Introduction

It is well known that Bitcoin and Ethereum are the most popular blockchain technology platforms in the world of the crypto sphere. However, these platforms suffer from low scalability and low speed when processing transactions. 7 TPS and 15 TPS on average for each of them, respectively, cause a delay in the platforms with decentralized applications. This is due to the fact that internally they use consensus methods that require a lot of resources and consume a lot of energy, which brings more consequences in the medium and long term. In this opportunity, we will see a new platform that is already in testing period, called Harmony, which uses new generation technology to solve these problems and present a blockchain infrastructure capable of providing the ecosystem necessary for the development of decentralized applications fast, secure and scalable.

What is Harmony

Harmony is a new blockchain sharding-based technology that solves scalability problems without sacrificing security or decentralization aspects, innovating the network and blockchain protocol, making it faster, safer and more energy-efficient.

This will improve the decentralized economic model offered by conventional blockchain technologies, allowing to increase the volume of transactions per second that require decentralized exchanges, payment systems and other applications that previously were not possible to be developed under blockchain technology such as internet transactions of things, among others.

Normally, each node that is part of a blockchain should contain an image of the state of the entire blockchain, however, with the growth of the blockchain this slows transaction, because the size grows exponentially. Basically, sharding is to divide the blockchain into smaller pieces or groups, which will be specifically responsible for generating their own transactions and simultaneously update the state of the blockchain. Sharding is not a new concept, it is a technique used in database optimization, where data is divided into smaller and more manageable pieces called "shards".

Harmony achieves total scalability through sharding, however, not only cuts up communication and network transactions, but also the state of the blockchain. To keep the sharding process safe, Harmony uses a process called distributed randomness generation (DRG) to determine the nodes that will form the structure of the shard.

In addition to Harmony's shard structure, which improves blockchain access and handling, Harmony greatly improves the speed of its transactions through the adaptive PoS consensus method, which is energy efficient unlike the conventional PoW method, which not only consumes resources but also a lot of energy. The secret of Harmony (which makes it even faster than the competition) is that it uses a method called Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance (FBFT) to reach the consensus method in seconds within each shard (which is generally made up of hundreds of nodes).

Use-Cases

Harmony allows blockchain projects to create fungible tokens and non-fungible assets, such as collectible tokens.

Criptokitties

CriptoKitties is a project of collectible tokens that work on Ethereum, in the form of digital kittens, which can be bought, sold and collected and whose user database is growing exponentially. This has demonstrated Ethereum's difficulty in being scalable. Animoca, the company behind CryptoKitties, has decided to partner with Harmony to develop a new platform to support its collectibles.

Obviously, Harmony's superior scalability will allow the best performance for this type of platform. Allowing the database of users and collectibles to grow.

DeFi (Decentralized Finance)

Source

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has become one of the main applications of Ethereum. This platform allows you to make or borrow and earn interest in a medium without intermediaries. One of the main foundations of this platform is the DAI, as a stable currency. Due to the demand, this platform can no longer process the daily amount of transactions due to the speed of the network, i.e. the low scalability of the Ethereum blockchain.

It is imperative for this platform to move its system to an infrastructure like Harmony, which will give it more than ten times the speed and growth needed to handle requests and transactions.

Exchanges

Source

One of the most abundant platforms in the world of the crypto sphere is the exchange platforms. However, due to the slow processing of transactions of the most popular blockchain: Bitcoin and Ethereum. Many of these do not have the ability to handle user demand today to compete with large companies such as Visa and Mastercard. However, with Harmony's capacity of 118000 transactions per second, it makes competition from exchanges more feasible and obviously allows the adoption of cryptocurrencies as a financial system.

Pangaea - A Blockchain Experimental Zone

Pangaea is Harmony's experimental network for thousands of people around the world to join Harmony blockchain network platform and test the limits of this technology. The Pangaea contest was launched on August 15 and has had more than 700 people connected to the Pangaea network.

Source

Conclusion

Harmony is the solution to the problems presented by decentralized application development projects. There is no doubt that the use of this new platform as infrastructure for decentralized applications will allow the adoption of cryptocurrencies worldwide, since, finally, they greatly exceed the limit of 15 TPS. Giving the opportunity to compete with conventional financial systems and making more feasible the use of cryptocurrencies at a global level.