Why investing in Harmony is a better investment than Hodling any other crypto?

What is Harmony?

When you are looking at Harmony you are actually looking at a blockchain that is fully scalable.
This means that as the network load increases the harmony blockchain network can scale up its transaction processing functionality to meet the needs of the project that is being run on the Harmony network.

In this post further down you would discover why this is no mean feat and how Harmony does it differently and in a better and efficient way.
The harmony network is emerging as a highly energy efficient POS blockchain based upon sharding.
This makes it a blockchain capable of linear scaling and able to easily manage heavy transaction loads without bottlenecks and difficulty.

Why do we need Harmony? Are there not so many blockchains already?

A good question I must say
For a business to move into the crypto space it has to either built its own blockchain or use a blockchain that lets you build a project over its network.
Having said that, the top blockchain that emerges in terms of coinmarketcap rankings is ethereum.
Ethereum is a wonderful blockchain project and a lot of blockchain projects have built their solutions over the Ethereum network.
A case in point is a crypto collectable game called Cryptokitties.
A great game with a lot of fan following. This was developed by a company called Animoca.
However as the game became popular the number of transactions that it sent out to the blockchain were simply to many which overwhelmed the underlying Ethereum blockchain resulting in its slowing down the entire blockchain and delaying the transactions for the entire network.
Now the Cryptokitties was an emerging as a popular blockchain at that point of time and as compared to the entire world only a fraction of the entire world population was playing it.
This clearly demonstrated the need for a better blockchain solution that is scalable, cost effective and decentralized.
So this is when the Harmony blockchain emerged to the scene and Animoca has partnered with Harmony for its popular and transaction intensive project called cryptokitties.

Animoca & Harmony Partnership

How Harmony is different and can it succeed where the number two blockchain Ethereum failed?

Harmony is providing a very unique approach to breakdown the blockchain data load. A fine example of which has already been shown by the launch of its mainnet on June 28th 2019.
This launch has shown how harmony has launched a 600 node decentralized mainnet thus propelling it into the top 15 decentralized projects.

The above info graphic depicts how the ever expanding nodes are intrinsic to the Harmony project.

How does Harmony compares to other players in its space?
A good comparison to evaluate a project is to compare it to its peers that operate in the same space.
By comparison one can see

For a detailed comparison please refer this datasheet
Comparison Table (PoS Blockchains)

The Harmony business case

As already mentioned above the scalability has already been proved by way of it becoming a successful partner platform for Cryptokitties.
So the next question emerges is harmony only for blockchain based transaction intensive games?
To answer this obvious question one may refer to the Binance DeFi Report
Decentralized Finance or DeFi which happens to be the business of cryptocurrency buying and lending has become one of the most common uses of the Ethereum network.
Thus Harmony by virtue of being safe, secure and efficient has emerged the obvious choice to meet the needs of the DeFi industry.

So The harmony networking would use its magic wand to solve the challenges and needs of the DeFi industry?

The Short answer is Yes a bit detailed answer would require to take a closer look into the technology used by Harmony to run its network.
Harmony uses a technique of breaking the database load into smaller manageable chunks called shards.
This means instead of using larger dedicated server and computing servers and computers the chunks of data can be processed by relatively simpler machines. This reduces the cost and spreads outs the computational tasks over a number of devices across the network.
This technique of spreading out the database load across chunks (shards) is known as sharding.

Sharding have I heard about it before?

Well if you are technically inclined then you might surely have heard about it. however what Harmony does differently and more efficiently is that it draws its learning and implementing of the sharding solution to create a new improved tech solution that basically uses the industry wide accepted norms of the Zilliqa network.
However the academics papers point out that the protocol used in the Zilliqa network is susceptible in a way that a attack vector can corrupt the shard and compromise the functioning of the entire network.
Now The harmony network works to provide both linear scaling and a secure sharding scheme.

Harmony the blockchain with 2 type of chains

To improve upon the existing Sharding technology
Harmony operates 2 types of chains

• A beacon chain that is like an index or an identity register. It is derived from a randomness generator.

• The shards store the separate blockchain states and process transactions.

The entire operation is built on the POS system.
In this blockchain security is maintained in a way where a minimum number of votes act as a threshold for security against malicious actors.
In this system the votes are accrued based on the number of Harmony one tokens held.
It works on a one token one vote principle.

The Harmony philosophy and efficiently secret

Harmony works on the principal of incorporating 10X innovation at every layer of the blockchain operation.
Well the efficiency part is no secret actually as it has been explained in detail in the harmony whitepaper here.
The essence of which is that the higher level of efficiency and decentralization can be attributed to

1.Full Scalability

The function of the Harmony blockchain can be divided into 2 kind of tasks the processing of the database and maintaining a record of the states of the blockchain.
Both these tasks are fully sharded therefore there is less stringent storage requirements.

