Ours is truly an exciting period in the history of Information technology as we see the progress and development of blockchain technology. Since the introduction of bitcoin in 2009, cryptocurrencies and blockchains have disrupted well-established industries and financial processing systems. Whether it is in health, education, insurance, governance or production, blockchain technology has enabled a seamless, direct transfer of value between individuals and teams without passing through a central control. The widespread development and use of decentrlized systems make it seem as if blockchains have been around since a century ago. While still an imperfect technology, blockchains continue to gain grounds and record landmark achievements, to the benefit of individuals and organizations. If the current rate of dvelopment is maintained, blockchains would soon replace centralized financial and data processing systems.

However, while we sing the praises of blockchain development and success, age-old challenges of this technology persists. In order to consolidate on the progress already made and achieve true mass adoption of blockchain technology, these challenges must be quickly and effectively addressed. Take a look at some of them.

The Problems

Here are some of the challenges facing blockchain technology today.

1. Scalability: The oldest problem of blockchain technology is scalability. All blockchains from Bitcoin to the least of them suffer this challenge. Blockchains were not originally designed for speed. Little wonder then that Bitcoin and Ethreum could only handle 7 and 24 transactions per second respectively. In comparison Visa, a centralized payment processing platform handles up to 24,000 transactions per second. The difference is processing speed is obvious and really huge. In a face-paced world where everything happens swiftly, 7 TPS will always struggle to attain mass adoption. Industries like payment processors, online games and others would certainly go for centralized data processing technologies that guarantee the kind of speed suitable for handling large volumes of data.

2. Security: Blockchain technology is one of the most secured systems in the IT world. However, we have seen recently, that the number of breached blockchains continue to raise. There are several recorded cases of blockchain intrusion that resulted in the loss of personal data and other digital assets. As hackers increase their penetration power and abilities, blockchain systems have been the main targets. Also, in a bid to achieve more scalability, some blockchains were designed to be inherently insecure. As such, sensitive data stored on such systems are greatly at risk of being lost or stolen. These and many other things contributed to the lack of security of some blockchain platforms today.

3. Cost: The cost of running blockchain projects or implementing blockchains on existing systems is still high. As a result, many organizations and new startups stick to traditional systems of data transfer because they are cheaper. So cost has been a major roadblock to blockchain progress. In order to achieve true mass adoption, running blockchain projects should be affordable. This will enable individuals and teams with a small budget to effective adopt blockchain systems.

4. True decentralization: The idea of true decentralization is that there is no central control point in blockchain systems. But is that really the case in today's blockchains? The answer could be no! Take for example some cryptocurrency exchange platforms. Those platforms are owned and operated by a board of owners who still have a measure of central control over the platform. They manage user wallets and some of them still has access to the funds though they claim not to. They take decisions that affect how your digital assets are stored and transferred. In essence, establishing a central control infrastructure. This is just a basic example. It happens in other sectors of blockchain application too. So as we still have it today, Blockchain technology is yet to achieve true decentralization and that is the same problem it claims to solve in traditional systems.

These and many other challenges not mentioned here contributes to the inability of blockchains to progress to the point of mass adoption. How can these challenges be overcome? Yes. How? Read on and discover the ultimate solution - a project called Harmony

The Solution - Harmony

Harmony is a blockchain project consciously engineered to solve scalability, security and high energy consumption challenges of today's blockchains. This project utilizes sharding at network levels and the blockchain itself to ensure fast and expandable transaction of data in the system. This coupled with an enhanced consensus algorithm ensures that whole new economies could be built on top of Harmony with true decentralization and security at the core. Because of scalability issues, high data-processing projects like IOT cannot be effective implemented on today's blockchains. But with Harmony, systems built on its blokchain can scale at inconceivable capacity, enabling them quick access to resources needed to process and transmit big data in the least time.

Consider some of the core components that integrate to form a completely scalable solution and opporuntiy presented by Harmony.

The two Core Components of Harmony

Harmony built its blockchain on two core components. They are as follows: Sharding and its unique Consensus algorithm. This session describes in detail how each component contirbutes to Harmony unmatched scalability an security.

Sharding

First, we need to understand that sharding is a technique usually employed in databases to facilitate the storage and accessing of data. In sharding, a very large database is divided into smaller sections or partitions, each holding and managing a portion of the whole data. Sharding improves performance because this horizontal splitting of the entire database reduces the total number of rows needed to store data; thereby improving the speed at which data is stored or retrieved. Sharding also facilitates a distributed system because each partition could be held on a separate storage device, making sure that the whole database is not domiciled on a central sever.

Sharding has been an efficient means of achieving scalability. Hence, there have been plenty of work done in practice and on paper to implement and improve this technique. Harmony have built its unique sharding techniques based on the work or previous people and has gone on to improve them. The Zilliqa network was the first blockchain to conceive and fully implement sharding. Although its limitation is that the entire blockchain must reside in a particular shard at any given time to be able to process transactions. Harmony borrowed the Zilliqa sharding technique and used it as a foundation to develop and fine-tune its unique sharding technique. But instead of putting the whole blockchain in one partition, Harmony borrowed the state sharding methods proposed by Omniledger where each shade holds and process a part of the blockchain, making it impossible for attackers to corrupt and take over the blockchain when stored in a single shard.

