Utopia: The State of Harmony

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“Yeah!!” Jack’s shout thunders through his apartment. He has just passed the third stage of “Xyra” a blockchain based game that is being simultaneously played by more than half of the Earth’s population. Passing the third stage means he has earned 50 “Xyrions”, the game’s currency worth more than the dollar. Now he can boast to his numerous friends around the world who couldn’t even get past the first stage. He can’t help but wonder how fast the days of CryptoKitties have faded behind him, around the corner and into the abyss of archaic blockchain technology. He can still vividly remember the excitement he felt at the prospect of a game based on the blockchain and even more so, the disappointment he felt when the blockchain then could not handle the large influx of zealous players because it could not just scale. How happy he now feels!

His thoughts are however interrupted by the silent but persistent chiming of his wrist watch. Why? He had been up for more than 12 hours in his gaming room and it was already past midnight. The door to his bedroom which is IoT enabled with the same blockchain powering “Xyra” had not sensed him pass through and so effortlessly communicated with his wrist watch which is needless to say, also IoT enabled reminding him it is time for bed. Jack smiles at his wrist watch. “Yeah, bed time” he notes and leaves for bed.

Back in bed, his thoughts stray back to Harmony, the innovative blokchchain solution that has so entirely changed his life and that of his era by providing a super secure, low cost and efficient blockchain that now powers most of the digital processes of a digital world, from payments and banking to transport and even entertainment. Lost in his euphoric thoughts about the Utopic life of the average human brought about by the sheer innovative power of Harmony; his eyes close in harmony on the heels of his thoughts about Harmony.

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The Blockchain: Its Journey Through Failure in Search Perfection

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2008 marked the slow beginning to a revolution and perhaps what can be counted as one of the foremost innovations of the 21st Century –the Blockchain. With its promise of decentralization, trustless security in the transfer of value without centralized intermediaries and the promise of use cases in virtually all facets of human life, one thought this disruptive and innovative technology was the new gold and held the key to the future of a much more advanced digital revolution.

The truth is, the idea of the blockchain is unimaginably brilliant and indeed holds the key to a much more advanced digital future of efficient decentralized applications with use cases across various industries like gaming, IoT, decentralized exchanges, banking etc; trustless security in the transfer of value and even much more secure information management.

However, the pioneer blockchains as obtainable in Bitcoin, Ethereum and even newer blockchain solutions which profess to solve the problems of the first two have failed in the attempt to build a blockchain of the future which will unleash the true potential of decentralized technology.

One of the hallmarks of the blockchain of the future is the ability to scale, that is, the ability to cater for as many users that may care to leverage its platform. Bitcoin and Ethereum fail woefully at being scalable. Bitcoin’s transaction capability of only 7 Transactions Per Second (TPS) and Ethereum’s wholly unhelpful improvement to 15 TPS constituted a very serious obstacle to the probability of these two blockchains being the base for a decentralized economy which will no doubt involve thousands (if not millions) of transactions per second from users all over the world. Perhaps Ethereum’s failure at being scalable can never be more evident than with the CryptoKitties disaster of 2017.

Since Bitcoin and Ethereum, various blockchains such as Zilliqa have by their very infrastructure developed what they hoped to be solutions to the scalability problem of the blockchain. However, all fell pathetically short of the ideal blockchain that will power the trustless decentralized economies of our digital future.

More recently, a new blockchain, Zilliqa, developed a amazingly ingenious solution to the scalability problem of contemporary blockchains known as sharding. However, yet again, it failed to provide the ideal blockchain of the future because such a blockchain need not only be scalable, it must be possess trustless security and be inherently decentralized. Zilliqa failed at the last two even with its sharded blockchain.

While all predecessors have failed to provide the world with that low-latency, provably secure and low fee blockchain, a new project powered by brilliant minds from Silicon Valley have finally come through with a solution. Not surprisingly, it is called HARMONY. It brings melodious harmony into the chaos of the scramble for the ideal blockchain.

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Harmony: The Promise of Decentralization at Scale Delivered.

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Harmony is a provably fast and secure blockchain which implements revolutionary innovations that finally deliver the first ever high transaction throughput, low latency, provably secure and low fee platform that is poised to power the decentralized economies which have for too long remained a coveted future to be looked forward to. Development from before the dawn the history has always been about developing available means into veritable tools for advancement of humanity. We fly today because someone set out with the conviction that driving was not just enough and thus developed the first plane, today the technology has so developed that supersonic flights are possible.

