Harmony (ONE) Review

An independent review of Harmony (ONE)

An Open Consensus for 10 billion people

Summary

Harmony is an open infrastructure adopting sharding technology to scale trust for billions of people worldwide. The platform is designed to power high volume decentralised economies, at the same time addressing several problems that are prevalent in existing projects. Harmony will be the first sharding-based PoS blockchain to launch soon.

Company Overview

Incorporated in 2018, with its core team in California, Harmony has the vision to create an open consensus for 10b people globally and create a radically fair economy. Utilising a sharding model, the project seeks to create a scalable blockchain that is energy efficient, powering decentralised economies of the future.

Here are several issues that the project seeks to resolve:

•Full scalability using sharding technology not just on network communication and transaction validation, but sharding the blockchain state as well

•True randomness for secured sharding

•Energy efficiency as most sharding-based blockchain utilise PoW

•Adaptive threshold PoS model to deter malicious stakers

•Fast propagation of blocks across shards

•Consistency of cross-shards transactions

Commercial & Technical Strategy

Harmony’s key innovations lie on both the protocol and network layers on the blockchain, which includes an in-state sharding model and peer-to-peer (P2P) networking features. Harmony will enable high transactional volume projects to build dApps and marketplaces for gaming, exchanges, AI sectors, etc., on their platform.  They  will  also  preserve  consumer’s  privacy  using  zero-knowledge proofs for data sharing.

Several core features of the platform include:

•In Sep 2018, Internal testnet results recorded speeds of 118,357 TPS on 41k machines across Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud servers.

•Efficient  broadcasting  with  Kademlia-based  routing  and  Erasure  Code  to achieve a Block-sync time of 1.36s

•Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance (FBFT) consensus protocol improved from PBFT using BLS (Boneh-Lynn-Shacham) multi-signature.

•PoS-based full sharding scheme

•Unbiased and unpredictable node selection using Distributed Randomness Generation  (DRG)  coupled  with  Verifiable  Delay  Function  (VDF)  and Adaptive-Threshold staking system

•Shard  Chain  and  Beacon  Chain  infrastructure  to  validate  and  process transactions

There’s more to this report…