Not long ago in 2017, over many bottles of wine, a bunch of smart and hardworking guys who have left their jobs at Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon got together and decided to come up with a startup called Harmony One. Stephen Tse, Nicolas Burtey, Alok Kothari and Rongjian Lan are no strangers in the blockchain industry. However, Harmony One has been flying under the radar until last week when they made their appearance in the New York Blockchain Week. Harmony One was also present during the Consensus 2019, which is one of the biggest annual blockchain events.
Harmony One has been seed funded since the beginning of the project. A healthy amount of US$18 million was raised and the funds have been used to develop and market their project over the last year. Harmony One aims to be the leader of the sharding technology and build a high-throughput, low-latency and low-fee consensus platform to cater to 10 billion people. This is yet another ambitious project in the blockchain industry. With the background and experience of the team members, especially Stephen Tse, who started coding at the age of 12 years old, it is certain that they know what they are trying to achieve. This is not just another blockchain project, but a project that will give a huge impact on a global scale.
Blockchain Scalability
Bitcoin is the first ever public blockchain. It was invented in 2009 to be a decentralized way of making payments that solves the double spending problem. However, it was only able to do 7-10 transactions per second (TPS). Ethereum came out a few years later with a smart contract feature and was able to handle only around 30 TPS. With over 7 billion people living on this planet, decentralization would not be a good solution unless the scalability issue is solved.
Sharding
In the blockchain industry, the word “sharding” has been heard a lot. Sharding means partitioning the huge database into smaller database that is easier and faster to manage. This technique has been used in centralized systems for many years and has recently been implemented in decentralized platforms.
Zilliqa, Quarkchain and Harmony One are the known players of sharding technology in the blockchain industry. Zilliqa’s sharding method has been proven to be able to handle over 2,800 TPS and Quarkchain has achieved 55,000 TPS on their testnet. Harmony One has recently achieved 118,000 TPS on their Testnet 3.0 with the mainnet due to be live in June 2019. What makes Harmony One different?
While several platforms are using the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), Harmony’s consensus protocol is a slight modification of PBFT which is the Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance (FBFT). In FBFT, instead of getting the validators to broadcast the votes, the leader collects the validators’ votes by running a multi-signature signing process before broadcasting it. This concept greatly reduces the communication complexity between leaders and validators.
On top of that, Harmony’s sharding technique, the Deep Sharding plays a very important role in the platform scalability. In Deep Sharding, both the transactions and the blockchain state are being sharded. This method, which is one step further than Zilliqa’s, creates a huge amount of parallel processing transactions that will generate a very high throughput.
By achieving 118,000 TPS on the testnet, Harmony One can be used to power decentralized economies of the future. All sort of decentralized applications can be built on the platform. For a test, check out these apps:
Lottery: https://lottery.harmony.one
Puzzle: https://puzzle.harmony.one
Take note that these apps are on the testnet and so do the reward tokens. The puzzle is quite an interesting game which I have completed and I hope that you try it out. When you are done, you can click at “View Transactions” and you can see how all the moves that you made are recorded on the blockchain. Enjoy!
For more details about Harmony One, check out these channels:
Website: https://harmony.one/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/harmonyprotocol
Telegram: https://t.me/harmony_one
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/harmonyoneprotocol/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harmonyoneprotocol/
Author: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1774179