2. Ensuring that the sharding process is secure

For this the Beacon chain of the harmony network is implemented using the DRG or the distributed randomness generation process.

3. Harmony is fast as well as efficient

The Harmony network is Proof of work (POS) based blockchain & this makes it more energy efficient than a POW blockchain.

4. Harmony is not just POS it is adaptive POS

The adaptive nature of the Harmony network ensures that the staking requirements are adjusted based on the total staking volume this is to ensure that

• The malicious stakeholders cannot focus on single shards and
• The entry threshold is deliberately intended to be low so that it acts as an encouragement for small harmony owners to participate and support the network.

5. The infrastructure of the harmony network is scalable

This is ensured by Harmony networks ability to process blocks quickly within the shards that are the essential components of the harmony blockchain.
Another feature adding to the efficiency of sharding is that cross shard transactions scale logarithmically with the number of shards.
In the harmony blockchain every new shard gives 1, 10, 100 more transactions instead of 5, 10, 15 ...

6. Consistency is maintained in the cross-shard transactions

Consistency is essential to ensure the speed and reliability and thus direct communication is used for sharding.
In addition atomic locking provides the reference to help ensure consistency in the cross shard transactions.

Harmony's evolved sharding

Harmony has taken the concept of sharding to the next level and the following are its key components

Proof of stake sharding

Each voting share is underwritten by a harmony one token held by the voter.
By holding a harmony one token you are entitled to cast a vote.
At all times security is ensured by keeping the malicious actors at less than 1/3rd of the voting shares in any shard.
To ensure such a security Harmony deploys its stake of the art adaptive security system.

The sharding process

Ensures that at the end of an epoch the validators that remove their stake are removed from the network and only those who stay would receive their voting shares for the next epoch.
The new shares are randomly assigned to those shards that have voting shares more than the median value of the entire network and some constant number of shares are distributed to those shards that have less number of shares than the median value of the network.
This would ensure that the shards in the harmony network do not have to reset from scratch at the end of each epoch. By this method the computational requirements are greatly reduced.
In this process the high stake holders ensure that smooth operation of the network and it also provides them with the opportunity of increasing their stake as more epochs process and the network progresses.

How can I benefit from Harmony

• Join Pangea :
  Pangea is a experiment which creates a blockchain across borders treating the world as one single entity devoid of any demarcations or borders.
  Anyone is free to join this experiment and interact with the harmony network.
  As a remuneration for these interactions one can earn rewards .
  Pangea has its own currency for playing and book keeping.
  It happens to be a live experiment that highlights and demonstrates the benefits of joining the Harmony network.
  The Pangea Experiment is a rapidly growing experiment that was received with a lot of enthusiasm.
  There are the numbers to show the support the Pangea experiment received within the first 24 hours of its launch.

• 138 Nodes up & running already

• 1283 Signups

• 77 Countries

• 356 Keys Downloaded
  Source: https://twitter.com/harmonyprotocol/status/1160385546515931137
  Join Pangea here https://docs.harmony.one/pangaea/

If you plan to start holding a masternode Harmony one token gives you the perfect opportunity as per the Harmony Press Release: Phase 2

There is a current prevailing opportunity to run a Harmony masternode.
This news would be seen in light of the current node expansion plan of Harmony blockchain.
After its June mainnet Harmony network launch it is functioning as a fully sharded POS blockchain.
It has 600 nodes and places Harmony in the top 15 most decentralized networks.
However there is plan underway to add 4 shards with 400 nodes each taking the node count to 1600 and this would be known as the Phase 2 expansion.
Another Some noteworthy features of this phase would be

• Token swap to the native ONE token,
• The staking smart contract, and
• Token transfers.

Conclusion

• Harmony is not just a blockchain but an entire futuristic ecosystem that is dedicated towards creating an open infrastructure for the world's data.

• It would also function as a Global- scale marketplace platform and

• It would enable decentralized and trustless economies to be created and operated over its blockchain.

• Besides its functional mainnet it would be launching a testnet to help the developers to help them develop and build dapps over the Harmony blockchain.

The reliability of the Harmony blockchain is supported by a robust Harmony team

• Currently the opportunities exist to be part of the Harmony network by way of
  • Joining the Pangea Project
  • Run the Harmony Masternode

The Harmony one tokes are already tradable on the cryptoexchanges and currently ranking at around 136 on the coinmarketcap ranking and currently trading at around 1 cent.

For a blockchain project that can deliver and overcome the drawbacks and shortcomings of top blockchains like the Ethereum, Harmony looks to be due for a long innings and a robust price and volume action.

Additional Resources:

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

[1] https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/05/stake/
[2] https://searchoracle.techtarget.com/definition/sharding