony team has been actively preparing for large-scale application of ONE in the future.

TROY, a global prime broker specializing in crypto trading and asset management, has a strategic partnership and integration with Harmony to foster and improve the scalability of Troy Network. Working closely with Harmony in devoting R&D resources towards research and development of layer-1 scaling solutions. Through this partnership, TROY could adopt Harmony’s novel and advanced state sharding technology. Simultaneously, TROY could provide Harmony with the most promising application scenarios, like trading marketplaces and settlement networks.

SafeHaven, a startup developing a decentralized network for capital preservation solutions on the blockchain. SafeHaven is building multiple asset management solutions focused on B2B2C clients. With inheritance solutions being the primary product of SafeHaven, value is created through exchanges, wallets, and individuals who seek to protect their digital assets should an unforeseeable event occur. B2B clients will be able to offer protection to their end-users through SafeHaven. As a result, the patented Safe Haven Protocols can be adopted globally by service providers ranging from SMEs to global enterprises and as an extension by their millions of end-users. As part of their expansion, they will now support the toolset and ecosystem on Harmony; customizing their key products to operate powered by Harmony Blockchain.

Ankr, a blockchain company that is building a distributed computing platform by utilizing idle computing resources in data centres and edge devices. The use of Harmony blockchain allows dApp developers to connect, communicate securely and form consensus quickly for billions of devices. The scale at which these IoT devices collect data requires an AI to perform quick analysis and decision making which requires high bandwidth for computation and storage. This time-sensitive data processing can be offloaded to Ankr.

Chainlink, the leading oracle service provider for its secure blockchain. The Chainlink network provides reliable, secure input and output data that smart contracts on the blockchain require to function. Chainlink has been recognised by leading independent research firms and top blockchain projects for its cutting edge technology.

Matic, a Layer 2 scaling solution to move transactions off-chain (as opposed to layer 1 scaling techniques, which improve the transaction throughput of the base chain). Harmony dApp developers will be able to integrate with multiple blockchains and provide users with a universal platform with which to use/exchange digital assets from various blockchains openly and securely.

Everstake, a leading Staking Service Platform that helps institutional investors and regular token holders profit off their crypto assets. Everstake will add support for Harmony Nodes to its growing customer base.

SafePal, a secure and user-friendly hardware wallet designed for the masses. It is also the first hardware wallet brand invested by Binance, one of the biggest exchanges worldwide. SafePal is the first hardware wallet to fully support native ONEs.
Community Involvement
Harmony supports individual freedoms through community-driven thinking and, in partnership with DAO Maker, has launched a new initiative to grow the Harmony ecosystem.
Each month, at least $10,000 worth of ONE token’s will be distributed to the Harmony Social Mining Community. Participants who exerted the greatest effort to help Harmony reach more people, acquire supplemental tech development, and grow business development will be rewarded.
As in any social mining organization, the distribution of value and grants is up to HSM Community participants. Participants are required to stake at least 10,000 ONE token’s to determine which actions are contributing real value to the development of the Harmony ecosystem.

Harmony + Community = ❤
HSM Community: community.harmony.one
Telegram: harmony.one/telegram
Twitter: @harmonyprotocol
Discord: harmony.one/discord
Github: github.com/harmony-one/harmony
Medium: medium.com/harmony-one
Official Website: https://harmony.one
Whitepaper: harmony.one/pdf/whitepaper.pdf