Hi guys, I've been missing from action since months ago but that happens for a reason. Mainly because I don't find any new project worth to be discussed. But a few days ago, a new project that was rated very high by several crypto expert has started to gain tractions on social media. Because of that, I find it worth to write about Harmony.
So what Harmony aims to do? Who's their competitor and will they have a chance to compete in the market? Why do you have to follow the development of this project and who should use this? Those are three questions that we'll discuss in this article.
A Brief Review of Harmony
So, what's Harmony One? If you visit their site, you'll see these sentences at their homepage:
Open Consensus for 10 Billion People. Harmony for One and All.
Our open infrastructure is a revolutionary high-throughput, low-latency, and low-fee consensus platform designed to > power decentralized economies of the future.
So there are some key terms that should give you a general overview of Harmony. In my opinion, Harmony is a blockchain protocol or systems, that aims to achieve highest-speed & cheapest transactions between parties involved in the ecosystem. In other words, it aims to provide a more robust blockchain ecosystem (first layer) which will make Harmony compete directly with Ethereum, Zilliqa, EOS, Tron or other first layer blockchain project.
This conclusion is supported by their technical whitepaper, mainly on the first section (Introduction), in which Harmony said:
We introduce Harmony, the next generation sharding-based blockchain that is fully scalable, provably secure, and energy efficient. Harmony addresses the problems of existing blockchains by combining the best research results and engineering practice in an optimally tuned system.
How do they aim to achieve that goal? There are at least several keywords. Harmony aims to make an ecosystem with low-latency, low-consensus platform, with consensus algorithms & consensus protocol that can power decentralized economies of the future
Harmony Tech 101
It's hard to understand how Harmony competes without understanding their tech a little bit. So we have to get a glimpse on how they'd do their job. As always, reading it directly from their tech paper should give you better insight, but here's the resume of their tech based on my understanding of the tech paper:
Sharding with state sharding (or called deepsharding here). Harmony will implement sharding up to state sharding, which shards the blockchain state, therefore, improve the speed of synchronization and so on.
FBFT consensus algorithm and PoS at its foundation.
Low-latency blocks propagation using RaptorQ foundation code and Kademlia routing to improve connection latency and parallelize transaction processing which can scale logarithmically with the number of active shards on the network.
So here's the gist: Harmony will use sharding to scale the network. It uses the FBFT consensus algorithm which basically an improvement over PBFT. In order to decrease latency and therefore improve the speed of transactions, they'll use Kademlia routing and RaptorQ foundation code. Compared to other PoW or PoS ecosystem, it's supposed to be a cheaper and faster network, with more or less the same security to decrease the existence of malicious actor or validator in the network.
Harmony Competitors
In late 2018 and early 2019, there are a lot of projects which aims to provide a new ecosystem for decentralized applications that is faster and cheaper than Ethereum. Some of them include Zilliqa, Kardia Chain, Harmony, Lighstreams, Solana, Jura, X-Block and so on. Most of them are still in the development stage, so comparing them is a bit hard as there are no clear indicators of real network performance. However, we can still compare other things.
First of all, let's compare Harmony with several existing ecosystems which is already active (on mainnet). Who are they? Ethereum and Zilliqa. It is clear that Harmony aims to solve the problem of Ethereum, which is clearly indicated on their tech proposal. Ethereum doesn't use any sharding (yet) and they have limited TPS at this moment. Zilliqa on the other hand just finished their bootstrapping phase and is now looking to enter full mainnet. However, they're still young and it needs more real network performance to prove how strong their network will be. Harmony should be able to compete with Zilliqa, especially with their state sharding proposal which is claimed to provide better scaling solution than using transaction and network sharding only.
So how about the other projects that are still on funding or early development stage such as Kardia, and so on? Most of them still don't offer any real usage yet. So the competition is pretty much open. It will depend on which project can deliver the highest scalability and also how many of them can acquire users / dapps on top of their platform. So I personally don't see any issue that limits Harmony from competing with their existing or future competitor. This is pretty much still an open space.
Who's Harmony made for?
Who should use Harmony? Why they have to use it? Based on the idea, then anyone or anything which requires high-throughput, trustless validation and scalable blockchain infrastructure should try this. For example, an e-commerce platform can use this. Instead of relying on a centralized database to store user data such as transaction, they can use Harmony as the infrastructure to store user data and at the same time use it as their payment channel. It would help them saves their operational cost.
Gaming dapps, where you need fast connectivity and high throughput can also use Harmony to empower their ecosystem. Any transactions (in-game transactions, payment, etc) should be transparent and get processed quickly. The supply chain industry can also use Harmony ecosystem as its backbone to track delivery on-chain. No need to spend thousands of dollars to build your own database to track the delivery which is prone to corruption or latency error.
Conclusion
Harmony is a high-level blockchain infrastructure with low-latency, low-fee consensus platform that utilizes deepsharding to power decentralized economies of the future. With the blockchain business still in its earliest stage, Harmony still has the opportunity to compete with existing competitors and shows the world who can handle all the needs of a scalable blockchain.
Learn more about Harmony here:
Harmony One Website: https://harmony.one/
Harmony Twitter Link: https://twitter.com/harmonyprotocol
Harmony LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/harmony-protocol/
Harmony Medium Page: https://medium.com/harmony-one
Harmony GitHub Page: https://github.com/harmony-one
Harmony Instagram Profile: https://www.instagram.com/harmonyoneprotocol/
Author: Ahmad Hidayat
Bitcointalk Username: ahmadhidayat27
Telegram: https://t.me/ahmad_hidayat27
Bitcointalk Profile URL: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1125575
ETH Address: 0x95afD6422538c5c9AbF6C7fF4Ec5c45281bD545B