Similarly, Harmony has achieved the feat of the ideal blockchain that can power the trustless economies of the future by developing on an innovative yet inefficient available means –Sharding. Harmony combines and consolidates on the strengths of existing solutions, the scalability of Zilliqa and the security of Proof-of-Work consensus models.

Sharding: The Security Deficient Scalability Solution

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Imagine there is a task to be performed by 10 teachers to confirm that an essay is written correctly, instead of giving each the whole task to complete individually, you can easily divide this up into 10 parts (shards) and give each a smaller portion. After that, the teachers can verify one part each, side-by-side. This way a task can completed faster and another started leading to more completed tasks in a limited time frame leading to exponential time saving. Sharding is based on the same technique. It is a type of database partitioning that separates large databases into smaller, faster and more easily managed parts called data shards. An example would be placing the information of various customers on different servers based on such customer’s geographic location.

Thus, applied to the blockchain, sharding proposes to vastly improve on the scalability of blockchains due to the fact that each node only has to carry a portion of the data in order to complete transactions as opposed to traditional blockchains which require all nodes to carry all data on the blockchain.

However, while sharding promises to drastically increase the number of transactions and so ensure scalability, the largest concern which has been a hindrance to its real world blockchain application is its security concerns.

Delton Rhodes of CoinCentral in thisarticle said;

Sharding is Promising for both the technical advancement of the blockchain as well as the adoption of cryptocurrencies. In the present, complex issues like inter-shard communication and overall security of the sharded blockchain appear difficult to solve”

Yes, complex issues like inter-shard communication and the overall security of the sharded blockchain appeared difficult to solve but not any longer. Harmony, through the instrumentality of its brilliant team from the super tech giants have finally brought security and decentralization to the sharded blockchain.

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Enter Harmony’s Sharding: Scalable, Secure and Decentralized Sharding Achieved

Improvement is the only way forward; the only way to a brighter future for technology as a whole. We would still be living in caves if no one cared on improving on anything. Harmony cares about improving the state and applicability of blockchain technology so it has improved on the sharding technique which is the only method that solves the scalability problem of the blockchain.

Harmony utilizes deep sharding which not only shards network communication and transaction validation, but it shards all the way to the blockchain networking layer which is exponentially faster than the traditional way of reaching consensus on the blockchain. Moreover, Harmony’s sharding process is highly and provably secure as a result of its Distributed Randomness Generation process which is unpredictable, verifiable and scalable.

To add to its attraction as a fully scalable sharding based blockchain, it utilizes Proof-of-Stake instead of a Proof-of-Work Consensus model and so it is very energy efficient and also allows for fast reaching of consensus among validator nodes. Harmony is also able to propagate blocks quickly within shards by using an Adaptive information dispersal algorithm.

Yet still, Harmony utilizes Kademlia routing to achieve cross shard transactions that which enable shards to communicate directly with each other while ensuring the consistency of cross shard communications.

The very nature of the Harmony blockchain architecture has set it out as the blockchain which finally fully settles the tripartite requirement of a blockchain that can power our decentralized economies of the future viz, Security, scalability and decentralization.

As shown below when compared to other blockchains utilizing Sharding techniques, Harmony stands excellently stands out. Its Testnet transaction per second ability of 118,000 transactions per second is even twice that of the much talked about Visa!

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Harmony therefore possesses several characteristics that set it out and apart from other blockchains and even the ones utilizing the sharding technique. When leveraged a s a base infrastructure, Harmony offers;

1. Eliminating Sharding’s Security Concerns with Proof-of-Stake.

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Current Sharding based blockchains like Zilliqa still utilize Proof-of-Work. A shard-based blockchain utilizing Proof-of-Work is a deadly combination in terms of security as an attacker can concentrate their voting power on a single shard and take over control of that shard.

The best way to prevent this attack is to make sure that an attacker is any able to focus their hash-power unto a single shard. Proof-of-Stake allows Harmony to easily and effectively through the use of random sampling, take away an attacker’s ability to focus their hash power on a single shard. This eliminates the 1% attack vulnerability. Moreover, in Harmony, to assign a group of consensus validators to a shard, nodes are randomly assigned to a shard as shown below:

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This whole mechanism therefore ensures that attackers cannot choose a shard they want to work on and they can never know the shard they’ll work on ahead of time. Security problem solved.

