Harmony is a blockchain-based decentralized platform that provides tools and functions for developing, hosting, managing, and deploying Dapps with optimum scalability and interoperability. Because Harmony is hosted on Ethereum, the project offers remedies to Ethereum's present restrictions. The ultimate goal of the blockchain project is to establish a self-sustaining ecosystem in which users may utilize existing tools to construct markets for fungible and non-fungible tokens while benefiting from interoperability and scalability via sharding. Harmony intends to become a major contribution to the decentralized financial field with subsequent enhancements. Harmony also has a block generation time of less than a second, allowing for near-instant transactions with faster transition throughputs than Ethereum or comparable networks.

The Harmony network's native coin, ONE, is a multi-purpose currency. ONE can be used to pay for a variety of network services and functions, including storage. Holders of ONE can also participate in network governance because they have voting rights.

History

Harmony was co-founded and developed by a development team with extensive experience in cryptography and computer science, with the goal of providing scale and interoperability to Dapp developers. Stephen Tse is the founder and CEO of Harmony, while Nick White is a co-founder and active member of the Harmony community. The startup was launched in 2017 with a dev team of 12 employees, including Tse, seven of whom had previously held roles at Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Apple. Stephen Tse formerly worked as an engineer at Google, Microsoft, and Apple. To further the project, Harmony implemented cross-sharding and cross-chain infrastructure by the end of 2021.

How does it work

Through the use of random state sharding, Harmony provides scalability and boosts the speed of transactions and block production. To minimize latency, random state sharding allows the network to divide the database into smaller segments called shards. Sharding provides near-instantaneous transactions while preventing network congestion.

The sharding technique is based on an adaptable Proof of Stake consensus mechanism known as distributed randomness generation. This combination provides security, scalability, and simple and straightforward verification.

The Harmony network uses Fast BFT, a variant of the Byzantine Fault Tolerance protocol. By processing transactions in parallel, FBFT improves speed and efficiency on the Harmony network. Simultaneously, Harmony lowers communication costs by signing transactions using an aggregate signature, allowing 250 or more validators to reach agreement in less than two seconds.

Total supply and circulation

Out of a total of 13,156,044,840 ONE, there are now 12,305,426,115 in circulation. Harmony presently employs inflation to reward stakeholders, hence there is no capped maximum supply of ONE. The entire yearly reward rate, on the other hand, is fixed at 441 million ONE, and transaction fees balance the production of new tokens. As network use expands, inflation tends to approach zero.