Harmony (blockchain platform)
| Harmony (Blockchain) | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Development | |
| Original author(s) | Stephen Tse, Rongjian Lan, Sahil Dewan, Nick White |
| White paper | https://harmony.one/whitepaper.pdf |
| Latest release | 4.1.8 / June 21, 2021 |
| Written in | Solidity |
| Website | www |
| Ledger | |
| Timestamping scheme | Proof of stake |
| Block time | 2-Seconds |
| Block explorer | explorer |
| Circulating supply | 10,540,000,000 |
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Harmony is a decentralized, fully-scalable layer-1 blockchain,[1] powered by ONE, its native cryptocurrency, capable of layer-2 solutions and is currently among the top 100 in market capitalization.[2] Harmony's blockchain uses sharding not only on the network communication and transaction validation level, but also on the blockchain itself, making it fully-scalable while reducing bandwidth and latency. It uses Effective Proof-of-Stake, an enhanced modification to Proof-of-Stake, to select its validators, minimizing stake centralization while significantly reducing energy-consumption compared to Proof of work consensus. The project was founded by Stephen Tse, Rongjian Lan, Sahil Dewan and Nick White.[3]
Background[edit]
Harmony was first introduced in July 2018 as an open, scalable marketplace for the decentralized economy. The project was successfully kick-started in its Initial Exchange Offering on the Binance Launchpad platform on May 28th 2019. The token sale was conducted through a single session where participants purchased Harmony tokens using Binance Coin (BNB). All 1.58 billion ONE tokens were sold to Launchpad participants who drew and claimed winning lottery tickets.[4]
Technical Aspects[edit]
While most 3rd generation blockchains attempt to solve the blockchain trilemma, Harmony's goal was different. The issue to CEO Stephen Tse was limited to security, decentralization, and scalability, and privacy; he classified this as the blockchain quadrilemma, and Harmony has been designed from the ground up to solve this.[5]
Harmony is a sharded layer-1 blockchain solution that utilizes a unique consensus mechanism known as Effective Proof-of-Stake (or Adaptive Threshold Proof-of-Stake) to provide a highly secure and scalable blockchain.[1] Harmony has designed their blockchain to be fully Ethereum Virtual Machine compliant to create a developer-friendly experience, allowing developers to deploy Ethereum applications on Harmony in less than 5 minutes[6]. Similar to many other Proof-of-Stake protocols, Harmony offers an eco-friendly alternative to first and second-generation blockchains (such as Ethereum & Bitcoin). [7]
Consensus Mechanism[edit]
Harmony uses a first-of-its-kind Proof-of-Stake mechanism, Effective Proof-of-Stake, specifically designed to provide resistance to large stake attacks. This mechanism revolves around splitting validator stake amounts into smaller pieces (by creating BLS keys) and moderating the size of the stake by associating it with network median effective stake. By breaking up stake amounts, this mechanism weakens the influence that a significant stake may have.[8]
Harmony furthers the weakening of the influence of large stakes by fragmenting the stake across multiple shards. See Sharding Visualization. By spreading the stake across multiple shards, Harmony reduces the probability of consensus not being met significantly. The consensus mechanism requires a 2/3 majority + 1 vote to confirm blocks and slashes any malicious validators' stake belonging to both the validator and delegator(s).[1]
Harmony uses a modified Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus mechanism, called Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance (FBFT), in which the selected leader broadcasts the block to all validators, who then send their vote back to the leader, instead of all the validators, broadcasting the leader back all the votes in a single multi-signature, thus each validator receives two signals and sends one, instead of one for each validator taking place in the mechanism. The validators then check the validity of the multi-signature, sign the message and send it back to the leader, who, upon receiving the necessary signatures to have consensus, aggregates them and commits the new block with the multi-signatures, broadcasting it for all validators to commit.[1]
Sharding (Scalability)[edit]
Harmony is a sharded protocol designed to scale up to 1000 shards (currently at four shards). The transactions per second for each shard are approximately 1000. Each shard is also stated sharded, meaning it can independently process transactions and store data, essentially acting as independent blockchains. The exception to the independence comes from the beacon shard (Shard-0). While also processing transactions, this shard serves as a randomness beacon for random resharding and an identity registry for validators.[1]
Currently, Harmony supports cross-shard transactions and is working to implement cross-shard smart contracts. Cross-shard communication is required to secure the network as all blocks validated in a shard pass a security check in the beacon shard, which receives the block's header and checks its validity.[1]
Upon full implementation of random resharding, validators' stakes will be fragmented and randomly assigned to shards. This rearrangement is a security feature designed to prevent the ability of a validator from corrupting a shard slowly. A validator is resharded every epoch (32,768 blocks or about 18 hours) through fast state synchronization; this allows a validator to switch between shards without the need for downloading the entire history of the blockchain.[1]