RapidChain, also another publication offers a more superior way to reshuffle the nodes randomly without breaking up the smoothing running of the blockchain. In all, Harmony picked and pierced together, desirable elements of these 3 sharding techniques and advanced the concepts to produce a sharding technique that uniquely scales the blockchain, enhances performance and processes data securely. Here are some of the main features of the hybrid sharding developed by Harmony.

1. Distributed Randomness Generation: In sharding, there should be a way to assign nodes to shardes. A lot of techniques have been tried and tested to do this assignment. Having considered previous works - their success and failures, Harmony agreed with other industry experts and selected randomness-based sharding as the technique with the best security ever.

In randomness-based sharding, all the participating nodes must agree that a randomly generated number must be used to determine how each shard is assigned a node. This unique number must be unpredictable, unbiaseable, verifiable and scalable. Harmony combined the best of previous works to produce the number that satisfy all these conditions. It utilized Omniledger's random number generation technique which is inherently slow and did not satisfy the last condtion of scalability. But matching Omniledger's methods with Algorand's Verifiable Random Function, together with Ethereum 2.0's Verifiable Delay Function produces a hybrid random number generation technique that satisfies the four conditions of being unpredictable, unbiaseable, verifiable and scalable. Hence, nodes are effectively assigned to shards using Harmony's unique random-based sharding.

2. Epochs: In Harmony blockchain, an epoch is a period of time determined in advance, when the conditions for sharding laid down. Each epoch is started first by using Harmony randomness-based sharding to generate the number. This number generated will determine the conditions that will be fixed for each particular epoch. As the number changes between the end of the previous epoch and the beginning of the next one, the conditions for sharding in each epoch is similarly unique.

3. Staking-based Sharding This is another feature of Harmony that makes it truly unique. Harmony deviated from general practice of using (PoW) to determine who adds a block to the chain. To validate blocks in Harmony, validators will stake some tokens the quantity of which determines how much shares a validator gets. How can farudulent validators be spotted in this kind of voting? Here is how it is explained:

Our security assumption is that across all the staked tokens, up to 1/4 of them belong to malicious validators. If we shard by validators (i.e. assign one validator to one shard), in the worst case wherea single malicious validator holds 1/4 of all the staked tokens (or the voting shares), it will easily possess more than 1/3 voting shares in that shard.

4. Resharding: The structure of the shard changes after each epoch. This is called resharding. It is done to prevent attackers from overtaking the blockchain. In creating the new epoch, participants that kept their stake are rewarded with new votes while those that withdrew are not allowed to join the new epoch. Hence, validators with ulterior motive are easily fished out.

5. Shard chain: A shard chain is a blockchain that operates as a separate unit from the whole. It handles data processing and storage and can send out messages about its current state to other chains. This communication at network level between shard chains is taken care of by employing Kademlia routing to sort out any irregularities in transmitted messages. Shard chains ease make it easier on the side of clients because there are no complex technicalities that must be mastered by users before sending out messages.

6. Beacon Chain: The beacon chain is another unique feature that makes Harmony really outstanding. This chain is not different from other chard chains except that it performs 2 special functions that chard chains cannot perform, First, this chain does the work of generating the unique random numbers that are used to determine how nodes are assigned to chards. Second, the beacon chain is the place where potential validators make and deposit their tokens. The beacon chain also handles transaction processing like chard chains and validators for the beacon chain are selected using the same technique employed for the chard chains. Of course,remember that it is a type of chard chain.

7. Blockchain State Sharding: Harmony's sharding builds on the work of existing projects and research papers. Sharding on its own enables the partitioning of a whole database into smaller shards or partitions. In Harmony, each of the shards is an independent subset of the blockchain and is therefore able to perform data processing on its own.In a case where a single shard is unable to handle a large load of data, cross-shard transaction, the load could be shared among other shards where the user maintains balances. This in effect spreads the work and enhances scalability as they are processed concurrently. Smart contracts on the other hand cannot be be duplicated in a case where one shard is unable to process them. Instead, different instances of the smart contract is spread across the shards and they are able to relate to one another and communicate the state of each chards transactions.

The above 7 elements discussed constitute just one main component of the Harmony blockchain. The second main component is the consensus algorithm.Here is how it works on Harmony

Consensus Algorithm

Each blockchain has a way of making the nodes agree on the real state of the blockchain. The consensus mechanism is a crucial element of any blockchain. How fast a consensus is reached has a direct bearing on the speed of the blockchain. The faster a consensus is reached, the faster transactions are processed. There are many consensus algorithms such as Proof of Work(PoW), Proof of Stake(PoS), etc.

