Eureka!! A Word of Discovery
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More than two centuries have gone since Archimedes found a solution to the king's puzzle but still his legends lives on. And the most dramatic part of this story was that he mistakenly stumbled on the formular to solve the king's puzzle after toiling day and night to no avail. And when he did found out, he shouted Eureka! Eureka! Eureka means I have found it.
In similar fashion, this short story captures the mood of the blockchain community when they stumbled on the idea of Sharding and Resharding to re-invent blockchain technology. However, one of the first blockchain to implement this concept; Zilliqa didn't get to see the light of the day inspite of its obvious advantage in terms of transaction throughput (speed) and scalability over conventional blockchain like Ethereum and Bitcoin.
However, their implementation of this revolutionary concept fall short in two ways
Sharding process is susceptible to a single-shard takeover attack due to its reliance of PoW as its randomness generation mechanism.
Secondly, the blockchain data is not divided; a move which ostracize machines with little resources from participating in the network, hence curtailing true decentralization
So when Harmony came out with an improved and better version of sharding implementation, it had to be a repeat of history; its Eureka!!! to all the puzzle of riding on a fast, scalable and secure blockchain.
A Breath of Fresh Air - Harmony Blockchain
Its time to dive deep into this puzzle-solving technology behind blockchain's return to glory since its inception in 2009 to arrest the niggling issues of double spending, User control and security associated with traditional payment system.
Since then, blockchain shortcomings in performance-related issues are well documented and they encompass the trilemma of today's technology which are speed, scalability and security.
As opposed to traditional payment system, the obvious compromise is speed and scalability when it comes to Blockchain technology and this recounts the major reasons why blockchain technology is yet to be fully adopted beyond its native cryptocurrency use case.
Therefore, Harmony represents the best chance of driving new economies on the blockchain due to its harmonious push for one with better speed and scalability over other options.
Harmony Blockchain to the rescue!!
Due to key innovations in core blockchain concepts, Harmony is a fast, highly scalable, secure and fully-decentralized option to host unprecedented number of transactions per second. The blockchain is able to scale trustlessly across many economies including DApps due to their implementation of deep-sharding techniques driven by the PoS consensus mechanism.
Harmony invents on both the Network and Protocol Layer
Harmony’s vision is “For One and For All,” creating open consensus for 10 billion people. This explains the reason why a 12-person team in Silicon Valley with 7 engineers from Google/Apple/Amazon and 2 PhDs came together to create a public network that is fully open sourced. However, the team is not relenting on their dreams but working hard to live it. Although the hardwork doesn't stop here , it starts by reinventing key concepts within the Network and protocol layer to be able to support emerging technologies.
State-sharding Guarantees Network Security
Sharding was introduced to address the demands of large data computations which can slow down the network. Hence, it is simply the process of dividing a database’s computational responsibilities into smaller segments (called shards). Harmony deep sharding techniques does more than shard the processing of data but take it a step further by sharding the storage of data on the network. This process is best called State sharding and facilitates the claim for a more scalable network without restrictions on storage requirement.
Harmony employs the energy efficient PoS(Proof of Stake) consensus mechanism to reach fast consensus on the network while the DRG( Distributed Randomness Generator) via the beacon chain helps to keep the process unbiasable, unpredictable, verifiable and ultimately scalable.
Harmony adjust their staking requirements based on the total staking volume such that
Malicious stakeholders cannot concentrate on single shards
The threshold is low enough to allow participation for small stakeholders
Consensus Mechanism ensures True Decentralization
On the backdrop of security concerns which plagued current sharded blockchain options such as multivac to name a few, largely due to implementation of the loose PoW consensus mechanism which only favours the few. Harmony takes a leaf from this major lapse and will instead employ a PoS + FBFT(Full Byzantine Fault Tolerance) protocol to ensure true decentralization.
In the previous section, we saw how Harmony adaptive staking design helps to raise the level of participation in the network, driving true decentralization in the process.
BLS Multisignature Reduces Communication Complexity
As opposed to PBFT protocol, In FBFT protocol, validators are not required to broadcast their votes to the whole network. Instead they ONLY need to reveal the content of their votes to the leader via the Boneh-Lynn-Shacham(BLS) multi signature before a new block can be created.
Thus ensuring the communication within the shard is linearly scalable and speed is not compromised in any way.
Kamdelia-Based Routing simplifies Cross-shard communication
This routing protocol enables efficient communication between shards. Since each node maintains a routing table that contains the node of different shard, messages sent accross the network ONLY needs to travel short distance before it gets to its destination.
This approach greatly reduce the overall network load in a sharded blockchain.
Cuckoo-ruled Resharding Techniques keeps malicious activity at the Lowest Ebb
In order to maintain the security and Decentralization of the network, Harmony resharding technique is to completely remove validators who withdrew their stake from the network at every Epoch -
a predetermined time interval (e.g. 24 hours) during which the sharding structure is fixed and each shard continuously runs consensus with the same set of validators.
Harmony's High-Performance Blockchain Lives Beyond Native Cryptocurrency Usecases
Harmony's innovative solutions within a very short time has brought succour to the endless nightmare of scalability and speed which has ravaged many blockchain startups. Two of such recent projects that comes to mind are highlighted below
Cryptokitties
A Crypto-collectible game based on the ethereum network. Animoca - the company behind Harmony, helped solve the scalability issue which almost denied the success of this project after ethereum experienced major network clog few hours of launching this project on the platform due to heavy traffic.
