What Is Harmony? All You Need to Know About ONE
What Is Harmony (ONE)?
What Is the ONE Token?
How Does Harmony Work? Sharding and Fast BFT
How Secure Is Harmony?
Is Harmony a Good Investment?
Harmony Network: Web3 Assets, Collectibles, and Governance
How to Own ONE?
News on Harmony
Useful References
Take Action on ONE
What Is Harmony (ONE)?
Harmony (ONE) is a blockchain-based platform that has succeeded in solving one of the most significant cryptocurrency’s downsides using sharding technology. Harmony found an answer to the issue of providing both scalability and decentralization without sacrificing either. Additionally, interoperability and transfer speed are stressed by Harmony. Their applied solution has significantly reshaped the cryptocurrency market until this day.
Harmony is an open-source blockchain network that seeks to offer relatively cheap and quick transactions. Harmony has ONE as its native token.
Blockchain is a decentralized, distributed, and open digital ledger that is used to log transactions across several computers in a way that prevents changes to the record from being made retroactively without changing all subsequent blocks and obtaining network consensus. In blockchain, decentralization is the transfer of power and decision-making from a centralized entity (an individual, an organization, or a collection of such entities) to a dispersed network. Therefore, no single person has complete authority over what occurs on the platform. Since the system is decentralized, nobody has absolute ownership.
As a decentralized blockchain platform, Harmony (ONE) intends to act as a link between scalability and decentralization initiatives. It’s important to note that the main issue with many blockchain-based platforms is scalability. Congestion is a prevalent issue that various blockchain technologies have promised to address. Scalability is a term used to describe how well a system can handle growing amounts of data. In other words, the capacity of a blockchain to accommodate a growing volume of transactions is known as scalability. Under the guiding principle of “decentralization at scale,” Harmony was developed with an emphasis on data sharing and the establishment of markets for fungible tokens and non-fungible assets.
But what are fungible and non-fungible assets? Fungible assets are non-unique and divisible assets. For instance, fiat currencies, such as the dollar, are fungible. To elaborate, a $1 bill is worth the same in Arizona as it is in New Jersey.
A cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is another example of a fungible token; 1 BTC is worth 1 BTC regardless of where it is issued. In comparison, a non-fungible token is not like this. NFTs, otherwise called non-fungible tokens, are blockchain-based tokens that individually represent a unique asset like a work of art, a piece of digital material, or other media. An NFT can also be seen as an irrevocable digital certificate of ownership and authenticity for a given asset, whether digital or physical.
To put it simply, Harmony aims to enhance the decentralized blockchain’s capacity to handle growing cryptocurrency transactions while preserving decentralization and acting as a market for cryptocurrency assets.
The Founding of Harmony
The company’s founder and CEO is Dr. Stephen Tse. He earned his doctorate in Type theory and Cryptography protocols from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Tse joined Microsoft as a research intern after he finished his degree. He joined Google in 2006 and worked there for four years as a senior engineer. He built the popular search engine “Spotsetter” in 2011, which Apple eventually bought. Dr. Tse was appointed Apple’s principal engineer in 2014. In 2017, he founded Harmony. Twelve people make up the Harmony founding team, seven of whom have previously worked for Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.
Harmony was founded as a corporation in 2018 and released as an Initial Exchange Offering (IEO) through the Binance Launchpad in May 2019. An IEO is a procedure/process of digital asset (e.g. coins or tokens) procurement through an established exchange for the purpose of raising capital for start-up companies.
What Is the ONE token?
Similar to how Ether (ETH) is the native cryptocurrency for the Ethereum blockchain, ONE is the native cryptocurrency of the Harmony network. It’s important to note that ONE is a versatile token.
The Value of ONE
ONE gives its holders the opportunity to vote. This allows them to participate in the network’s (Harmony’s) governance. In essence, the ONE token facilitates involvement in the Harmony ecosystem. It also acts as a payment method for numerous network-wide activities, which keeps the ecosystem’s gears turning. As a matter of fact, on the network, ONE can be used to pay for a variety of operations and services, including storage, transaction, and gas fees!