Harmony's blockchain furthers its scalability by optimizing communication complexity between validating nodes through the FBFT consensus mechanism. Implementing the Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance ensures that the blockchain operates with 3-second blockchain finality while guaranteeing no forks in the network.[9]
Staking[edit]
Harmony is an account model blockchain, similar to Ethereum, and each wallet is confirmed with a bech32 address. The validation on the Harmony blockchain is based on Proof of Stake so that the voting power is not equal for each node but depends on the amount of ONE token staked by them. Each validator receives a reward (in ONE token) for each validated block that they signed, proportional to the amount staked by them.[1]
Users who do not run a validator node can also delegate/stake their ONE tokens to a specific validator, receiving a reward percentage in exchange. Staking your ONE tokens with a validator locks them in a smart contract with the validator and grants them voting power equivalent to your staked token amounts. Upon staking your ONE, you will earn rewards at the start of the next epoch; rewards are issued every 64 blocks. Unstaking from a validator to restake with another validator takes one epoch, and completely unstaking takes seven entire epochs.[10]
Decentralization[edit]
As of September of 2021, Harmony has 40.2% of its total supply locked in staking contracts and has 120 elected validators.[9]
Assessing decentralization:[edit]
Using a conventional assessment of decentralization (the Nakamoto coefficient[11]) and assuming Harmony would need 33.34% of network stake to halt the blockchain and 51% is needed to corrupt the blockchain [1], the table below shows how harmony compares against similar projects:
| Blockchain | #Needed to Halt | #Needed to Corrupt | #Total validators |
| Harmony | 8 | 14 | 120[12] |
| Zilliqa | 2 | 3 | 12[13] |
| Polygon | 2 | 4 | 100[14] |
| Terra | 8 | 15 | 134[15] |
| Solana | 18 | 42 | 997[16] |
| Cosmo | 1 | 3 | 200[17] |
| Nano | 4 | 8 | 200[18] |
Note: No central resource exists to determine the nakamoto coefficient for various blockchains and it must be calculated.[13]
The EPOS Difference[edit]
While Harmony does not fare poorly against comparable blockchains, the model above only considers if the stake was distributed on a single blockchain. Thanks to the implementation of random resharding and Effective Proof-of-Stake, Harmony can further mitigate the risk of the blockchain halting or being corrupted.[1]
Horizon Bridge[edit]
Harmony is one blockchain presently in operation among a number of others such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Polkadot. These are isolated layer-1 networks that do not natively cross-communicate; assets on one cannot be stored on the other. Transferring assets from one blockchain to another is an issue Harmony is working to solve through blockchain bridges, building a solution for inter-connecting different blockchains.
Users of Harmony can use their Horizon Bridge to communicate with the Ethereum and Binance blockchains, sending assets between them[19]. The Horizon Bridge is a fully audited bridge based on a series of smart contracts in the Ethereum, Binance and Harmony blockchains; and a pool of validators that listen to events on those blockchains. Users are freezing assets in the original blockchain, and then minting the same amount of the bridged token on the other blockchain. These minted tokens can be burned to retrieve the original token in its blockchain. At the moment any ERC20 and BEP20 assets, as well as BNB and ETH can be bridged into the Harmony blockchain.
Harmony's next technical milestone, their Bitcoin (BTC) bridge, will allow the bridging of assets to and from the Bitcoin blockchain.
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 "Harmony whitepaper" (PDF). Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ "Harmony price today, ONE live marketcap, chart, and info". CoinMarketCap. Retrieved 2021-08-12.
- ↑ "Harmony – Scaling Ethereum Applications and Cross-Chain Finance". www.harmony.one. Retrieved 2021-08-12.
- ↑ "Binance Launchpad: Harmony Sale Results". Binance Blog. Retrieved 2021-08-12.
- ↑ "Harmony Keynote: Scaling Privacy, Secure Staking, Radical Fairness". Harmony. 2019-09-29. Retrieved 2021-09-09.
- ↑ How to migrate an Ethereum application to Harmony in less than ONE minute, retrieved 2021-09-06
- ↑ HQ, Lunie (2019-12-05). "Why Is Proof of Stake Better for the Environment?". Medium. Retrieved 2021-09-06.
- ↑ Hackathon Workshop Intro to Harmony Protocol, Harmony Blockchain, retrieved 2021-09-06
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 "Smart Stake - Harmony". harmony.smartstake.io. Retrieved 2021-09-06.
- ↑ "Harmony Protocol - Staking FAQ". Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ Srinivasan, Balaji S. (2017-10-31). "Quantifying Decentralization". Medium. Retrieved 2021-09-06.
- ↑ "Smart Stake - Harmony". harmony.smartstake.io. Retrieved 2021-09-06.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 "Zillion - Zilliqa Staking Application". stake.zilliqa.com. Retrieved 2021-09-06.
- ↑ Kanani, Jaynti. "Polygon". Polygon. Retrieved 2021-09-06.
- ↑ "Terra Station". station.terra.money. Retrieved 2021-09-06.
- ↑ "Dashboard | Solana Beach". solanabeach.io. Retrieved 2021-09-06.
- ↑ "Full Cosmos Validators Leaderboard". cosmos.fish. Retrieved 2021-09-06.
- ↑ "Nano Charts - Representatives and decentralization statistics for the cryptocurrency Nano". nanocharts.info. Retrieved 2021-09-06.
- ↑ Harmony, Official Documentation. "Horizon Bridge". Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help)
External links[edit]
https://docs.harmony.one/home/general/horizon-bridge
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