2. Fast and Scalable with Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance Consensus Protocol (FBFT)

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The Consensus protocol of any blockchain is highly important and determines how fast and quickly consensus in reached on blocks. A low performing consensus protocol will lead to lags in transactions and so hinder a blockchain’s ability to be fast and scalable as delay is equal to ‘not scalable’. However, Harmony’s Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus protocol is super fast and linearly scalable. As an improvement to Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance in terms of message broadcasting, Harmony’s FBFT is super fast and furnishes the basis of a scalable blockcahain. FBFT uses multi-signatures to make the validation faster and the process of reaching consensus better, faster and more efficient.

3. Better and More Consistent Cross Shard Communication.

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When transactions are divided across shards as in a Sharded blockchain, efficient communication between these shards becomes of the essence. For example, consider a sharded protocol network on which a transaction is trying to book a hotel room but Stadium reservations are booked on a different shard. What if the user ends up in a situation where a stadium seat is booked and not a hotel room? Harmony supports cross-shard transactions with shards directly communicating with each other and able to perform cross-shard operations synchronously.

Harmony supports cross-shard communication with shards communication directly to each other using Kandemlia routing. When a message from shard A needs to be sent to shard B, the nodes in shard A will look at the routing table and send the message to the nodes which are closest which approach allows a message to travels faster and only across a few nodes before reaching its destination shard.

4. Highly Energy Efficient

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The use of Proof-of-Work consensus protocols consume a lot of power which explains why stakeholders from countries like China control the most stakes in proof-of-work based blockchains like Bitcoin. Similarly, even sharded blockchains based on proof-of-work to select validators also experience the same problem of the need for excess energy which might not always be readily available. The Harmony blockchain on the other hand is based on PoS and thus very energy efficient.

5. Low Transaction Costs.

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High transaction costs always feature prominently among the factors that hinder the widespread application of the blockchain. This problem is closely related to scalability as when the network gets clogged, transaction costs rise exponentially. This was what Ethereum experienced with CryptoKitties.

However, even Sharded blockchains are not saved from this plague. In Zilliqa for instance, because each node has to hold the entire blockchain state to be ableto process transactions, when the blocksize grows, it becomes expensive and difficult to maintain the full ledger thereby increasing transaction costs.

However, state sharding as implemented by Harmony where each shard has to only hold a subset of the blockchain state is a better option as it minimizes the resources used to process transactions and ensures ultra low transaction costs in the process.

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Consensus for 10 Billion People: The Sheer Power of a Harmony Based Project.

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There are about an estimated 7.2 billion people on the planet Earth. What if all these people could reach consensus at the same time? They can! With Harmony, They will! The Harmony blockchain is that very powerful and delivers scalability that will even transcend the entire population of the Earth while being securely decentralized thanks to its innovative sharding technique. This powerful combo of a consensus platform is what a failed project like Cryptokitties all but needed.

Harmony’s claim to a consensus platform for 10 billion people is priceless for any project or even any institution. Harmony’s revolutionary high through-put, low latency and low fees consensus platform provides;

1.1 Open Infrastructure for the World’s Data

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Data based projects or institutions like healthcare centers and institutions have a lot to gain from the use of decentralized technology to store their data. From making sure that such data is highly secure to preventing loss that is all but common with centralized data storage solutions, the ability to securely store data with decentralized technology is a no brainer. Harmony provides such an irresistible platform for such data based institutions. Its open infrastructure is capable of securely storing data in a decentralized manner and the fact that Harmony comes loaded with minimal transaction fees all but adds to its attractiveness as a base infrastructure for these data based projects. Harmony will not only securely store data for these projects but its scalability will allow it take as much data as any institution cares to feed it. It is an open consensus for 10 billion people after all.

1.2 A Global Scale Market Platform

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Digital financial transactions have all but doubled in the last few years. With the advent of Cryptocurrencies, a new market platform also emerged, the Cryptocurrency exchanges and Decentralized Finance (DeFi). These exchanges however have their fair share of undesirable characteristics. The famous Mt. Gox hack always comes to mind. Furthermore, most of these exchanges are not scalable and have outrageously high transaction fees. Once again, Harmony comes to the rescue here. A market platform like a Cryptocurrency Exchange by utilizing Harmony as its base infrastructure will forever put to rest scalability and security concerns. On the other hand, while Decentralized Finance is being threatened by Ethereum’s lack of scalability, Harmony with its ability to support a global scale market platform can also play a big role to salvage the situation for a Decentralized Finance project which cares to leverage the harmony blockchain.

