Do you know Harmony (ONE)?
There is no doubt that every day the world's interest in cryptocurrencies increases as more people understand what this type of digital money is about, so any number of new projects arise, either to cover a little explored niche or to try to unseat the all-powerful Bitcoin (BTC).
Considering the above, this time it is the turn to meet an interesting project called Harmony (ONE), which is presented as an open platform of innovative and experimental technologies applied to a public blockchain.
Like most of the platforms that focus on Bitcoin blockchain scalability, Harmony bases its functions on Proof of Stack (PoS) with the support of a linearly scalable BFT algorithm which its developers consider Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerant (FBFT) as opposed to the conventional practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant algorithm, which makes it faster.
Harmony uses so-called state fragmentation to support the network to scale at the protocol layer by eliminating protocol and transaction validation, a little explored territory among the diversity of projects.
It is necessary to highlight that state fragmentation is considered a highly sophisticated field that is still experimental when applied to a distributed network such as a public blockchain, in fact other projects that also make use of this technology opted not to apply it in the early stages of development largely because of its underdevelopment.
Essentially, network and transaction shards allow online processing of transactions to be performed on subsets of nodes in networks, called shards, which are then consolidated into the larger PoS consensus of the network. The processing is done in parallel, which allows the network TPS to overcome the limited nature of proof-of-work networks. However, in such a system without state fragmentation, all nodes in the network maintain the full state of the blockchain to ensure secure and authentic validation of transactions.
Harmony divides the network state into subsets of fragments, where groups of fragments only contain part of the state and not the entire state, achieving this by using a 'Beacon Chain', in addition to using a verifiable random function (VRF), which functions as a source of randomness in the PoS validation mechanism.
One of the key hurdles in fragmented blockchains is the reconciliation of communication between fragments. Essentially, this encompasses the concept of how shards can send messages to each other without sacrificing security or validation/network state integrity. Harmony uses a shard-controlled model, meaning that each node transmits messages to the network independently, and Harmony uses the Kademlia routing protocol to make communication between shards simpler.
It is also important to note that Harmony uses an account-based transaction model like Ethereum, rather than the UTXO design employed by Bitcoin. Each shard chain has its own account status, making the overall design less complex than if a UTXO system were implemented.
Following the recent launch of Cosmos and the imminent unveiling of Cardano, competition for scalable blockchain networks is increasing. Add in the ongoing transition from Ethereum to Serenity, and it appears that PoS, sharding and new development protocols are trending popular among development teams for on-chain scaling.
However, concerns about long-term security and decentralization of PoS persist, and it is unclear how these networks will overcome some of the established issues with respect to smart contracts (i.e., the Oracle problem) and blockchains. Quite simply, scalability is not the limiting feature that prevents the mainstream from using blockchains. Rather, it's that centralized systems work better at scale, have better UX / UI and are more familiar to the mainstream.
Clearly Harmony is vying for position in the realm of smart contract development platforms such as Cosmo, Cardano or Zilliqa, however as attractive as these types of projects seem they remain unpopular with the cryptocurrency user community. As always it is important to consider that this publication does not represent any kind of advice or recommendation about Harmony, the purpose is to provide information to users for their own purposes.
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