Harmony & ONE Coin: A New Era in Crypto Transactions

Harmony is a peer-to-peer network powered by cutting-edge mechanisms and features for hosting, managing, and building DApps (decentralized applications). This applies to DApps with the highest cross-platform integration and high transaction throughput. Harmony employs the Ethereum infrastructure and aspires to design a solution capable of removing the current boundaries of the Tier-1 blockchain.

Harmony Uniqueness

The project's functionality is devised for DApps, while the platform proves second-to-none transactional data performance. Today, Harmony boasts a 2,000 transactions/sec (TPS) processing speed with a 2-second finality. Notably, community members can enjoy fees that are 1000 times less than Ethereum ones. Harmony engineers state that their main objective is to scale to a million with its sharding protocol, which adds 500 TPS per shard.

Here is another technical advantage worth keeping in mind. Unlike Ethereum and other analogous blockchain systems, Harmony has achieved an impressive block generation time that completes within one second. Thus, blockchain fosters near-instant transactions capable of processing higher transition throughputs. Tremendous competitive advantage, by the way.

Harmony Origins

Nick White, Stephen Tse, Sahil Dewan, and Rongjian Lan launched the project in 2017. Harmony's founders are top-notch engineers with invaluable experience at top tech giants, including Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

Here are a few key historical milestones:

• January 2020: transfer of the ONE token from the Ethereum network and Binance to the Harmony blockchain
• May 2020: the project becomes the first sharded blockchain to deliver stacking opportunities to ecosystem members
• 2021: Harmony launched on-chain 1Wallet, added Polkadot and Bitcoin bridges, and initiated decentralized voting

The project has made several breakthroughs since its takeoff and plans to continue increasing interoperability and adoption in the coming years.

Harmony Pros and Cons

Today, Harmony is an ambitious and popular blockchain project that has developed a unique environment for the end-to-end transfer of crypto. Still, it has some pros and cons worth considering.

Hits:

• Low barrier to entry for validators
• Fast transactions with low fees
• Highly scalable
• High returns through staking

Misses:

• Roadmap is a bit unclear
• Centralization of decision making
• Fierce competition

Harmony has enough reasons to be a profitable project in terms of long-term investment. However, the company's success directly depends on the developers' success and goals.

Decrypting Harmony's Mechanism: Unraveling the Enigma

The primary purpose of the ecosystem work is to amplify the expandability factor and hasten the production of blocks and transactions with the RSS (random state sharding) technique. RSS lets the Harmony network halve the directory into fewer pieces called shards to decrease latency. Besides, sharding enables near-instantaneous crypto transfers while bypassing network congestion.

The sharding approach employs a distributed randomness generation procedure with an adaptive proof-of-stake consensus. As a result, easy verification, scalability, and security became more than possible with a similar tech blend.

Harmony Coin (ONE) Explained

The project uses the native ONE token so that users can utilize it as a payment mechanism and partake in the ecosystem's life. On the other hand, businesses and developers can use the ONE coin as a reward for stakeholder incentives.

The ONE coin values (May 26, 2023):

• Market cap: $203,134,070
• Total supply: 13,906,042,327.44 ONE
• Fully diluted market cap: $211,041,351
• Circulating supply: 13,285,417,327.44 ONE
• All-time high (October 26, 2021): $0.3798
• All-time low (March 13, 2020): $0.001257

Recently, the coin has failed to exhibit any significant surge in its price. It can be attributed primarily to the prevailing bullish sentiment in the market rather than any delay in introducing novel features.

Harmony Tokenomics

The project's architects have revised the ecosystem's economic model several times. The latest update comes ahead of the upcoming stake announcement. The new tokenomics model assumes that the on-chain reward (transaction and issuance fees) will have a fixed amount, regardless of the staking ratio or average block time.

Here are the details of the updated Harmony tokenomics:

• The project plans to allocate 441M ONE as a permanent annual reward regardless of changes in underlying variables.
• As the protocol gains adoption, transfer costs will gradually counterbalance issuance and create a solid path to zero allocation.
• Harmony's 1st-year yields will range from 9% (at 95% staked) to 164% (at 5% staked)

According to the updated tokenomics, the main task of the developers is to achieve a higher staking ratio, find a way to zero-emission and simplify the ecosystem model. According to the project engineers, such steps can provide long-term benefits for Harmony and enhance the project from a technical point of view.

Harmony Funding Details

The project management team secured a solid investment of $18 million over four consecutive investment rounds. The last investment round took place on September 20, 2019.

Funding Details:

• April 2, 2019: Seed round backed by AU21 Capital, UniValues Associates, Consensus Capital Holdings, BCA Fund, and Lemniscap. Harmony managed to raise $18M.
• May 31, 2019: Venture (series unknown) supported by Digital Asset Capital Management.
• May 31, 2019: Venture (series unknown) supported by Hashkey.
• September 20, 2019: Initial Coin Offering (ICO) backed by Outliers Fund.

Harmony has achieved its goals of raising high-profile capital from Tier-1 investors, which has positively impacted expanding the workforce and building the technical capacities of the ecosystem.

Harmony Roadmap 2023

Over the past few years, Harmony has achieved impressive protocol results. So, today's triumphs make a lot of sense, especially if you look at how far the company has been able to go within the roadmap:

• Q1 – Q2 2020: First sharded blockchain to implement staking | Open staking implementation | EPOS mechanism | Token swap to native ONE token | Stablecoins and HRC-721 for branded assets.
• Q3 2020: Improvement to 3-second finality | DeFi middleware | Staking wallet and an Ethereum bridge + global fiat gateways.
• Q4 2020: 100% decentralized nodes, and community governance | Auditable privacy | Cross-border finance

Once the roadmap goals were achieved, the company continued publicizing intranet updates and informing users on its official Medium blog.