1.3 Enabling Decentralized and Trustless Economies

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For avid gamers like me, since I got to know about the blockchain and its potential, I had always imagined a dencentralized virtual reality game in which millions of gamers will compete in a radically fair and trustless economy and perhaps even earn rewards with real world value. It seems Harmony has brought me a step closer to my dream. A decentralized gaming project which will leverage the Harmony blockchain will be scalable therefore catering for millions of users.

A decentralized and trustless banking economy is also a dividend for any banking project that will leverage Harmony’s Open Consensus network.

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It is Not Bluff, Pangaea is Proving It.

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The word Pangaea is derived from Ancient Greek meaning ‘whole’ or “entire”. First proposed by Alfred Wagener, Pangaea is a supercontinent that was once a contiguous landmass consisting of all the continents. If the earth as it is isn’t yet fully explored, Pangaea imaginably was a thoroughly wide expanse of a continent. Harmony is building a new Pangaea for its users, a limitless environment where they can interact with the Harmony network and test its limits –if there’s any.

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Harmony’s Pangaea is staking competition that has been organized in collaboration with Binance allowing everyone to interact with the Harmony network, testing its limits and capabilities. Pangaea is organized in three phases with phase one allowing as many users as possible to set up a node and join the network. Phase two will allow people to claim rewards earned in phase 1 and compete in key metrics such as latency and uptime while Phase 3 consists of testing the limits and security of the network by incentivizing evil behaviour such as organizing malicious attacks.

Within 24 hours of going active, Pangaea already had about 138 nodes up and running, 1283 signups and 356 downloaded keys all from 77 different countries. If these could be achieved within 24 hours, days and months will show the Harmony’s prowess through the Pangaea experimental program.

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Applications and Use Cases

1. Application - Blockchain Gaming

Use Case -Xyra

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Xyra is a blockchain based game that leverages the Harmony Network. Xyra has more than 3 billion daily users. However, with Harmony’s ability to scale even as the network gets heavily utilized, Xyra has been granted the unique opportunity to welcome as many users as possible in contrast with what is obtainable in other blockchain networks where a few thousand interests in a game in terms of players grounds the whole blockchain upon whose infrastructure it is built and brings it down to its knees. Not for Xyra though, Harmony keeps it ever ready to welcome new players in a provably fair economy. Scalability is guaranteed.

2. Application- Travel

Use Case - AirSafe

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It is 2059. AirSafe is one of the busiest airlines in the world but the most efficient. But there is something more peculiar about AirSafe which makes it stand out. Airsafe’s information Technology base is built on the Harmony network. It has more than 50 million daily users who make more than 1 billion transactions everyday in terms of flight bookings and reservations. With Harmony’s scalable architecture, Airsafe has never seen itself lagging behind and unable to cope with the sheer volume of transactions it has to process daily. Harmony’s transaction per second capability which has since hit the 10billion per second mark is also an added advantage not obtainable elsewhere. The fact that user data is highly secure is the icing on the cake. In 2059, there is only one way to travel, AirSafe.

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The Team.

I could barely restrain myself from talking about the brilliant team behind Harmony throughout my article. The team consists of industry giants and specialists. 7 out of 12 have worked with all the big tech companies including Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Google. They call themselves ‘ambitiously idealistic’ and truly so they are. Harmony makes that evident.

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Harmony's Tokenomy

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Harmony One is a BEP2 token built on Binance Chain while in Testnet phase and got famous thanks to their Initial Exchange Offering (IEO) conducted on Binance in May 2019.

Harmony One native token align incentives of different stakeholders, developers, and businesses while allowing them to build open marketplaces of fungible and non-fungible tokens and assets. With a total token supply of 12,600,000,000 ONE, the distribution is planned in the following manner: 22.4% went to the seed sale tokens, 12.5% to the launchpad sale, 16.9% is going to the team, 26.4% for the protocol development and 21.8% into the ecosystem. It is important to note that the team’s tokens are locked till 2020.

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The Partners

Harmony is a very interesting project. No wonder it has received lot of interest from various brands who wish to partner with them.

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Conclusion – The Future is Here

A revolution was begun with the blockchain. But that revolution was crude, inept and inefficient. It needed an evolution. Harmony represents a product of that evolution from the crude inefficient blockchains to a linearly scalable, high through-put, decentralized blockchain ready for the future of decentralized ecosystems. The future is here. The evolution is complete.

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