In the consensus model utilized with Harmony, the ONE token serves as a stake. The owners have the opportunity to receive block rewards and are rewarded for maintaining a healthy system. Additionally, users can trade ONE on the cryptocurrency market to profit from the difference in buying and selling prices brought on by trend reversals. Out of a total of 13,156,044,839.793139 ONE, there are now 12,305,426,115 in circulation.
How Does Harmony Work? Sharding and Fast BFT
Harmony uses a technique based on randomness and sharding to balance security, scalability, and decentralization.
Simply put, sharding is a method that divides massive tables of data into more manageable units known as shards. Each shard has the data that distinguishes it from other shards. In the context of blockchain, sharding can reduce latency and drastically reduce data overload, thereby facilitating quick and nearly instantaneous transactions. It in turn increases the overall efficiency of cryptocurrency transactions and operations in general. Remember how we previously spoke about Harmony aiming to enhance scalability? This is one strategy to achieve that objective.
Source: blog.harmony.com
In addition, the Harmony network uses Fast BFT, a variant of the Byzantine Fault Tolerance protocol.
On the Harmony network, FBFT speeds up and streamlines operations by processing several transactions simultaneously. As a matter of fact, achieving consensus among 250 or more validators in less than two seconds is made possible by Harmony’s ability to sign transactions with an aggregate signature, which lowers the cost of communication.
What Is Unique About Harmony?
The Harmony mainnet seeks to reinvent block creation by emphasizing processing speed and validity. The business drastically decreased node validation times by implementing the sharding method. Nodes, which validate transactions and protect the network, are essential components of the blockchain.
The Verifiable Random Function (VRF) for impartial and unpredictable shard membership was established by Harmony to assure the protection of nodes and the security of the validation process. This indicates that validators and nodes are randomly assigned and reassigned. Harmony is also gaining popularity because it addresses fundamental blockchain issues, is energy-efficient, has cross-chain capabilities, charges cheaper gas prices, and has a ton of room for non-fungible tokens. Harmony stands out compared to other factors.
What Gives Harmony Its Worth?
Harmony is as useful as its technological capabilities, utility, and technical support to use cases and operations on the network. While the intrinsic value of ONE is mostly determined by volatility and a wide range of specific criteria, Harmony’s value as a project is defined by the above-stated elements.
Harmony is one of the few projects that can process transactions in seconds since it uses sharding to reduce congestion issues and boost overall capacity to scale. Partly due to the extreme volatility of the cryptocurrency market, the real-world worth and the market price of this project sometimes tend to diverge.
How Secure Is Harmony?
Effective Proof of Stake (EPoS) is used by Harmony Network to safeguard the network and thwart malicious assaults.
The first network to use a Proof of Stake variant in conjunction with sharding to promote decentralization and security is Harmony. With EPoS, hundreds of distinct nodes can take part without running the risk of the staking process becoming centralized. Owners of cryptocurrencies utilize the Proof of Sake (PoS) mechanism to confirm block transactions depending on the quantity of staked coins.
Since Harmony’s EPoS is the first staking mechanism in a sharded blockchain to provide both security and decentralization, it stands out for being distinctive. The innovative effective stake mechanism eliminates the propensity of stake centralization and permits staking from hundreds of validators. In Harmony, random nodes can be selected by leading nodes during the verification process without endangering the network’s security, thanks to Distributed Randomness Generation and a Verifiable Random Function.
Harmony’s Competitors
A blockchain infrastructure with tremendous potential for scaling and low-cost, quick transaction processing is what Harmony is striving to offer. As a result, platforms like EOS, Cardano, Hashgraph, and Zilliqa that aim to accomplish similar goals compete with the initiative. Harmony is entering a highly crowded industry that will only continue to draw more participants, and other initiatives like High-Performance Blockchain, Dfinity, and Seele are tackling similar concerns.
