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…