Introduction
With the advent of blockchain technology which has helped facilitate transactions, there have been some setbacks not tackled properly like latency, inability to achieve multiple decentralization, privacy, and scalability shown with several use-cases.
Here is a platform that has aimed at resolving these problems with the prospect of using the blockchain to full capacity with sharding technology
Harmony
A decentralized based blockchain, with a network, were each node functions separately, having a peculiar identification to give security and restricted access by a separate blockchain validation.
Harmony provides total decentralization for computing. It uses sharding technology as its main powerhouse enabling full compatibility and decentralized blockchain. With this, all issues mentioned above have been resolved with fast performance, a vision to implement zero-knowledge which allows you to share data without revealing content and low cost of transaction as a plus.
Harmony is a deep sharded blockchain i.e multiple blockchain that runs simultaneously providing scalability; a scalable network that allows you add more shard and node continuously. Using sharding technology, harmony brings decentralization to a new era making blockchain technology available to all.
With the aim of being a powerful decentralized network, Harmony accesses blockchain technology to full capacity by using it as a power source for various services and applications over the internet; it drives at creating a blockchain that can be used to create more fully decentralized applications and also, it makes available all requirements for blockchain nodes to function separately and perform new features.
Harmony uses Proof-of-Stake(PoS), rather than Proof-of-Work(PoW). With this, there is a virtual consensus mechanism were miners are replaced with validators. Also, PoS ensures lower cost per transaction and saves energy when compared to miners of PoW.
Blockchain technology comparison
Presently, Proof-of-Stake has been adopted by many other platforms, basically exploring or giving a version of sharding. Harmony on the other hand completely makes use of this technology. Here is an image for comparison
Harmony provides the best tradeoff between speed and fair consensus
Scalability issues and solutions by Harmony
Previously, systems based on blockchain had a slow transaction speed. Several instances of delayed and increased cost of transactions were encountered a few years back. Cryptokitties was one app that congested the Ethereum Blockchain Network; a network which most decentralized application was built on.
"Harmony has been chosen to partner with Animoca (the company responsible for cryptokitties) to develop a new ecosystem".
Harmony is a scalable system with the capability of performing more TPS( Transactions Per seconds) without having heavyweight on the network; This helps the visibility of all use-cases. Harmony being equipped fully with sharding technology can handle any issue concerning scalability that arises.
Common Use case- Decentralized Finance (DeFi)
DeFi applications are basically created as an improvement on the current financial system by adding decentralization for improved performance. It eliminates the third party in transactions( financial institution carrying out the transaction), sending the digital currency directly to the recipient wallet. DeFi has other use-cases like lending, payments, exchange, stablecoins and many others.
DeFi being on the Ethereum network suffers scalability issues as TPS is slow hence the need for "Harmony's sharding to enable it scale linearly".
Sharding
A means to parallelize a network i.e creating multiple networks that scale linearly. Each transaction in each shard process independently. It brings about stable decentralized storage and computation which also brings about the decentralization of transactions.
"Harmony has learned from both industry and academia in developing its own linearly scaling, and provably secure sharding scheme; From the Zilliqa network, the industry learned to shard".
Several features of harmony have been mention above like full scalability, secure sharding and fast performance. One particularly interesting is;
- Distributor Random generation: This is a key feature for sharding. It selects shard randomly, avoiding people going into one shard and corrupting that shard. Selecting shard randomly helps to strengthen security but generally, random selection can be really slow thus harmony created a faster way to maintain security and speed by combining Verifiable Random Function( VRF) and Verifiable Delay Function (VDF).
Conclusion
The team on this project, Harmony, is full of experts in engineering with a load of academic achievements having backgrounds from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple. Harmony possesses its own tradable token, ONE.
Harmony redefining blockchain as we know it can be used for music streaming like soundcloud and spotify on the blockchain and also an Automated teller machine where fiat currency can be withdrawn directly from digital currency wallet.
Harmony being an open source community, will emerge new business models on the Blockchain dominating the world with decentralized Blockchain Revolution.
For more information, visit:
Harmony Website
Harmony OnePager
Harmony WhitePaper
Harmony Medium Blog
Harmony Telegram Group
Harmony Twitter
Harmony LinkedIn
Harmony Instagram