Might do some more of these, just general research into a project

Disclaimer: I currently don't hold any Harmony, I have in the past.

General

• Ticker/symbol: ONE
• Max supply: 13,156,044,839
• Circulating supply: 10,549,064,276
• Website: https://www.harmony.one/
• Consesus: POS

What is Harmony?

Harmony is a cross-chain blockchain, cross-chain means that it is the bridge between different blockchains. Beside bridging a big Harmony application is NFTs & DApps. Harmony's mainnet can run ETH DApps with 2s transaction speed and cost a fraction of the gas fees.

Why cross-chain?

You might wonder why we need a cross-chain blockchain, seems a bit like a gimmick?

Because there is such a wide variety of blockchains (and there's surely more to come) each blockchain will be specialized in one thing (e.x XMR is best for privacy, Nano for cheap feeless). With cross-chain blockchains we should be able to get the best of both worlds. This brings us to the concept of Cross-chain platforms. Essentially, cross-chain interoperability refers to the ability of a blockchain platform to share data with others.

An analogy to understand the concept of interoperability would be fiat currencies. If you travel from the US to China, you need to get your money converted from USD to RMB. If this facility of International money transfers or conversion of currency was not available, you would be unable to buy anything in China.

Same applies to the world of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain. If you have 100 ether but want to transact on another platform, you need to follow a process of converting your ethers into the native currency of that platform.

Harmony History

Harmony was founded by ex-FAANG developers in California. Their vision is to change the blockchain industry by creating an interoperable blockchain that can solve scalability issues for other chains.

Harmony's founder, Stephen Tse, has a compiler PhD (cryptographic protocol, type theory, functional compiler). He's worked at a myriad of big tech companies such as

1. Apple (Principal Engineer)
2. Google (Senior Engineer)
3. Microsoft (Research Intern)
4. Founder (Spotsetter) // acquired by apple
5. Voice AI (Founder)

How does Harmony function?

Harmony uses "sharding" to speed up their Blockchain, Harmony has 4 shards each with 1000 nodes which allows for 2 second finality. Currently shard 0 has some speed issues because it's practically the only shard being used, the Harmony team has said they're going to incentivize using different shards.

Harmony’s goal is to create an open network of nodes. It is designed to be operated and governed by a large community. They call such a community Pangaea, so far 800 nodes are run by the community. Pangaea consists of volunteers and validators from more than 100 countries, Harmony states in its official documents.

Harmony key features

• Secure random sharding
• Effective Proof of Stake
• Scalable networking infrastructure
• Asynchronous cross-shard transactions
• Efficient and fast concensus

Architecture scalability is powered by the network’s sharding concept. It is applied not only on the network communication and transaction validation but also on the blockchain state. This makes Harmony fully scalable on all three blockchain aspects: network, storage, and transaction processing.

Harmony is run under a Proof-of-Stake consensus. Such consensus is energy-efficient and low-cost for node runners. They call it Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS). The Effective goes because of the sharding focus of the mechanism. This is introduced to stimulate stake distribution to be more decentralized.

The main difference of EPoS compared to a classical PoS is the obligatory ratio between the staking amount of a validator and the number of nodes he runs. The more tokens a validator is staking - the more nodes he has to run. Sounds like some of the European countries’ fine policies. The more a citizen’s salary is - the bigger fine he gets if he obeys a law.

Staking

Staking is available on Harmony and can be done here: https://staking.harmony.one/portfolio/mainnet