What Is Harmony One All About in Early 2022?
What Is Harmony One All About in Early 2022?
Can good Engineering still win in the blockchain?
Harmony is a sharded PoS smart contract platform that I think has tremendous potential. They have top Silicon Valley engineers and a collaborative vision on the future of blockchain interoperability.
I like the scalability of their end game potential. Here we have Harmony One as a layer-2 protocol blockchain designed to enhance the creation of decentralized apps with a focus on scalability and faster, cheaper settlement.
In recent months, as of February 2022, I think Harmony is intersecting with the future of DeFi. As I say this, Harmony One is growing an increasingly muscular TVL in DeFi thanks largely to DeFi Kingdoms, a gamified farming platform built around NFTs and the $JEWEL token. Total value locked (TVL) is the overall value of crypto assets deposited in a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol – or in DeFi protocols generally.
I like Silicon Valley takes on blockchain problems approach here. Harmony advertisers itself as your open platform for assets, collectibles, identity, governance. Our secure bridges offer cross-chain asset transfers with Ethereum, Binance and 3 other chains. Interoperability is king I believe in the future of crypto platforms.
All things being equal, Harmony One would also make a good investment, in the event of a Bitcoin correction that is normal in its multi-year cycle. This is because of the increasing partnership ecosystem Harmony is creating that can attract real developers to its platform and robust ecosystem.
You could even argue that Harmony is an underdog and potential rags to riches story in the crypto narrative. Here’s a video that suggests as much:
Harmony (ONE) was launched as part of the Binance Launchpad's initial exchange offering (IEO) in May 2019.
Harmony has a small probability to fix the trilemma of blockchain where a project is designed with security, decentralization, and scalability (4th is Privacy) in mind. These are major problems to be solved. Engineers solve these problems and Harmony One has among the best in the crypto startup industry in my humble opinion.
Harmony is realistically in 2022 still finding its product-market fit I believe. It now apparently wants to be a bridge between scalability and decentralization efforts. It was built with the motto "decentralization at scale" in mind, emphasizing data sharing and the construction of fungible token and nonfungible asset marketplaces. Heard of those things? Good old NFTs.
Li Jiang, chief operating officer at Harmony, believes that a bridge connecting all existing blockchains is key to onboard the first 1 billion users on Web 3. “We think that the future is multichain and cross-chain, that you should be able to move assets very easily from one chain to another, with good prices, with good rates and very fast.” He recently told Cointelegraph.
The Promise of a Decentralized Interoperable World of Blockchains in the 2020s
Crypto startups are all about promises. Many of these promises mean nothing, but are signposts. Harmony promises to give high throughput with two "lows": latency and costs. They're expected to put the platform at the center of efforts to establish the groundwork for future decentralized trustless economies when they're combined. Impressive ambitions, I like that.
Harmony One’s price is currently $0.228 or 22.8 cents, according to Coinmarketcap. Harmony One also recently launched its own crypto news outlet that it wants to be unbiased. It’s currently pretty full of news about Harmony One.
https://harmonyoneheat.com/
They have been doing a blitz in Cointelegraph in early 2022 I see. Their Layer-2 specs are interesting.
Harmony could solve major bottlenecks in the scalability issues of crypto and that’s the key thing for me as a crypto enthusiast or a potential investor.
The Harmony One project can conservatively be considered a solution (one among many) to poor scaling and interoperability and a useful foundation for DApp developers to scale their apps and transactions.
Maintain decentralization and security
Energy-efficient
Cross-chain capabilities
Lower gas fees
Huge potential for NFTs
For delegators
For validators
I think we get it. The diversity of backers of Harmony One is also very relevant as I study venture capital at the intersection of blockchain. So who have backed Harmony One? Multiple investors, including Silicon Valley's Consensus Capital, Hong Kong's Lemniscap VC, and others, were interested in its fundraising endeavor, which raised $18 million in April 2019. Investors bought almost $2.8 billion of the company's ONE tokens, with $12.6 billion put aside for pre-mining.
This is not a hyped Ethereum killer falling into security problems like Solana, this is more an underdog bet on the evolution of blockchain powered by good engineering, realistic product timelines and decent sales and partnership ecosystems in my view. I’m not an expert in crypto or blockchains.
One year ago Harmony One’s price was $0.01, today it’s around 20x that. Bitcoin will remain a volatile digital asset, but the cream will eventually rise to the surface of platforms of scale with solid engineering. I view Harmony in the same category in this sense as someone like Cardano, good fundamentals.
They are hiring aggressively and can expand in Asia a lot in 2022. So what can investors expect Harmony one to manifest in terms of industry alignment? Harmony gives investors access to an ecosystem that will enable the company's adoption across a variety of businesses, with a focus on data sharing, decentralized marketplaces, supply chain monitoring, ad exchanges, credit rating systems and gaming.
