Harmony, headquartered in Mountain View, CA, is a fast and open scalable blockchain for decentralized applications. It focuses on efficiency-building in the areas of sharding and peer-to-peer networking. While in sharding, the protocol follows a secure proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and decentralized randomness — the efficacy of its networking stems from optimal cross-shard routing and fast block propagation.
Harmony collaborates with businesses to help create marketplaces of both fungible tokens and non-fungible assets. While fungible tokens may include energy credits and loyalty points, the non-fungible assets can be anything, starting from game collectibles to real estate.
Because Harmony applies zero-knowledge proofs for data sharing, it can offer unmatchable integrity when it comes to preserving the consumer’s privacy. Owing to this property, Harmony comes in handy in forming data consortia among competitor brands.
Latest Updates on Harmony
- In November 2020, Harmony launched Horizon on its mainnet. Horizon is the first version of the protocol’s Ethereum-Harmony cross-chain bridge. It laid the groundwork for Harmony’s several upcoming initiatives to help prosper a vibrant cross-chain ecosystem where developers and users would engage in hassle-free interactions across multiple chains.
- Demonstrating Horizon’s efficacy, the Harmony community launched the technology model of a cross-chain decentralized exchange named Swoop. The launch of Swoop showed how easy the migration of foundational decentralized finance infrastructures — like Uniswap v2 — could become on Harmony, an EVM compatible chain.
- In mid-November 2020, Harmony completed its primary integration with the Rosetta API specification. Rosetta API is an open-source framework aimed at simplifying blockchain interactions. Harmony also continues to work with oracles and DEFI as ChainLink, Band Protocol, Magic, My Constant, Stacktical, Humming Bot, etc.
- As per information compiled for the entire 2020, Harmony’s developer ecosystem continues to grow beyond 100,000. In 2020, the protocol hosted 150 developers in its DevPost hackathon and helped build DeFi projects facilitating cross-chain swap and lending. It partnered with Gitcoin and its 47,000 developers to continue with its collaborative project of expanding the future of Web3.
- In 2020, Harmony launched 25 dApps on its mainnet with its grantees and team.
- Harmony began 2021 with its ongoing ‘Hack the Horizon’ program. The initiative had commenced on 17th November 2020 and continued till 25th January 2021. The program had an allocation of up to $50,000 in prizes. The purpose of Hack the Horizon, a collaborative cross-chain hackathon, is to build applications that leverage the Horizon Bridge. The program works with both Ethereum and Harmony developers so that they can build useful and innovative applications making the most of both Ethereum and Harmony’s strengths.
- On January 20, 2021, the popular mobile game Beast Quest Ultimate Heroes powered by Animoca Brands collaborated with the Harmony Blockchain.
- On March 6, 2021, in an exciting and crucial update, Harmony Protocol made its network governance app available for its validator community. It was a notable milestone in Harmony’s journey towards full decentralization.
- On March 7, 2021, Harmony launched the Binance smart chain bridge on its testnet.
- For users interested in yield farming, Harmony launched ViperDAO and the protocol’s first deployed product ViperSwap live.
- On March 8, 2021, Harmony Staking became available on the mobile Guarda Wallet.
- On March 9, 2021, Harmony conducted its first governance vote on the protocol network. The vote was on the proposal to introduce a change in Harmony’s core EPoS mechanism, shifting the upper bound 15% to 18%. The motivation behind this proposal was to incentivize bigger validators to shrink their bls keys and bid for fewer seats on the upper bound. This change was meant to create more scope for the smaller validators to get elected.
Overall 2021 Developmental Themes of Harmony Protocol
The main objective of Harmony that will drive its journey in 2021 is becoming one of the most preferred blockchains for cross-chain finance.
This journey will rely heavily on the three following principles of adoption, interoperability, and decentralization.
To increase adoption, the platform will proactively showcase its utility to users through its developers and partners. Hackathons in collaboration with Gitcoin and workshops at Ethereum events are supposed to serve that purpose of boosting Harmony’s reach.
To enhance interoperability, Harmony Protocol is developing bridges with Bitcoin and Ethereum for broader assets. It also expects cross-shard and cross-chain transactions to enable new finance applications.
In offering external voting power and resharding facilities, Harmony expects to confirm its long-term governance along with the growth of its validator community and network features.
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