The team is convinced that they will outperform their competitors if they can operate effectively and enhance existing platforms like OmniLedger. They often aim to master technologies that have previously been successfully implemented and concentrate on the fundamental elements of transportation networks. They generally seek to master innovations already proven in practice and focus on the key components of transport networks, consensus protocols, and systems tooling.
Competitors’ valuations:
EOS, valued $5B.
Zilliqa, valued $172M.
Hashgraph, raised $120M
Thunder, valued $100M
Dfinity, raised $195M
Kadena, raised $15M
Algorand, raised $62M
Is Harmony a Good Investment?
Harmony may be a smart investment overall, but several factors, including those that are unknown currently, will determine whether it remains successful.
These include whether the ecosystem can reach one million tps (transactions per second) and how effectively the sharding mechanism withstands any malicious attacks. Macroeconomics and the effects of any foreseeable regulation of cryptocurrencies are other considerations. It is important to always keep in mind how volatile the cryptocurrency market is. Therefore, the value of all tokens and coins may fluctuate both upward and downward.
Project Roadmap 2023
Harmony is a project driven by the community, a network with hundreds of applications, and a group of people with irrational goals.
Source: open.harmony.one
Harmony Network: Web3 Assets, Collectibles, and Governance
Harmony aims at building a radically fair economy and scale trust. For any transactions to be settled without the involvement of trusted parties, a decentralized, scalable, and secure blockchain must be created. Fairness in these radical marketplaces offers everyone the chance to build substantial riches or to scale their digital economies and foster cooperation for global communities.
- Scale Trust: By enforcing contracts without relying on outside parties or established rules, a blockchain decentralizes coordination among international communities.
- Radically fair: A blockchain is fair if it allows for meaningful involvement from everyone, even if the odds and rewards aren’t entirely equal, despite the influence of accumulated money.
- Create an economy: A blockchain enables anyone to create tokens, secure transactions between parties, and accure values from serving utility. It also acts as a marketplace full of incentives.
First off, Harmony offers uniform scalability, so shards expand indefinitely and linearly in response to transaction needs. Secure synchronization with the beacon shard, nodes, states, and transactions are all neatly split into separate shards.
Secondly, Harmony provides on-chain security, which means that, aside from fraudulent validators, Harmony’s delegators, bridges, and wallets limit trust assumptions. Also, its end-to-end security relies solely on the core protocol and the execution of smart contracts, avoiding the storage of authentication credentials, suffering from any single point of backend failure, or exposing personally identifiable information.
Harmony’s network had $1.41 billion in total value locked, $1.48 billion in stakes, 160 validator pools, 120 active apps, 75 DAO governors, 371 thousand monthly active users, and 656 thousand total wallets at its height. Harmony’s protocol also accomplished 500 transactions per shard per second in production.
By providing Dapp developers with a flawlessly optimized environment for Defi Dapps and transactions with almost immediate finality, Harmony seeks to address the issue of inefficient scaling and interoperability. With minimal latency and affordable prices, Harmony wants to rank among the top networks in terms of speed and usefulness.
The value of Harmony’s native token, ONE, rises in direct proportion to the adoption of the platform for Dapp development and quick transactions. Network users can use ONE to unlock all the network’s features while traders can purchase and sell ONE to make money.
How to Own ONE?
One way to own ONE is to go through a crypto centralized exchange, so the first step is to create a Gate.io account and complete the KYC process. Once you have added funds to your account, check out the steps to buy ONE on the spot or derivatives market.
News on Harmony
According to what was announced by the Harmony team on November 25th, 2022, the LayerZero bridge has been successfully updated. The upgrade allows users to create links to seven tokens bridged to the Binance Smart Chain. These tokens are: ADA, DAI, CAKE, USDC, ETH, USDT, and WND. The Bridge is used to migrate assets from one chain to another. Users can use the bridge to transfer whatever assets they have from Ethereum or Binance Smart Chain to the Harmony blockchain and receive matching assets on Harmony. Additionally, LayerZero enables the swapped assets to be redeemed at any moment.
Useful References
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