Chainode Tech — Fundamentals of Harmony Protocol prior to Open Staking

Harmony Protocol Introduction

Harmony Protocol is the first blockchain protocol that has an active mainnet which uses sharding technology with an open consensus to 10 billion people.

Harmony uses a variation of PBFT consensus, called FBFT (Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerant) that uses BLS (Boneh-Lynn-Shacham) multi-signatures and a secure distributed randomness generation protocol that uses VDF (Verifiable Delay Function). One of the advantages of the FBFT consensus is that it guarantees finality within just one block confirmation.

Using the view-change protocol, Harmony implemented a robust process by which a malicious leader is replaced with an honest one in case one leader will behave malicious or will be absent.

Joining the network as a new node is also very fast with the new state pruning active. Validators have the possibility to download a DB snapshot or to use rclone in order to sync their node to the latest state of the blockchain in a very fast manner, generally a couple of minutes — depending on shard, connection and hardware specifications of the validator.

Harmony’s Mainnet was launched on the 28th of June 2019, also marked as Day ONE, with 4 shards and more than 150 external nodes ran by validators known in the Harmony ecosystem as Foundational Nodes.

Since day ONE, Harmony has gone through multiple innovation and development stages and is currently racing its last 100 m before the implementation of Open Staking for everyONE.

Harmony protocol features

In the following moments we will focus on the coolest and most important features released by Harmony prior to Open Staking:

• Fast finality. This means that every transaction has a finality within one block confirmation. By implementing the aforementioned feature, you will only have to wait for the next block and your transaction is finalized. At a current block time of 8 seconds it will mean that after just 8 seconds your transaction will be finalized. Compared to Bitcoin or Ethereum, where it takes a couple of minutes (up to an hour in case of Bitcoin), the transaction finality on Harmony Protocol really is super fast. This helps a lot in developing fast applications (such as games) on top of a blockchain network. While 8 seconds is a great value, it is expected in the future for this value to be reduced even further while the protocol evolves and gets improved.
• State pruning. By implementing state pruning a network is able to achieve a massive reduction in storage requirement. Our nodes currently occupy a total of 6.3 GB disk space on shard 0 and 8.3 GB on shard 2. By making a parallel to how much disk space was needed to run a node without state pruning, we can say that the storage requirement decreased by 98%, thus reducing the barrier of disk space as well as storage costs for validators;
• Possibility to run multiple nodes for your validator with the same BLS key(s) at the same time — we strongly believe that this is a great feature of Harmony Protocol and we will explain this feature in detail in an upcoming article that we are already working on. The main idea of this feature is that Harmony has a double signing protection at protocol level, which will allow you to run for a single validator identity, e.g. Chainode Tech, two nodes with the same BLS keys at the same time. However, if a validator decides to behave maliciously, for example by changing binaries and run another node, this will be detected by Harmony Protocol, thus generating a double signing slash. So in order to summarize everything in one sentence, running a Harmony node software on two nodes (main & backup node) with the same keys at the same time is actually beneficial for the protocol, validators and stakers but trying to behave maliciously while doing that will end up in a double signing slash.
• Option to run a validator with multiple BLS keys. As this is a controversial feature with both advantages and disadvantages, we will create another article on the subject, where we will explain it in more detail.
• Integration with Ledger. The Harmony Ledger app can be installed on any Ledger device via Ledger Live for staking.
• Open Staking Testnet Network (OSTN). The OSTN is launched and has multiple iterations per week. It is a network where everyone can join and test the protocol from both a technical and economical perspective.
• Staking Dashboard. A staking dashboard was also released so that stakers have an easy way to delegate their ONE tokens and monitor their rewards and other parameters like the election status or the uptime of the validator they delegated to: https://staking-explorer.firebaseapp.com/validators
• Lower entry limit. Introduction of a lower entry limit of 10.000 ONE tokens for validators in order to prevent the spam with zombie identities and malicious validators. This parameter is being tested as we speak on OSTN and can be changed in the future if it would have a positive effect for the ecosystem.

We want to invite everyONE to join this channel https://t.co/O2bWzG8ztj?amp=1 and experiment with staking on the OSTN network of Harmony Protocol. If you will have any questions, the P-OPS team will be happy to answer them.

From a token perspective, more than 4.4B ONE tokens were swapped already to native ONE through multiple exchanges like Binance, Bitmax and Kucoin. Harmony also announced the token burn on Mainnet in order to clarify what will happen with the mined ONE tokens by the internal Harmony nodes: https://medium.com/harmony-one/harmony-mainnet-token-burn-9d8a3b7c83bc.

At the same time, Harmony team announced the new token economics: https://medium.com/harmony-one/harmonys-new-tokenomics-bcdac0db60d7.

Native ONE tokens are currently supported on the following wallets: Ledger, TrustWallet, MathWallet and SafePal.

Next steps to come for Harmony

The next biggest event for Harmony is Stake Heist, which is planned to start soon, if no major bug or issue will appear. The purpose of Stake Heist is to exploit the network and the open staking design in every way possible. All hackers, validators and professional stakers are invited to join Stake Heist and knock prizes totalling up to 10 Million ONE tokens.

A detailed article about Stake Heist can be found here: https://medium.com/harmony-one/coming-soon-on-pangaea-stake-heist-23bd201d08a7

Don’t forget to register for the event and hope to see you there!

In the meantime, iterations on the OSTN network continue and we, Chainode Tech, rejoin the network after each iteration. We do this in order to test and propose new features with the long term objective of offering the best possible staking service to our delegators.

Who is Chainode Tech?

Our team members were early participants in the first Harmony Testnet. With great excitement we participated at Day ONE, where the very first block on Harmony Mainnet was produced. Since then we continued to validate successfully on Harmony Mainnet. Also, one of our team members, Ionut S., is involved in the P-OPS team, thus being very close to the development, testing the protocol, proposing new features and supporting other validators with their issues on Mainnet or OSTN.

Our story with Harmony will continue and evolve to the next level after the Open Staking and we will offer all ONE token holders the possibility to stake with us in an easy, secure and fast manner. Our team is transparent regarding who are the people behind the validator identity and you can approach us and discuss any related topic you might have.

More informations about Chainode Tech and the team behind it can be found at chainode.tech.

Social handles & Contact

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChainodeTech

Telegram: https://t.me/ChainodeTech

Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/ZkMeNU9

E-mail: contact@chainode.tech