One thing about this world of ours that makes it a whole lot interesting is its ability to evolves with time, with fashion, with humans, races and most especially with technology. Technology has been a vital part of existence because it touches virtually all spheres of our lives in no small way, over the years we have seen mind bugging inventions in the world of technology one of such invention is the blockchain technology that came to limelight in 2009.
Blockchain technology has indeed marched forward in its earnest quest for massive adoption; although it's major hindrance has always been ensuring optimum scalability without compromise, quite a lot of merchants across the globe have anticipated the possibility of eventually having to accept crypto currencies especially ethereum and bitcoin as means of exchange ( payment); however the urgent need to make crypto a major force to reckon with in terms of borderless payments services leaves very much to be desired, to achieve this crypto has to be up to date with already prevalent e-payments systems like Visa and MasterCard and so far the progress of crypto in attaining this feat can best be described as poor, ethereum for instance can only a meagre 40 TPS in a day, bitcoin can handle only 10 TPS while contemporary systems like Visa manages about 2,000 TPS this gives a clear picture of the huge gap yet to be bridged by blockchain.
In a bid to solve this quite a number of crypto oriented project have been created with different solutions to the scalability challenges. Ethereum for instance seems to be taking like forever to proffer a lasting solution to its scalability challenges, any attempt to increase the network throughout capability will invariably imply the creation of centralized system that will have scalability, efficiency but zero security, most times its puts project developers in a dicey situation where they will have to choose 2 out of decentralization, security and scalability.
SOLUTION AT LAST
Harmony is one of the very exciting project with on hand and workable solutions to for the crypto space right now, it represent how the next generation of blockchain project should be, it is a scalable blockchain infrastructure to be used for a decentralized economy, harmony is all out to connect over 10 billion users effortlessly by offering a much more better innovative technology for networking
WHAT MAKES HARMONY UNIQUE
sharding A better state sharding technique
Harmony instead of splitting network for multiple shards thereby preventing machines with abrupt resources to be a part and parcel of it and then kill decentralization. It shards the blockchain state (state sharding). It carries out deep sharding it does not only shard the transactional layer but also shard the layer where the consensus takes place. With this nodes within the system can seamlessly locate other nodes that are very much necessary for the exact type of transaction and carry out transaction with this node in the consensus process. With this system simple computers can join the network to operate as nodes and so a great level of decentralization is established.
Enhanced consensus mechanism
Instead of using the PBFT protocol that causes complexity in communication process, harmony uses an enhanced consensus algorithm called FBFT (fast Byzantine fault tolerance), with this protocol all validator nodes do not need to broadcast their votes rather the leader retrieves the validator nodes via a multi-signature signing procedure and then goes further to broadcast it thereby reducing any form of communication complexity that may arise, validators within the system are selected on the basis of PoS mechanism, the number of token staked determines the chance for access to higher incentive.
Unique Beacon chain
Harmony parades a unique architecture that comprises of beacon chain with shard chains. Every shard chain is capable of processing a subset of the total number of transactions. The beacon chain is a unique shard chain with other extra responsibilities i.e. receiving stakes from validators and generating random numbers for all DRG. Another endearing function of the beacon chain is that it beefs up the security system of the entire ecosystem, it also uses the kademlia route to receive all sent block header.
Effective DRG (distributed random generation ) systems
The process of sharding is such that employs randomness when assigning nodes to shards, so as to mitigate the risk of attacks. Harmony leverages on the strengths and peculiarities of VDF and VRF to offer better services.
The Kademlia cross-shard communication system
in order to have an all en-compassing sharding system that can carry out cross shard communications, harmony uses the rapid chain shard driven approach and then uses the kademilan routing protocol to drastically reduce complexities.
CONCLUSION
Harmony is indeed a unique project with big dreams and aspirations, has so far achieved about 118,000 TPS and nodes of about 4000 and at this pace it will only get better as the team of experts work assiduously towards bringing all their aspiration for a better world to reality.
More info about Harmony:
• Website: https://harmony.one
• Telegram: https://t.me/harmony_one
• Medium: https://medium.com/harmony-one
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/harmonyprotocol