What is Harmony?
Omni -An EVM-compatible smart contract platform with 2-second transaction finality and extremely low fees.
Harmony balances three critical pillars – security, decentralization, and scalability with secure random state sharding.
Harmony is an open-source smart contract platform that is EVM compatible, meaning it can run Ethereum-based decentralized applications (dApps). Due to its use of sharding technology, it is able to ensure 2-second transaction finality with much lower fees compared to Ethereum mainnet. The protocol uses Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS) mechanism which allows the holders of its native token – ONE to delegate their holdings to network validators in order to secure the network and earn staking rewards.
As mentioned, Harmony uses a technique called state sharding, which separates a chain into separate segments that process transactions and store data in parallel. It currently supports one thousand nodes across four shards (250 nodes per shard), which work to produce new blocks every two seconds with finality. In addition to the faster and cheaper transactions, validators don’t need to maintain a full copy of the entire blockchain's transaction history, which lowers the hardware requirements
To protect the network from single shard attacks, Harmony uses a Verifiable Random Function (VDF) to randomly select shard membership and after every Epoch, validators likely move to a new shard. As the network grows, the number of nodes and shards will be increasing to meet the demand and ensure low finality and costs.
Harmony was founded in 2018 by a team of infrastructure engineers who previously worked at companies such as Google, Amazon, and Apple – Stephen Tse and co-founders Rongjian Lan, Nick White, and Sahil Dewan. The following year, Harmony launched its mainnet in June 2019 and opened staking to the public in May 2020.
Their mission to become an open and fair world-scale platform bringing financial tools and economic opportunities to anyone anywhere has not changed and to achieve their goal, they have launched an Ecosystem Development Fund to incentivize users and developers to show up and continue building.
Harmony has managed to attract a lot of builders since its inception due to its features and is home to dApps spanning all the verticals of Web3 – DeFi, NFTs, and GameFi. No matter your interests, you’ll find well-known games such as DeFi Kingdoms, NFT marketplaces such as NFTKEY and tofuNFT, or dApps that allow you to earn yield on your assets through lending – Tranquil and yield farming on Beefy, Unite Finance, and many more.
Many Harmony supporters prefer to not sell their ONE and find ONE staking to be a great way to passively earn more and grow their holding. Learn more about staking and how you can earn more through Omni.
