Harmony — Block chain Glued with Sharding Technology!

Introduction: Harmony is a safe and secure POS blockchain built on the sharding technology.Harmony can handle N number of transactions per second, even when the network gets stagnant with the highest utilization.Harmony had taken the decentralization framework to a completely new level, which becomes possible with sharding technology.Harmony was launched on 28th June,first of its kind to a sharded POS blockchain,having 600 nodes ,becoming one of the top 15 decentralized networks.Harmony is aiming at phase 2 with 400 nodes and 4 shards totaling to 1600 nodes.

What is Sharding? Sharding is the process of breaking down or partitioning a database’s computations into smaller data sets or smaller partitions called as Shards to improve speed,performance,security and scalability making it more easier to process.

Team Harmony on the go:The Harmony team is comprised of technical leaders from both business and engineering who are motivated through their passion making Harmony possible today.Every expert in the team have tremendous knowledge in academics and industry. The team has several expert groups,one of which called as ‘CryptoMafia’ who are top level executives and who have built some of the finest and greatest projects.They have proved their potential on the market and they stand as a team to provide the users a better framework.

The comparison Chart:Here is a chart that explains and compares harmony with other competitors on terms of security,scalability,performance etc.

Harmony Intergrated with Animoca: Animoca is a company that has built Cryptokitties which is based on the Ethereum network. Animoca sensed the scalability issues that might arise in the future for Cryptokitties,hence they chose to have a partnership with Harmony to coordinate and collaborate on the enhancement of a new framework for crypto collectibles!

Harmony Supports Decentralised Finance:Defi is widely used by Ethereum network for cryptocurrency trading which results in scalability and performance issues due to increasing number of transactions happening per second. This issue is being solved by Harmony.Wonder how?Through Harmony’s Sharding, it becomes possible to scale linearly through the network, ensuring that there would not be anymore bottlenecks experienced by the current infrastructure.

Unique Features:
Security and Scalability:Harmony has a feature called Ethereum ‘Beacon chain’ that uses a DRG (distributed randomness generation) process which makes Harmony more secure.Harmony’s secure Sharding technology makes it more reliable for performance.
Fast Consensus:Harmony is POS and hence it is more energy efficient,fast,easy and this makes the threshold low enough to allow small stakeholders to participate.
Fastest network Infrastructure:Harmony allows cross shard transactions which happens at the speed of 1,10, 100 per every new shard instead of 5,10,15.
Consistent Cross-Shard Transactions:All the cross shared transactions happening in Harmony are made consistent and reliable and all of them happens through direct communication.

Harmony’s Chains: Harmony has two sorts of chains: A beacon chain and multiple shard chains. The beacon chain is generated from a randomness generator. The shards are responsible to store separate blockchain states to process faster transactions. They are in turn built on a PoS system.

Sharding Process: Randomness and Sharding time Intervals
Randomness-based sharding is an unique feature of Harmony, which makes it more secure. In this process a random number is chosen and it is mutually agreed to identify the sharding responsibilities for each and every node participating in the network.
Every voting share for every token allows its staker to cast only one vote. Security is alerted by keeping malicious stakers to less than 1/3 of the total votes shared. By Harmony’s computations, this process becomes completely fault tolerant to any kind of malicious transactions.

Resharding Made Possible: After an epoch is over, the validators and stakes are expelled from the network. Those who still choose to stay back will receive new voting shares for the next epoch. The new shares which are given to other shards have the privilege to use more voting shares existing in the entire network, then some random number of all shares will be forcibly redistributed to shards that have less than the median of all voting shares. This means that Harmony’s shards are not required to reset themselves from scratch every time an epoch gets ended.Sounds great right?

The Beacon Chain:One of Harmony’s unique feature happens in beacon chain. It is one of two chain types, the other being the multiple transaction-processing shard chains which was explained in the above sections. The beacon chain itself processes transactions like the standard shard chains, but it also has two important functions which makes it significant.

1. Generating the random numbers that creates an impact and influences the validators and stakeholders.
2. Accepting the stakes of the stake holders by providing the opportunity to become a validator.

Pangaea: The successful Experimentation:Pangaea is an experimental project for millions of people to use and interact with the Harmony network.It also allows users to test the limitations of our technology and have lots of fun while earning free technical rewards. Pangaea was created purely for experimentation and as a pilot project to receive user’s responses.
In our first live experiment with the users, Within the first 24 hours, harmony witnessed the following.
38 Nodes up & running already
1283 Signups
77 Countries
356 Keys Downloaded

Use Case1:Mr.Peter is a cryto currency trader.He is a businessman and most of his assets are gained through crypto currency trading.He invests a huge amount in buying and selling cryptos. He is a serious trader and looks to expand his business through trading. However he is not able to achieve this due to the unavailability of a safe,reliable and fast channel to keep his trading secure and fast.When Peter was greatly disappointed with the performance of the existing channels, he got introduced to Harmony.He got to know about the sharding technology in Harmony and was excited to use it instantly. From then on, Peter could not switch to any other network anything other than Harmony.He was extremely happy about the security and performance of the framework and was able to do N number of transactions within seconds in a secured way.Thus Peter achieved huge profits and was able to expand his business to the next level.

Use Case2:Mr Jack is a beginner in Cryto currency trading. He was facing many hindrances to learn the existing transaction channels, since most of them were too slow and complicated.Jack met one of his seniors and got to know about Harmony.He started using it and he found harmony to be one of the easiest and fastest learning channels available for new beginners in cryto currency trading.He got greater confidence to do more transactions since he knew harmony is safe and secured.Thus Harmony serves as a fast learning channel to create more and more investors and traders in crypto currency business.

Conclusion:By using Harmony, we guarantee that users will have the benefit to use a highly secured framework.Users will be able to test Harmony’s upcoming core protocol milestones, like staking smart contracts and resharding, which will be of a different exposure altogether.Harmony would always Identify and offer rewards to users and members who help in growing the Harmony network!

For more information Please visit:
https://medium.com/harmony-one/become-a-harmony-mainnet-node-on-august-9th-b522db6a12f8
https://medium.com/harmony-one/tagged/node
https://medium.com/harmony-one/introducing-harmonys-effective-proof-of-stake-epos-2d39b4b8d58
https://medium.com/harmony-one/tagged/technology
https://twitter.com/harmonyprotocol/status/1160385546515931137
https://docs.harmony.one/pangaea/

You can also view my original blog at 'https://medium.com/@vandhana.writes/harmony-block-chain-glued-with-sharding-technology-85c92e3b5276'