Harmony (ONE): Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Harmony (ONE) is a blockchain project that focuses on processing speed and validation
The Harmony MainNet has an average of 2,000 transactions per second (TPS) but can reach a maximum of 24,000 TPS
Harmony has launched a $1 Million Hackathon that will see the bridging of TradFi and DeFi
Unbound Finance and Bancor have both entered into a partnership with Harmony and will be utilizing their technology

Harmony is a unique blockchain platform designed to facilitate the creation and use of decentralized applications (DApps). The project aims to innovate decentralized applications by focusing on random state sharding, allowing the creation of blocks in seconds.

Harmony (ONE) focuses mainly on processing speed and validation, as it seeks to revolutionize block creation. By introducing the sharding process, the company reduced node validation times significantly.

Harmony Vs the Competition

Polkadot, Kusama, THORChain, Chainlink, Fantom, and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) are the first to be mentioned when scalability and blockchain bridges are raised. While largely unknown, Harmony is a top-tier blockchain that competes favorably with the best in the industry.

Harmony boasts an average of 2,000 transactions per second (TPS) but can reach a maximum of 24,000 TPS. Ethereum allows for 15-20 TPS, Binance Smart Chain can handle an average of 55 to 60 TPS, Polkadot can process up to 1000 TPS, while THORChain can handle up to 10,000 TPS.

The Harmony mainnet runs Ethereum applications with 2-second transaction finality compared to the 60 seconds for a parachain transaction. The closest to this finality time is Fantom, boasting around 1-2 seconds finality time. The transaction fees are also significantly cheaper on the network; Harmony says up to 1,000 times lower.

The direct competitor, Fantom, is left in the dust when it comes to integrations for developers. While Fantom has integration for only Covalent and Orion terminal, Harmony supports up to 31 integrations, including Chainlink, Changelly, Ethereum, MetaMask, amongst others.

Harmony uses the Verifiable Random Function (VRF) technology for unbiased and unpredictable shard membership. On the Harmony network, nodes and validators are assigned and re-assigned in a randomized manner.

Harmony’s bridges can also connect any Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake chains. All around, Harmony ONE is a stellar project, primarily made possible by its talented and dedicated founding team, composed of some of the best developers around.

Recent Developments

For Harmony, the year has been about driving for mass adoption. In August, to reach that goal, Harmony launched a $1 Million Hackathon to allow web3 and web2 developers to get together and build exciting apps, protocols, and tools.

The hackathon, Bridging TradFi to DeFi, will run until September 30. The hackathon will see the improvement of cross-chains and interoperability of the network.

Harmony has also announced a partnership with Bancor – a liquidity protocol that enables automated, decentralized exchanges. The partnership will also see the addition of single-sided staking on the network.

Another partnership with Unbound Finance will see the integration of the Harmony blockchain into its platform. Harmony will help Unbound to accelerate inter-blockchain operability and profitability on the network.

Future Events

The next couple of months could give Harmony the required boost for mass adoption. Harmony is looking to introduce cross-shard contracts and a cross-chain infrastructure by the end of 2021.

Harmony has announced that the upcoming tooling and protocol integrations on its Mainnet will unlock the growth stage for NFTs, DeFi, and DAOs on Harmony. While there are no exact dates yet for their launch, the Harmony team is known for keeping to dates for upcoming releases.

The development team of Harmony has begun the creation of a multi-chain world. According to the announcement, the building of bridges with Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Terra, Polkadot and soon Bitcoin and Cosmos is already underway.

On The Flipside

While Harmony remains one of the leading blockchain platforms of innovation, it remains vastly underutilized
Projects like Solana, Polkadot, Kusama, THORChain, and Chainlink occupy more portions of the market than Harmony

The DailyCoin team, on scouring the internet, found that this has been a source of concern for some of the community members. One Twitter user, @Fitboy_Crypto, in replying to Harmonyonee, wrote;

Super Bullish on @harmonyprotocol $ONE but when will mass adoption spread amongst the crypto community. Solana Polygon Terra exploding while Harmony sits...
— Fitboy_Crypto (@Fitboy_Crypto) September 2, 2021

Another user, @macuna1011, answered @Fitboy_Crypto, stating,

There was an April fool's joke a team member played on the twitter following which was growing a lot at that time. I missed it as I working that day but it lost all of it's momentum from then on, imo has never recovered the hype it had despite all the loyal followers
— acuña.mtv (@macuna1011) September 3, 2021

Community

Harmony has one of the most dedicated communities. Harmony also has a respectable following on Social Media with over 205K Followers on Twitter.

There is also good community involvement on the network. Reacting to the partnership with Unbound Finance, a user, @theability2, wrote,

This is epic tech, I was literally thinking today how come there hasn't been a DAPP with zero liquidation and no interest. What a beast of a project can't wait to invest. Absolute powerhouse DAPP!
— theability.one (@theability2) September 2, 2021

Over the last six months, Harmony has experienced some remarkable growth. In the period, Harmony has registered 135k new wallets, over 50 dApps, over 85 million mainnet transactions, and over 17,000 delegators and 115 validators, staking 4.6 billion ONEs ($375m staked).

Why You Should Care?

Harmony boasts of one of the best blockchains, which will only improve with the development of cross-shard contracts and a cross-chain infrastructure on the network. If all goes as planned, Harmony is billed for mass adoption in the future.