Harmony is succeding where ETH failed

On first read the topic of my post may seem a tall claim ....
When you look at the evidence you might as well agree.
Not so long ago a blockchain based game called Cryptokitties was launched by a company called Animoca.

At the time of launch Ethereum had estabished itself as the blockchain platform of choice for blockchain based businesses and projects.

It was the high season for the altcoins and almost all projects that could afford the cost and had the resources would leverage the Ethereum blockchain to launch their token and run their blockchain project.

It was all going all quite well till the time Cryptokitties was launched.

Cryptokitties is a game which involves the gameplay to send out a number of transactions over the Ethereum blockchain.

As the game became popular the number of players increased and so did the
transactions sent out to the ethereum blockchain.
This eventually resulted in so many transactions being sent by the cryptokitties
users to the Ethereum blckchain that the entire network became very slow.
Even normal transactions on the Ethereum blockchain began to take anything from
a couple of hours to a few days.

Can a business wait so long for a transaction to go through?
This would be far from the ideal and not accepted as it would seriously risk service level agreement(SLA) violations of businesses.

This delay pointed out towards a bottle net in the system. It exposed the weakness of the system and pointed out at lack of scalability of the Ethereum blockchain.

Another thing that blockchains lack is the lack of decentralization.

With this learning in place a new blockchain environment called Harmony was
born and it has clearly demonstrated how a highly decentralized, linerly scalable and provably fair blockchain can be built.

Harmony is based on the Sharding principle. This means that as compared to the large computing nodes that process the transactions a new technique is used.
Here the database from the computational point of view is broken down into smaller pieces called Shards.
The tasks of processing these smaller database chunks is passed on to a network of decentralized nodes.

This is based on the industry trusted Zilliqa network. As per the academic research it may be pointed out that these systems can be compromised if bad actors corrupt these individual shards.
Thus the team and developers behind the Harmony network have come up a unique and improved adaptive sharding technique of their own.

Harmony's improved sharding takes birth

Harmony's sharding infrastructure is based on a POS blockchain.
It has two kinds of chains which are

The Beacon chain which is based on a randomness generator.

The beacon chain acts as a identity register.

The other kind of chains are the multiple shard chains

They not only process the transactions but also store the status of the network.

The Harmony blockchain uses a randomness based sharding scheme here a mutually agreed upon random number which is unpredictable, unbiasable, verifiable and scalable is the foundation of the sharding methodology used.

This random number is used to determine the responsibility of each node.
This arrangement has focus on

• Computing
• Proving
• Sharing and Securing the information related to the randomness of the numbers
  for assignment of the nodes.

Harmony is based on proof of stake sharding

Here the Harmony one token held gives the holder one voting share. This enables
the staker to cast a post.
At all times security is an important concern and so it is ensured that at all times less than 1/3rd of the voting shares in any particular shard are malicious.
Harmony has developed its own adaptive threshold system wherein less than 1/4th
of the system is malicious.
This ensures a secure sharding environment.
In the Harmony blockchain a EPOS system is used. Here the highest ranked
validators are elected based on the stakes of the committee.
In a given time frame Which is approx ~ 1 day, the top 1600 stakers will obtain the 1600 seats this is based on 4 shards and 400 seats that shows that the 1600 number is arrived at by
4 Shards X 400 seats.
Such top stakers become the validators across the shards.
Once the Epoch changes a new rank of stakes would be used to determine the validators for the next epch.

This is indeed a revolutionary approach and has big names in the cryptoworld like
Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum), Zaki Manian (Tendermint), Gawin Wood (Parity Technologies), Alex Skidanov (Near Protocol)
have given their feedback publically.
https://twitter.com/harmonyprotocol/status/1160065335011106816

Harmonys resharding approach

When one epoch ends the validators who remove their stake would be removed
from the network and those who continue to stay would receive new voting shares.

