Blockchains are faced with the scaling dilemma. And each blockchain aiming a different way to deal with the problem. While Bitcoin is the key example of a blockchain that lacks in scaling makes up in decentralization, Bitcoin is focusing on scaling slowly but safely with offchain proctools the main one being the LN. Bitcoin will and mostly likely will be number 1 and the golden standard of the crypto industry but this should not stop others from looking at different blockchains. Many are shitcoins but it up to you to decide if it is good enough or not. One of the interesting ones I found is Harmony-is it good enough? Well it up to you to really decide after learning more about it.

What is Harmony?

Harmony is a blockchain project that is aiming to be fully scalable, provably secure and energy efficient blockchain based on sharding technology. The consensus of the Harmony blockchain is POS and is capable of linear scaling which results in being able to perform several transactions per second.

Harmony is not vaporware as on June 28-Harmony launched its mainnet, its first fully sharded POS blockchain. The Mainnet had 600 nodes which is a great step to becoming a decentralized network.
Currently, the daily block rewards is 1M ONE tokens for the entire network distributed by the number of nodes on the network. This allows the blockchain to bootstrap and incentivize good actors

To run a node, you will need to stake 1,000,000 ONE tokens.
Read more about phase one and two here(info from here):
https://medium.com/harmony-one/join-harmony-mainnet-phase-2-f6101284cf70

How does the technology compare?

Harmony using sharding&POS allows a perfect balance between speed and fair consensus.
Here is a comparison of some other projects utilizing sharding technology

Source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IZhx4Ix9xwFEUZFTihc_MBQcI43TK3jEhBjobhpiZbo/edit?usp=sharing

What can more scaling with Harmony solve?

Scaling for Dapps remain a great deal as the best blockchain with security but cheapness attracts users. Good examples are:

• Cryptokitties:

Cryptokitties is one such project that at one point amassed massive attention and a large userbase and managed to clog up the entire Ethereum network. Call about wow. While alot of hype might be gone due to scaling factors. The company behind Cryptokitties Animoca has chosen to partner with Harmony in order to collaborate on the development of a new ecosystem for crypto collectibles. Pretty impressive.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/animoca-and-harmony-acquire-quidd-to-expand-sale-of-crypto-collectibles
Source(for more info) :https://steemit.com/contest/@originalworks/6-700-steem-1-300-usd-sponsored-writing-contest-harmony

• DeFi (Decentralized Finance)

DeFi is one of the most common use-cases of the Ethereum network. Some calling the future of Eth. DeFi is largely of cryptocurrency lending and borrowing, which results in high transaction throughput requirements. Think of banking but using smart contracts. Ethereum has run into scalability issues again and again as the network’s transaction speed simply cannot keep up with the demand. There are plans to go POS for Eth which will scale is massively but alot of factors unknown and will take all the way up to 2020 if everything goes. As such this is expected to only get worse as the industry continues to grow.
Here a good report on it:
https://info.binance.com/en/research/marketresearch/defi-1.html
Harmony can support the growing needs of the DeFi industry in a way that is both resource efficient and secure. With Harmony’s sharding, they are able to scale linearly as the demand of a project grows, ensuring that they won’t be bottlenecked by their infrastructure.
Source(for more info): https://steemit.com/contest/@originalworks/6-700-steem-1-300-usd-sponsored-writing-contest-harmony

Why Harmony is so intersting?

As stated Harmony is a sharding based blockchain that has produced various, significant breakthroughs. Their are:

• Scalability
  Harmony shards both the processing and the record keeping (state) of the network
  This makes that the storage stats less restrictive
• Secure Sharding
• Fast and Efficient Consensus
  POS helps reduce blocktime compared with POW which while secure requires more time for propagation.
• Adaptive-Threshold PoS

1. Staking requirements are changed based on total staking volumes
2. Malicious stakeholders cannot concentrate on single shards bc of adjustable staking.
3. Also the threshold is still low enough to allow participation for small stakeholders

• Scalable Networking Infrastructure
  Harmony can propagate blocks quickly within shards or across the network this allow more tx per second
  Harmony scales logarithmically with the number of shards which inc the tps count
• Consistent Cross-Shard Transactions

What is sharding?

Sharding is the process of dividing a database’s computational responsibilities into smaller segments (called shards) which individually carry out their tasks, making the total burden of computation smaller.

It kinda like mini blockchain but they make up one!

What are the Time intervals:

Harmony uses an epoch which is a time interval in which the sharding conditions are fixed.

Looking into sharding:

Backed by Harmony One token is a voting share which allows one vote each. Security is kept by making malicious stakers have less than 1/3 of the of the voting shares in any shard. Based on Calculations, the system is fault tolerant if it is less than ¼ of the entire network is malicious.

Resharding:

Once the time is over, the validators who eliminated their participation are removed from the network. Those who continue will receive new shares and voting rights, for the next time. The game theory is high stake holders will want to (1) ensure the system runs optimally and (2) maintain and increase their stakes as more epochs progress and the network develops.
Source:

Beacon Chain

Harmony has two chain types,one being a multiple transaction-processing shard chains of the network. The beacon chain itself processes transactions like the standard shard chains, but also has two other key functions.

1.  Generating the random numbers that influence which validators are assigned to which shards
   

2.  Accepting the stakes of the stakers applying to becomes validators
   

The history of Harmony:

Many roots and ideas have come from other projects to combine to make up Harmony.
Zillqa popularized sharding. Studies found flaws in in and state sharding was born.
Harmony has two “chains”: a beacon chain and multiple shard chains.
A beacon chain sits between the main chain and the shards. It is like a connective tissue providing a heartbeat.
The shards on the other hand store separate blockchain states and process transactions.
Harmony combines a plethora of solutions from projects like Ethereum 2.0 and papers such as Omniledger and RapidChain to adapt a solution with the various strengths of its predecessors.

Pangea:

I read this as a gaint, very powerful testnet.

Pangaea is an experimental zone for thousands of people to interact with the Harmony network
As you know tesnets allow for building with worrying about loss of funds and screwing things up.

Thoughts:

Seem very novel idea. Might be what Eth will look like if it can make it to 2020 :P
I personally think Defi is the future and will allow us to slowly bridge banks to a decentralized world. Banks are a useful tool after all. Will Harmony be the future? Up to you.

This isn't financial advice-do research on your own.

This is part of cateredcontent writing contest:
https://steemit.com/contest/@originalworks/6-700-steem-1-300-usd-sponsored-writing-contest-harmony
https://cateredcontent.com/events/harmony1
I tried to remain as unbiases as possible.