Harmony Blockchain: Solving Scalability Problem Without Compromising Decentralization

Introduction

The most admired feature of blockchain technology is attention that it is receiving from the academia and industry players at the moment. While this new technology is not without its challenges, it is often well quantified. Every blockchain is built to provide solutions to existing problems, for instance, the challenges that Bitcoin blockchain could not solve, Ethereum arrived with unique protocol and smart contracts capability, then it became a revolutionary DLT (Distributed Ledger System) allowing the creation of unlimited smart contracts.

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Shortly after decentralization, users began to crave for privacy which led to the creation of blockchains like Beam, using a new protocol called Mimblewinble.

The initial use case of blockchain was about digital information being stored permanently in a public database. Aside from transparency and privacy, it was discovered that any blockchain that is not decentralized enough would be attacked by dishonest miners or stakeholders, this is called a 51% attack. There were lots of solutions proposed and implemented, examples are BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerance), PoS (Proof of Stake), DPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake) and so on.

Era Low Scalability Blockchain

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Despite many progress made in the blockchain industry, the main reason why existing solutions will not encourage massive adoption is poor performance, and the inability to strike balance between transaction speed and decentralization. A parent wants to send money to his children in the college via blockchain, he needs assurance that the money will be received instantly. When a million users interact with the blockchain, it performance should not be affected.

How Harmony Overcame Blockchain Bloat.

Bloat

Distributed ledgers do not often deliver on their promises because of long-term challenges. Bloat can be defined as technical problems of permanently storing trillions of data on a blockchain. Harmony immutably records an ecosystems data, this will pile up to become gargantuan sizes over several years.

It is like eating without shitting:)

The developers looked into the future and suspected that data overload is a timed bomb that will eventually explode when blockchain interaction is massively increased. This is a threat to sustainability, reliability, and performance. However, this is a scenario that could harm cryptocurrency valuation and hinder massive adoption.

Harmony's Solution

In the simplest form, sharding is about splitting the database into smaller chunks and having it stored de-centrally in several nodes across the world. This ensures that data overload never occurs on Harmony blockchain. The overall transaction computational levels and performance are greatly improved.

Innovative Resharding Mechanism

Sharding

Using Cuckoo rule-based re-sharding approach, the network is fully protected from the action of malicious attackers. Any validator that withdraws its stake at the end of an epoch would get new voting shares, it will be randomly assigned to the shards who have more than average of total voting shares. Then a fixed number of voting shares from all shards will be redistributed randomly to the other half of the shards with below-average voting shares. Based on slowly adaptive attack technique, the re-sharding method guarantees security on the Harmony blockchain.

Security-conscious Incentive Model

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It is important to reward validators for ensuring the safety of the network, regardless of the consensus algorithm. Harmony rewards all validators who signs the block in proportion to the amount of Harmony coins that they stake.

As expected, the human factors will spring up, and someone will want to game the system. Therefore, stake slashing is used to discourage dishonest stakeholders. In a scenario that a validator signed a dishonest block, all of their stakes under the same shard will be slashed. Also, if a validator can prove that another validator is dishonest, all slash stakes will be rewarded to the prover.

All these are measures put in place to improve security on harmony blockchain.

Building Enterprise Infrastructure On Harmony

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In reality, public blockchains like Ethereum cannot meet core needs and requirement of enterprises, as they allow anyone to read and write in a blockchain that requires no permission. While this is true, Harmony guarantees a high level of privacy, this way, only trusted users will have access.

Enterprise cannot afford to open up their data to competitors.

Furthermore, Harmony rank high among scalable blockchains, with unprecedented transaction speed, and an ever-increasing number of nodes to keep its network secured, and more transparent. The benefit of using Harmony for P2P (peer-to-peer) e-commerce deployments is massive.

Potential Use Cases

Industries that require high transaction volume, enormous data storage, transaction speed, and throughput can deploy Harmony blockchain solution to scale up.

Use Case In Food Supply Chain

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There is a lack of transparency regarding the food supply chain and records. Information such as batch number, expiry date, production date, and movement paths are predominantly stored on paper. This is more expensive to store and difficult to assess.

With Harmony, this information and many more can be recorded and timestamped on the blockchain, it will be easier to verify the information digitally. Considering the sharding mechanism of this project, the network will not bloat even when it is used by the largest food supply chain in the world.

To Wrap It Up

Harmony is an all-purpose blockchain for smart contract creation, it is fast, scalable and secured. Its distribution randomness generation protocol provides tight security layer for the network. The network performance is optimized using Kademlia routing, while fBFT (fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus allow limitless scalability.

Here is a value-driven blockchain that will power the next generation of fungible and nonfungible assets on the internet.

For More Information

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