It appears this partnership is bound to bring more success in the coming years especially in the area of crypto collectibles!
DeFi (Decentralized Finance)
Away from the traditional use case of cryptocurrency, Harmony exploit can lead to the birth of new economies. One that is almost feasible is cryptocurrency lending and borrowing. Harmony blockchain are easily adaptable for such usecases due to their trustless and highly scalable nature as more users join the network.
Third-Party Hosting and DApps for Large Scale Integrations
From this revelations above , it appears the Harmony blockchain can serve as a reliable third-party network on which other economies can be hosted including high-volume decentralized exchanges, marketplace for fungible and non-fungible tokens, IoT-driven economy and other large scale integrations.
Why use Harmony Blockchain?
Fully Decentralized; This is possible due to the adaptive staking threshold unlike other sharded options which compromise security in one way or the other.
Fast Transaction throughput/Latency; Enabled by employing a fast, efficient consensus and linear routing protocol. Making the network 100 times faster than the other options.
Highly Scalable; Due to the state sharding employed on each node, Harmony network is able to propagate blocks quickly within the shards or across the network. The network typically scale logarithmically with the number of shards.
Low Transaction Fee; Validators spend less power when creating new blocks since the network is deployed on an energy efficient PoS-based consensus. Hence less transactional fee is accumulated over the network.
Consistent Network; An
atomic locking sequenceensures all shards within the network behaves like an homogenous system. Therefore, each shard behaves like a smaller unit of a larger network. This is very important as the system grows overtime.In a Nutshell, Harmony Vs Other Sharded-Blockchain Options
What the Community Thinks About Harmony
Some important personalities such as ()Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum), Zaki Manian (Tendermint), Gawin Wood (Parity Technologies), Alex Skidanov (Near Protocol) have made some keen observations about Harmony blockchain.
Here > https://twitter.com/harmonyprotocol/status/1160065335011106816
Highlighting the Features and Benefits of Harmony Blockchain
Harmony uses censorship detection to vote on view changes
Provably fair consensus mechanism
Harmony consensus accrues votes based on the amount of Harmony ONE token staked
Provably secure
Peer-to-Peer communication
Low transaction fee
Provably fair mining reward
Faster Block creation process
immunity from 1% shard attack
Zero-knowledge proof of data sharing to ensure customer's privacy
Proof of Stake consensus provides an energy efficient network
Linearly scalable for mass adoption
Partnerships - A key Strategy to Harmony's Dominance
Since Harmony launched their Mainnet with barely 600 nodes on the 28th of June. They have managed success on many frontiers including making it to one of the top 15 decentralized networks ; amidst striking partnerships that could favour their long-term if not short term strategy of winning the decentralized market for 10 Billion users or more. Top among their partnerships are
√ Matic Network
Which will allow it to gain the front door and be the defacto standard when it comes to DApp(decentralized Applications) deployment and hosting for businesses and vendors. This partnership will allow the DApps to run complex computation task off chain. Therefore as a result they pay less gas fee and potential latency is curtailed within the network.
Also, dApps can be built on harmony networks such that heavy computations can be driven on third party frameworks like magic Network. A good example is an hybrid DEX where order books can be maintained and settled off chain.
√ Pangaea
Pangaea is an experimental zone for thousands of people to interact with the Harmony network, test the limitations of our technology and have lots of fun while earning rewards. Pangaea is created purely for experimental purposes. It will have its own currency for playing and bookkeeping.
It’s the first live experiment - showcasing great prospect for participation on the development of the Harmony network. Within the first 24 hours the initiative had the following:
• 138 Nodes up & running already
• 1283 Signups
• 77 Countries
• 356 Keys Downloaded
Source: https://twitter.com/harmonyprotocol/status/1160385546515931137
Harmony ONE token
Harmony ONE token is the native currency for Harmony's open economy of developers, miners, validators/stakers and investors.
The Harmony token will gain relevance in the following aspects of the protocol:
For staking, inorder to participate in the POS consensus, earn block rewards and cover for transaction fees.
Voting for on-chain governance of the protocol
To pay for transaction fees, gas and storage fees.
In Conclusion
Harmony represents one of the first sharded-blockchain to employ PoS consensus mechanism along with some key innovations to deliver the promise of a fast, scalable and decentralized network to serve as the basis for hosting technologies of the future ; which inevitably raise the stake for processing of large computational data, Internet of Things economy, big data, Artificial Intelligence for driving the economies of various sectors.
Use Case
- Creating a Global Economy for Real Estate
Fraud is common in property registration due to the use of paperworks. The call of Posterity has left the land owners in a state of fear until they finally kick the bucket. This is when this properties become hard to claim for the rightful heir due to bad act, bad record keeping or worst still government policies.
In order to circumvent this misnomer, blockchain technology can easily replace the old system and serve as a secure, efficient store of data for every day use via the deployment of DApps ; which can drive the creation of global economy for the budding Real Estate Market. Harmony as a frontier for fast, decentralized economy fits the bill in every aspect.
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