What Is Harmony?
Harmony is a fast, secure blockchain designed for decentralized applications. Its production mainnet supports four shards of 1,000 nodes, producing blocks in 2 seconds.
Background
Stephen Tse founded Harmony One in 2019.
How It Works
Harmony’s mission is to build an open network of nodes operated and governed by a large community known as Pangaea. The sharding process, which works not only on network communication and transaction validation but also on the blockchain state, is secure against shard attacks. With this process, Harmony becomes fully scalable in every aspect of the blockchain: network, storage, and transaction processing.
Harmony’s consensus algorithm is called Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance (FBFT), confirming blocks within 2 seconds. Harmony uses a Proof-of-Stake mechanism called Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS) to elect validators, which prevents stake centralization and is energy efficient. Harmony’s network layer is based on the industry-leading p2p protocol named libp2p, which is used for network message broadcasting and decentralized state synchronization. Additionally, Harmony supports cross-shard transactions to achieve the composability of assets between shards.
Key Takeaways
- Harmony is a secure, fast blockchain designed for decentralized applications, capable of producing blocks in 2 seconds.
- Founded by Stephen Tse in 2019, Harmony aims to build an open network of nodes operated and governed by a large community.
- Harmony employs a secure sharding process against shard attacks, making the blockchain scalable in every aspect: network, storage, and transaction processing.
- Harmony’s consensus algorithm, Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance (FBFT), confirms blocks within 2 seconds. It uses a Proof-of-Stake mechanism called Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS) to elect validators, which prevents stake centralization and is energy efficient.
- Harmony supports cross-shard transactions, allowing for the composability of assets between shards. The network layer is based on the industry-leading p2p protocol, libp2p.
