Harmony (ONE) is now listed on CoinDCX.

We are pleased to announce the listing of the new cryptocurrency Harmony (ONE) in our INR market on 29th May 2020. Trading will go live on 30th May 2020,  3PM IST (11.30 AM CEST). Adding to this, the token will be available in ONE/USDT  pair also.

Harmony is a proof-of-stake blockchain that uses sharding with the aim of reaching extremely fast, large-scale settlement for millions of users. Harmony (ONE) is an open infrastructure platform for scaling consensus designed to power decentralized economies of the future. The project aims to solve the riddle of delivering both scalability and decentralization without compromising each other.

Similar to most of the platforms striving to improve on Bitcoin’s on-chain scalability, Harmony is a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus cryptocurrency network that relies on a linearly scalable BFT algorithm. Harmony calls their consensus ‘Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerant’ (FBFT) as opposed to the conventional ‘Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance’ algorithm. While PoS consensus mechanisms are widely known and understood at this point, Harmony throws a unique twist into their mechanism.

SHARDING

Harmony has proposed the deep sharding of the blockchain state:

• This approach involves sharding on both the transaction and consensus layers – Consensus and transaction sharding enable the on-chain processing of transactions to be performed in subsets of nodes in the networks, called shards, which are then consolidated into the network’s broader PoS consensus.
• Based on this, the nodes can identify other nodes which can play a role in the transaction and make transactions only with them as part of the consensus-building procedure.
• Harmony actually splits the network’s state into subsets of shards, where groups of shards only hold a portion of the state and not the entire state. This is supposed to improve the parallel processing capacity and, in turn, throughput performance of the platform.
• Finally, the elimination of the need to store the whole of the blockchain state by the nodes allows smaller capacity devices to become nodes on the network as well.

FBFT Consensus

• With the FBFT, validator nodes on Harmony do not engage in vote broadcasting. At the same time, the size of multi-signature is designed to reduce the communication management complexity. Drawing inspiration from ByzCoin’s BFT algorithm that uses Schnorr multi-signatures, Harmony uses BLS signatures, another multi-signature protocol for constant-sized signature aggregation.
• The validators are appointed based on the Proof of Stake approach i.e. their election depends on the ownership of a specific number of tokens. The larger their number, the higher the chance for the selection.
• With Harmony, the beacon chain is a specialized shard chain which accepts the validators’ stakes. It is also tasked with the random number generation for the DRG. Beacon chain uses a verifiable random function (VRF) to serve as the source of randomness in the PoS validation mechanism.

One of the key obstacles in sharded blockchains is the issues of reconciling cross-shard communication. Essentially, this encompasses the concept of how shards can send messages between each other without sacrificing the security or integrity of the validation/state of the network. Harmony uses a shard-driven model, which means that each node broadcasts messages to the network independently, and Harmony uses the Kademlia routing protocol to make communication between shards more straightforward.

Kademlia is the routing protocol used for cross-shard communication.  The consideration for using Kademlia in Harmony is based on the fact that Kademlia does not require as much overhead as standard gossip protocols, and messages only travel and explicit distance before reaching the destination node — making the communication less cumbersome.

THE ONE TOKEN

The ONE token runs the Harmony’s ecosystem by enabling participation in it and serving as the payment vehicle for various activities on the network. This is done in the following manner:

• The One token is used as a stake in the consensus model used with Harmony. The holders can earn block rewards and are incentivized to keep the system healthy.
• The tokens are used to pay for various fees, including the transaction fees, storage fees and gas fees.
• With the help of ONE tokens, the holders are granted voting rights as part of the platform’s governance system.

Harmony’s team comes from a background in major tech companies, including Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon. The project raised $18 million in a token sale to strategic investors last year, followed by an initial exchange offering on the Binance Launchpad in May, selling an additional $5 million worth of tokens. Harmony has also integrated with several hardware wallets for storage offline, such as Ledger and SafePal.

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