Harmony uses a consensus mechanism called Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance (FBFT). This algorithm is built on the popular Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) where the validators are gouped into 2: the leader and others. This is how it works:

Each round of PBFT consensus involves two major phases: the prepare phase and the commit phase. In the prepare phase, the leader broadcasts its proposal to all of the validators, who in turn broadcast their votes on the proposal to everyone else.

As noted above, before a consensus is reached using Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), the other nodes re-broadcasts their votes to other nodes. Imagine a blockchain with several hundred of thousand nodes. This re-broadcasting will take a lot of time and that is why Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) is not scalable. To solve this issue and improve scalability, validators on Harmony are not required to rebroadcast their votes after the leader. Instead, the leader collects the votes from other validators and runs a single signing that contains all the signatures from the validators. Then, the leader sends this multi-signature signing to all the validators. So instead of rebroadcasting individual votes among themselves, validators receive a single signing containing all the votes. This process reduces the time taken to cast votes and improves scalability.

Using the Proof of Stake combined with the sharding technique, Harmony has been able to forge a blockchain that is very fast - scalable - and one that has the best consensus protocol ever. The table below shows how is such a great improvement on current blockchains and even performs far ahead of othem.

How Harmony beats all competition

Looking at the core components of harmony and comparing the work that has been done to build this blockchain, it is obvious that Harmony have succeeded where every other blockchain failed. Consider some of the hallmark achievements of the project.

1. Scalability: The biggest and number 1 challenge of all blockchains is scalability. Harmony solves this challenge by employing the sharding technique which splits the blockchain into smaller independent, but cross-linked partitions. This design ensures that data is quickly processed and stored by the blockchain without complexities. Sharding greatly reduces the time involved to perform blockchain networking, data processing and node validation.

2. Security: Harmony is truly the most secured blockchain ever, making it difficult to attack. Its Adaptive-Thresholded Proof of Stake. Since there is no fixed threshold of stakes that nodes can use to participate in the blockchain, it becomes difficult for malicious users to concentrate their power in a single shard. Also, the beacon chain used to generate the random number for assigning of nodes to shard is Unbiasable, unpredictable, verifiable, scalable. Hence, the system is very secure.

3. Efficiency: Harmony boasts a unique consensus mechanism. It takes less time and resources for validators to reach a consensus on the network. Blockchains are already expensive in energy consumption. But Harmony's consensus mechanism ensures that energy is conserved and scalability is greatly enhanced.

4. Fully decentralized: Harmony's Sharding helps to ensure full decentralization as the whole transactions are not stored on a single server. Instead, shards of the blockchain are hosted by various devices spread across a very large area. Hence, even if an attack succeeds in overcoming a single shard, the whole system is not affected.

The token

1.IOT

Agged Inc. is a company that manufactures robots that monitor the elderly. The board at Agged Inc. have been researching on a cheaper, but efficient way to store and retrieve and process data collected by its robots. Currently, they use cloud hosting, but that is slow and expensive too. The board tasked Mr. John the IT manager to research about alternatives to cloud hosting.

Mr. John went online and started digging out information on cloud alternatives. After one week of work, he stumbled upon Harmony's, but is skeptical about blockchains, having known the scalability issues well. He decided to learn more about Harmony and its unique ways of handing scalability. After researching and consulting a friend who is a blockchain developer, Mr. John recommended Harmony's and is the board did a testrun with some of the newly developed robots. The board is satisfied after the tests and the approves the full use of Harmony as the main data paltform for its monitoring robots.

2. Payment Processing

PayZoom is a startup that wants to help shop owners process payments from customers. The small board has a limited budget and were contemplating the cheapest and most efficient platform on which to build their payment gateway. While on this project, the team leader Mark, heard about an annual blockchain even to be hosted in the state. He decided to attend. At the event, blockchain as a payment gateway was discussed and Harmony's was one of the platforms featured. Mark came back from the event and told his team about Harmony's and they agreed to research it. After 2 weeks, they met and everyone was satisfied with what they read about Harmony's. They decided to give it a run and build a testrun project on the platform. After making some friends to test the payment gateway built on Harmony's, they results were positive. Now, PayZoom is fully built on Harmony's and there are no problems with the service for since it started.

Conclusion

Since the invention of Bitcoin, blockchain technology have made progress in various areas, but a lot of challenges have prevented its mass adoption. Harmony solves all the major challenges that blockchains battle today. Its sharding technique makes the blockchain fully scalable. The consensus mechanism also helps the speed and efficiency of the blockchain, ensuring that large data-processing projects could be built on the blockchain. Harmony is the ultimate solution to the challenges of modern data processing and this project is capable of powering mass adoption of blockchain technology.

Roadmap

Team

Advisors

Investors

Partners

Find More Information about Marmony

Harmony Website
Harmony WhitePaper
Harmony Onepager
Harmony Telegram
Harmony Medium
Harmony LinkedIn
Harmony Instagram
Harmony Twitter

Who Organized this Contest?

This contest was organized by Catered Content. You can participate in the contest by clicking here.

Image credits

Unless otherwise indicated, all images in this article were taken from Harmony Website