Special energy efficient method of Harmony to distribute shares

The new voting shares are randomly assigned to those stakers who hold voting shares that are higher in number to the median value of shares held in the network.
For the other set of stakers which have lower number of voting shares, a fixed number of shares are assigned.
This methods of distribution uses a technique where the shards of the Harmony network do not have to reset themselves from scratch at the end of each network.

This is another of Harmony's way of reducing the computation needs of the network in proportion to the number of network users who keep their stake in the network for the next round of the consensus.
Another feature built into the Harmony network is that those who hold higher stake in the network and keep their stake get to increase their stake with the passage of epochs.

How would Harmony make it work so smoothly?

The entire operations of the Harmony blockchain are the work of it working as an efficient POS blockchain.
The efficiency of the system is built into due to the way the two kind of chains that work so well.
The Beacon chain that process transactions like shard chains and it addition it

• Generates random numbers that help in deciding which validators are assigned to which shards.
• It accepts the stakes of the stakers who are applying to to become the validators.
  The validators to the beacon chains are determined in a similar way.
  In such a mechanism the malicious actors would only succeed if they corrupt both the beacon and shard chain
  producing new fake blocks making the validators feel that these are genuine blocks.
  This is relatively more difficult.

The becan chain used as a relay for shards and it decreases the computational
burden that would be present if each shard had to communicate to all other shards independently.

Harmony uses state sharding

In harmony the account state of each chain is maintained by the shard chain itself.
A user with multiple balances can have these balances contribute as different voting shares to different shards.

These balances can move across shards when the user wants them to using cross-sharding transactions.
In harmony the smart contracts can be held within the shards in which they were created.
However if there is a use case that requires that the influence be maintained across multiple shards then for this purpose Harmony has built a provision of a decentralized application developer which can create the same smart contract on different shards and divert the appropriate amount of traffic to each one of them as needed.

In such a case even though the instances do not share the same state but can communicate with each other across shards.

Pangea the Experiment that is already a success

Pangea is a way for people at large to interact with the Harmony blockchain.
It is all about interactions and earning rewards.
The Pangea emerged as a first live experiment that within the first 24 hours itself it got tremendous success which is reflected in the numbers below
initiative had the following:

• 138 Nodes up & running already
• 1283 Signups
• 77 Countries
• 356 Keys Downloaded

Source: https://twitter.com/harmonyprotocol/status/1160385546515931137

The idea behind Pangea

Pangea was setup to test the Harmony's protocol and the milestones and updates

such as staking smart contracts and resharding and setting up on boarding a large number of nodes.
More details about how to join the experiment can be found here
https://docs.harmony.one/pangaea/

Harmony the promise of future

Harmony would be a great opportunity for decentralized financial transactions (DeFi) to migrate from the current Ethereum blockchain to the Harmony blockchain as it provides a more cost effective, linearly scalable and decentralized ecosystem to conduct the decentralized transactions.
This is in light of the fact the DeFi which are the decentralized financial transactions originated due to the borrowing and lending of crypto currencies need a lot of transactions to be generated.

Harmony current Network state

Harmony has already launched its main net on 28th June 19 and its network of nodes is only expanding as can be seen in the infographic below

Not only that Harmony is already a leading player placed withing the top 15 decentralized networks.
Not only that It is designed to be way ahead of its peers withing the space that it operates in

Over all impressions of Harmony goals

Harmony is setting up a robust yet scalable blockchain environment for businesses to do their business.
It is gearing up to service a 10 billion people economy that is our world and in the process would also open its gates to the developers by way of launching a testnet to build dapps over the Harmony network

Additional Resources:

• Harmony Website
• Harmony OnePager
• Harmony WhitePaper
• Harmony Medium Blog
• Harmony Telegram Group
• Harmony Twitter
• Harmony LinkedIn
• Harmony Instagram

[1] https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/05/stake/
[2] https://searchoracle.techtarget.com/definition/sharding