Harmony: Sharding into the Future

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto presented the Bitcoin Whitepaper that tends to revolutionize the entire global economy by offering an alternative to the present financial system. The original bitcoin proposal that was based on a peer-to-peer payment system displayed its performance bottleneck with its limited throughput of 7 transactions per second as the cryptocurrency system gained popularity. In 2014, Vitalik Buterin along with others came out with a concept paper on Ethereum that has since gained popularity as a preferred platform for developers to build blockchain solutions using smart contracts.

While Ethereum had a higher throughput of 15TPS, but it still started falling short of requirements especially for gaming applications and decentralized exchanges that require high throughput for good performance. While many solutions have since been offered, but they tend to compromise on the aspects of security and decentralization aspects for increased throughput. However, the problem has been partially solved by Ziliqa that came out with the first public blockchain infrastructure based on the concept of sharding - a scalability solution that creates multiple shards or groups of validators and allows them to process the transactions concurrently. While Ziliqa tackles the problem of security and decentralization to a large extent, it does not offer a complete solution.

First, it offers limited decentralization as it prevents machines with limited resources from participating in the network. Second, Ziliqa remains vulnerable to the single-shard takeover attack because of its use of randomness generation mechanism for relying on the Proof-of-Work. However, Harmony solves both of these problems and provides full security and decentralization while offering full scalability, efficient and fast consensus, scalable network infrastructure, adaptive threshold POS and consistent cross-shard transactions.

Harmony’s full scalability comes from its ability to shard not only the network communication and transaction validations but also the blockchain state. It uses the distributed randomness generation process to make itself highly secure. Since the process is unpredictive, unbiased, verifiable and fully scalable, it puts the Harmony miles ahead of what Ziliqa can offer. Furthermore, Harmony does not rely on PoW but PoS for selecting validators as a result of which the consensus is reached fast and efficiently. While Harmony supports cross-shard transactions for directly communicating with each other, it also leverages an atomic locking mechanism to ensure the consistency of such transactions. These features put Harmony ahead in the race of shaping our future through the use of blockchain technology by providing technology for high-volume decentralized transactions, interactive fair games, IOT transactions, and Visa-scale payments. In simpler words, Harmony harmonizes the true essence of blockchain technology for a better future.