Data sharing
Decentralized marketplaces
Supply chain monitoring
Ad exchanges
Credit Rating systems
Gaming
Harmony, like many other layer 2 (L2) platforms, has its community token, Harmony ONE, which stresses the protocol's objective of assisting open consensus procedures for the world’s crypto adopting population in the future of decentralized protocols. Like all cryptocurrencies, it’s price is highly tethered to the price of Bitcoin itself.
It’s currently ranked #48 on Coinmarketcap, impressive but not necessarily well-known. It has a a 24-hour trading volume of $206,792,629 USD.
The Harmony ONE token is of course used to pay for all the regular things on a platform such as activities and amenities, including voting, transaction fees, gas fees, staking and earning rewards.
A Leader in Sharding
Harmony’s strength I think also is about its random state sharding that allows the network to divide the database into smaller segments called shards to reduce latency. In addition, sharding allows for near-instantaneous transactions while avoiding network congestion.
Harmony One has focused on engineering fundamentals here which I consider its main strength. The sharding technique is based on a distributed randomness generation procedure that uses an adaptive proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. Security, scalability and simple and easy verification are all possible with this combination.
Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance protocol (FBFT) is a variant of the BFT protocol used by the Harmony network. FBFT improves the Harmony network's speed and efficiency by processing transactions in parallel. Simultaneously, Harmony minimizes communication costs by signing transactions using an aggregate signature, allowing 250 or more validators to reach a consensus in less than two seconds.
Harmony Works and Syncs with Ethereum
According to the recent report on Cointelegraph, Harmony is aligned with Ethereum.
Harmony is an open and fast blockchain, featuring a mainnet that runs on an Ethereum network with 2-second transaction finality and 1000 times lower fees than Ethereum.
Harmony (ONE) blockchain is an L2 blockchain platform built on the Ethereum network, making it easier for developers to create decentralized apps (DApps).
Because of Ethereum's high gas fees, more altcoins are developing scaling solutions in an attempt to dethrone Ethereum as the most popular network for developing DApps. Unlike many other platforms in this category, Harmony collaborates with Ethereum rather than competing with it.
The majority of engineering working in crypto work on Ethereum, in some way. It’s not perfect but it’s likely the best and biggest we have at the moment, the real first-mover of crypto platforms.
Harmony One Wallet
The Harmony ONE wallet is available as a Google Chrome plugin (with a rating of around 3.2/5.0) that is simple to install and much simpler to use. There are a plethora of third-party wallets for storing ONE, and the type you choose will likely be determined by how much you need to keep and what you plan to do with it.
Hardware wallets, also known as cold wallets, like Ledger or Trezor, are the safest way to store and backup cryptocurrency.
Harmony One Could be Acquired by Microsoft One Day
As consolidation occurs I expect many of the top crypto startups to be acquired. Given the engineering in Harmony One, they can excel in ways that most crypto startups cannot, things like security, cybersecurity and privacy for starters.
Harmony does not compromise security or decentralization even as it scales. For example, the network assigns nodes or computers that join the network and validate transactions, to distinct shards via a distributed randomness generation mechanism. Harmony also keeps the minimum number of ONE tokens required for nodes to join the network as validators and preserve decentralization at a low level.
Harmony can now process 2,000 transactions per second (TPS), which is comparable to Visa, ONE of the world's largest payment networks.
Harmony believes it will process 10 million TPS in the long run.
My prediction is Microsoft acquires Harmony by 2026 or 2027. If you like my predictions in M&A or are interested in IPOs and related Venture Capital stuff you might enjoy my Newsletter IPO Times. I mostly only write there when I really feel like it, but I have some deep dives up my sleeve.
Harmony conduct its initial-exchange offering (IEO) on the Binance Launchpad on May 28, 2019. At the time it was said that Harmony’s staking mechanism reduces centralization while supporting stake delegation, reward compounding and double-sign slashing.
Harmony is based in the U.S.—Cupertino, California, but I think it’s more ripe for global expansion in 2022 as hiring indications in Asia would seem to indicate.
For additional insights into the features of Harmony One, this is a post I liked here. I like it when Harmony aligns with ideas around a Universal Basic Income, but I think whoever acquires them like Microsoft can fulfil that further.
Energy-efficient
Cross-chain capabilities
Cross-shard Communication
ONE-backed stablecoin
Universal Basic Income proposal
The Liquidity DAO
Slashing for validators
Dex SWOOP
Target of 1 million transactions per second
ONE Wallet
Crazy.ONE project
DaVinci is back on Harmony
So clearly just to say this Harmony team has a lot going on under the hood. Their ability to form real industry partnerships also seems above average. That’s what I like to see in a real crypto startup in 2022.
I want to see them innovate, engineer and collaborate at scale in the spirit of decentralized protocols in our shared (not shaded) future. I don’t know if Harmony will be among the "unifying Web3 platforms" of the future but I like their balanced mission statement, engineering muscle and Silicon Valley approach to problems the crypto industry themselves have been unable and very slow to solve.