Harmony is an open and fast blockchain that enables building decentralized applications. It offers a technique called state sharding that allows the transactions to take place faster than usual with a transaction finality of 2 seconds. It also offers cross-chain asset transfers for its users. In recent years, decentralized applications have exploded. With the increasing use of dapps in finance and gaming, the backing infrastructure started to fall short. Therefore, the market produced many protocols and networks that facilitate the creation of decentralized applications. Not only that, these protocols helped improve dapps and provide additional functionalities. Harmony is one of them. Let’s see what it is and how it works! What is harmony? Harmony is a fast blockchain that is open source and allows building decentralized applications. Harmony’s mainnet is used to run Ethereum applications with a transaction finality of 2 seconds. It also offers about 1000 times lower costs for transactions and block validation. In addition, it offers cross-chain operability. More specifically, it connects POW chains with POS chains. This cross-chain operability is used for transferring crypto assets such as collectables, governance etc. In reality, Harmony currently offers cross-chain asset transfers with Ethereum, Binance and three other chains. It was founded in 2018 by Stephen Tse, Rongjian Lan, Nick White and Sahil Dewan. These are people who have experience working with Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook. In 2019, the team launched their mainnet and opened strike in May 2020. How does Harmony work? Harmony uses a technique called state sharding. State sharding is used to split a chain into parts that process transactions faster. This allows the platform to accelerate system performance and improve transaction validation speed. Harmony produces a new block sooner than other chains because it bounds itself with finality (2 seconds). Not only that, it uses the effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS) staking mechanism. This allows token owners to assign their holdings to network validators. Therefore, it reduces the centralization of assets. In addition, Harmony uses a PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) mechanism to support the rapid consensus of block transactions. This model makes it possible to complete transactions faster. In addition, Harmony Boneh-Lynn-Shacham (BLS) uses constant size signatures. The Native Token, ONE ONE is Harmony’s native token. You can use the token for various forms of participation and payment. These include staking, transaction fees, voting and governance. Not only that, you can deploy ONE on the network. In return, you can earn block rewards in the form of ONE. During staking, users participate in the network’s effective consensus mechanism. In case of double signing, there is a 2% slashing penalty on the validator’s reward. Not only that, if there are more defaulters, the slashing penalty will be even higher.
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