If you're active in the crypto space, you must have heard something about Harmony (ONE) these days. It became a talk of the town due to its recent Mainnet release followed by IEOs and listings in major crypto Exchanges like Binance DEX, BitMax and last week at KuCoin.

So what exactly is Harmony and what revolutionary technology it brings to the blockchain table? I tried to find it out. (If you ain't a techie, don't worry! Since I ain't a techie myself, I'd like to talk from the perspective of a non-techie in a layman's language).

We all know that blockchain is an emerging technology and several blockchains created and developed so far have their own problems e.g. Bitcoin has struggled with network congestion and its energy-centric PoW algorithm that is often criticized for heavy electricity consumption at the ends of miners. On the other hand, Ethereum brought in the power of deploying smart contracts over blockchain that helped widen the applicability and use cases of blockchain as a whole. But unfortunately, it too is struggling with severe scalability issues. High transaction cost on PoW algorithm was another problem area that needed to be addressed. EOSIO brought in high-speed free transaction dPoS mechanism of governance but it too faces the allegations of centralization and compromising on the feature of immutability of blockchian. So several PoS, dPoS, BFT and DAG based solutions followed but everyone has its own limitation in some aspect.

Harmony blockchain (ONE)

Harmony aims to address all these major issues with high scalability without any compromise on decentralization.

Harmony implements Sharding and its unique EPoS mechanism to make it scalable, efficient and decentralized at the same time. A couple of months back on June 28<sup?th Harmony blockchain released its Mainnet and became the first fully sharded POS blockchain. With about 800 nodes, it has also became the top 15 decentralized network. In phase-2 (which starts from August 29^th), it is aiming for a total of 1600 nodes.

Sharding

Sharding is a type of computational process where large computational tasks in the database at the time of any transaction are divided into smaller segments (called shards) that are distributed to several computers or nodes and processed concurrently and reconciled later. This makes process of computations very fast. Thus Harmony blockchain can propagate blocks more efficiently across the network and process more transactions in the given time.

Moreover, Harmony shards not only processes but also record keeping thus minimizing the storage space requirement (state sharding) This makes it fully scalable blockchain..

Thus Harmony is the best model for scalability, security, fair consensus and optimum resource utilization. Check this comparative chart with other blockchain recently launched using sharding technology:

Effective Proof of Stake (EPoS)

EPoS stands for Effective Proof of Stake. Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism helps in reducing the electricity consumption with optimum resource utilization. In PoS mining consensus, nodes with higher stakes plays the role in arriving at consensus and maintaining the network stability. So rich miners with higher stake earns more with mining making rich even richer. This is detrimental to decentralized distribution. So Harmony came up with the idea of Effective Proof of Stake where effective stake is determined by median stake of all miners running nodes. This incentivizes miners towards uniform distribution by aligning their holdings close to median level.

Beacon chain

Beside shard chains, Harmony protocol has a special blockchain called Beacon chain. Shard chains processes and validates only its own transaction and stores its own state. Shard chains are relatively independent, however they communicate with cross-shard communication.

The Beacon chain is also a shard but beside processing transactions like other shard chains, it also has 2 additional functions:
(1) Generation of random numbers through DRG (Distributed Randomness Generation). DRG is unpredictable, unbiaseable, verifiable and scalable. This decided which validator to assign which shard. This provides for secure sharding.
(2) Accepting the stakes of the stakers. Thus the Beacon chain is the chain where stakers deposit their tokens to become validators.

Harmony project is a welcome step in the evolution of blockchain technology. It would be good to see various dapps that need high-speed transactions and true decentralization on this blockchain. Remember 2017's Cryptokitties, the first high volume game that became the victim of scalability issues of Ethereum blockchain? Coincidentally, one of the investor of Cryptokitties, Animoca Brands is also a partner in Harmony. Animoca Brands Recently Animoca Brands acquired Quidd, Quidd is a digital collectibles' marketplace with 6.8M unique users and some of world's biggest names as its partners like Disney, Marvel, HBO, CBS and the NBA.

So the dapps like games, decentralized exchanges, gambling and even applications to hold public elections to appoint a nation's government that need a high throughput can be deployed over Harmony. With the launch of its Mainnet, it would be exciting to see how innovative developers make good use of this technology.

Combining the best of available tech, knowledge and innovating on top of it, this project has created a true harmony in the blockchain space. Let's see how dapps integrate into it to make it more harmonious!

_{This post is an entry to @originalworks & CateredContent sponsored writing contest}

References:
_{Harmony Website
Harmony OnePager
Harmony WhitePaper
Harmony Medium Blog
Harmony Telegram Group
Harmony Twitter}