Tackling Scale Harmoniously With Harmony

Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology has been seen as the underlying technology that will bring about a new age of technological advances and underpin web 3.0 with promising new ideas and functional which has so far alluded us or seemed impractical up until this point.

One of the more obvious uses for blockchain is immutable database management which can be used to disrupt a whole host of companies that have a strong grip on a multi-billion dollar infrastructure industry.

Blockchain is but a concept and the interpretation of how to use it is the important part and the way the project is structured, coded and implemented to suit different use cases is what really counts.

There a number of blockchains available today, some or single-purpose while others are general purpose.

Harmony Hompage

Scaling blockchain

Decentralisation provides us with a number of admirable qualities but at this moment in time, under current technological restrictions, scalability of blockchain has become a real issue holding back the sector as a whole.

Being able to complete thousands of transactions a second across a distributed network, while adding new users each day and keeping costs low while still maintaining decentralisation and security is a balancing act of note.

We saw the limits of scalability with Cryptokitties bringing the ETH blockchain to a screeching halt and when BTC hit above 20k, 3-hour transaction processing times and $5-$8 transaction fees. It simply isn't sustainable and scaling solutions became the focal point of the next phase in blockchain development.

How Harmony aims to scale its chain

Sharding has been one of the proposed solutions to the scalability dilemma with Etheruem exploring their own version of the concept to try and improve the chain's performance but there are many interpretations of how sharding should be done.

Harmony is a new chain that looks to focus heavily on sharing and create its own version of how it should be used to scale a blockchain.

Sharding splits up data into smaller sections that are more manageable making the total burden of computation smaller. This means that instead of tackling large computational tasks, they are broken into smaller chunks which are easier to process.

Harmony has built its system on both industrial and academic developments with inspiration from the Zilliqa network to create a new chain that has some nifty sharding based features. Such as proof of sharding stake, beacon chain, resharding and Epochs.

Use cases for Harmony

High-performance blockchains like Harmony make for interesting use cases such as high-frequency micropayments.

Getting what you paid for

Let's say for example a user would like to purchase an online course but only pay for the content he uses they can do so and be charged either based on a time amount the used it for or the amount of content/pages/videos consumed while using the course.

Now users are able to only pay for what they actually find value in and not buying an entire course with some fo the content not being applicable to them.

High-speed networks

Online gaming is fast-paced and a few seconds can make all the difference between winning and losing. Let's say you're playing online and you required additional health or armour you could buy some and have it sent to your inventory almost instantly for use and make sure your competition doesn't get the best of you. The transaction goes through and either a gamer selling the product itself on a marketplace or the developers receive heir fees instantly.

More on Harmony

If you found this review on Harmony interesting and would like to know more about the project or their current developments I recommend you check out the following resources.

• Website
• One Pager
• White Paper
• Medium
• Telegram

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Disclaimer - This is my submission for the @originalworks writing competition found here

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