Harmony is a high-throughput, low-latency and low-fee consensus platform.
Harmony is a fast and secure blockchain for decentralized applications. Harmony's main focus is on achieving scalability by dividing not only the network nodes but also the blockchain states into shards, "scaling linearly in all three aspects of machines, transactions and storage".
- Harmony's sharding benefits by Verifiable Random Functions for secure and random state sharding. The consensus mechanism of Harmony, Effective Proof-of-Stake, innovates on Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus mechanisms to further reduce centralization, while supporting stake delegation, reward compounding and double-sign slashing.
- Its utility token, ONE, is running on Harmony's mainnet since June 2019 and is prospected to reach an annual inflation of 3%. The token must be used as stake for network validators and is required to initiate transactions.
Harmony is a fast and secure blockchain with key innovations in state sharding and peer-to-peer networking. Its sharding uses secure proof-of-stake and decentralized randomness, and its networking achieves optimal cross-shard routing and fast block propagation.
Harmony helps businesses build marketplaces of fungible tokens (such as energy credits and loyalty points) and non-fungible assets (such as game collectibles and real estate).
Harmony is applying zero-knowledge proofs for data sharing while preserving the consumer's privacy. Common industry use cases include ad exchanges, credit ratings and many other data consortia that would otherwise take many years to form among competing companies.
Harmony implements deep sharding with innovations on both protocol and networking layers of blockchain by introducing:
- Highly scalable FBFT (Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerant) consensus using BLS (Boneh-Lynn-Shacham) multi-signatures.
- Secure distributed randomness generation protocol using VDF (Verifiable Delay Function).
- Sharding with adaptive Proof-of-Stake for strong network security.
- Kademlia routing and erasure encoding for optimal network performance.
Some of Harmony's points of differentiation include:
- Key innovations in state sharding (secure staking & resharding with decentralized randomness) and in peer-to-peer networking (optimal cross-shard routing, fast block propagation).
- Harmony is a POS-based state-sharding protocol, while existing protocol projects are mostly POW-based.
- Harmony's consensus is a fast BFT algorithm which uses BLS multi-sig and scales linearly with the number of nodes, while many existing projects uses the old single chain-based consensus (same as Bitcoin).
- Harmony's consensus doesn't have forks and has instant finality, while existing chains have forks and no instant finality.
- Harmony's cross-shard communication is sublinearly efficient due to the use of Kademlia routing and Erasure Encoding.
Token overview and use cases
Harmony's scalable, high-throughput protocol is powered by a native token which is used for various forms of payment and participation in the protocol (staking, transaction fees, voting & governance).
Harmony uses blockchain to align incentives of different stakeholders, developers and businesses while allowing them to build open marketplaces of fungible and non-fungible tokens and assets. Furthermore, the upcoming application of zero-knowledge proofs will allow Harmony to become a data sharing platform that can overcome the conflicting problem plaguing many information and data markets: that individual market participants' have mutual distrust to share data but strong desire to acquire data themselves.
The Harmony token functions in the following aspects of the protocol:
- The token is used for staking, which is necessary to participate in the POS consensus & earn block rewards and transaction fees.
- The token is used to pay for transaction fees, gas and storage fees.
- The token is used in voting for on-chain governance of the protocol.
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