Harmony.one: project review
Harmony aims to provide a scalable, secure, and decentralized blockchain system that supports all kinds of applications, including data marketplaces, gaming, and financial transactions for billions of people around the world.
What is Harmony?
Harmony is a high throughput blockchain project that aims to transform the world into an open marketplace, and it supports the coming decentralized economy by operating at an extremely high scale. The Harmony team aims to provide a consensus protocol over the open internet that is able to facilitate 10 million transactions per second (tps) with a 100-millisecond latency, and a maximum fee of 0.1%.
Their open infrastructure is a revolutionary high-throughput, low-latency, and low-fee consensus platform designed to power decentralized economies of the future. Their consensus protocol uses design principles such as sharding and pipelining to parallelize transaction processing. This allows to effectively handle connection latency and enables their throughput to scale with the size of their network.
Harmony addresses the problems of existing blockchains by combining the best research results and engineering practice in an optimally tuned system. Specifically, Harmony makes breakthroughs in following aspects:
● Fully Scalable: Harmony shards not only the network communication and transaction validation like Zilliqa, but also shards the blockchain state. This makes Harmony a fully scalable blockchain.
● Secure Sharding: Harmony’s sharding process is provably secure thanks to the distributed randomness generation (DRG) process which is unpredictable, unbiaseable, verifiable and scalable. Harmony also reshards the network in a non-interruptive manner to prevent against slowly adaptive byzantine adversaries.
● Efficient and Fast Consensus: Unlike other sharding-based blockchains which require PoW to select validators, Harmony is based on PoS and thus energy efficient. Consensus is reached with a linearly scalable BFT algorithm that’s 100 times faster than PBFT.
● Adaptive-Thresholded PoS: The threshold of stakes required for a node to join the network is adjusted based on the volume of total staking in a way that malicious stakers cannot concentrate their power in a single shard. Moreover, the threshold is low enough so that small stakers can still participate in the network and earn rewards.
● Scalable Networking Infrastructure: With RaptorQ fountain code, Harmony can propagate blocks quickly within shards or across network by using the Adaptive Information Dispersal Algorithm. Harmony also adopts Kademlia routing [37] to achieve cross-shard transactions that scale logarithmically with the number of shards.
● Consistent Cross-Shard Transactions: Harmony supports cross-shard transactions with shards directly communicating with each other. An atomic locking mechanism is used to ensure the consistency of cross-shard transactions
Team & Advisors
Harmony is founded by a diversified and skilled team, that counts with experience in blockchain, machine learning and scaling of technology products. The founders and engineers previously worked for top tier Silicon Valley companies.
Stephen Tse is the founder of Harmony. He previously worked as an engineer and researcher for Google, Microsoft and Apple and founded a startup that later on was acquired by Apple. He holds a PhD from University of Pennsylvania in cryptography.
Nicolas Burtey is a co-founder and the COO of Harmony. He is a previous VR entrepreneur and has a bachelor in mathematics and computer science.
Alok Kothari is a co-founder at Harmony and previously worked at Apple’s Siri in the machine learning area, particularly in the natural language processing field. He holds a Master degree in Artificial Intelligence form Carnegie Mellon University.
Rongjian Lan is a co-founder at Harmony and a previous Google engineer. He is also the co-chair of the ABC blockchain foundation that connects engineers from companies such as Google and Facebook. He holds a Master degree in Computer Science form University of Maryland College Park.
Minh Doan is a co-founder at Harmony and a previous engineer at Google with more than 5 years of experience. He holds a Master degree in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from Moscow State University.
Nick White is another co-founder at Harmony and specialized in Artificial Intelligence. He is responsible for community development.
Sahil Dean is a co-founder at Harmony and a previous entrepreneur.
Several other people are involved in the Harmony project in fields such as system architecture, business development and research.
Conclusion
The idea is not new but ambitious for the speed and trading volume on this platform is very impressive. The technology uses the PBFT OmniLedger consensus mechanism and the Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) delivers good security. The strong team has experiences in senior positions at large technology corporations. There are people who have doctor’s degree in prestigious universities. There are consultants and staffs working as professors at big universities in USA. Partners are individuals who have worked at the world’s largest technology corporations, and the founder of several start ups.
COMMUNITY
Twitter — https://twitter.com/harmonyprotocol — 4,156 followers
Telegram — https://t.me/harmony_one — 11,043 members
ADDITION LINKS