Harmony is a blockchain platform designed to facilitate the creation and use of DApps. It emphasizes scalability and security, offering fast transaction speeds and low fees. The platform supports various DeFi protocols and aims to bridge the gap between different blockchains through cross-chain communication.
Harmony was founded in 2018 by Stephen Tse and co-founders Rongjian Lan, Nick White, and Sahil Dewan. All were infrastructure engineers who used to work at Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. Harmony launched its mainnet in June 2019 and open staking in May 2020. The team’s goals in 2020 include cross-border utility, decentralized development, and auditable privacy.
The project designed a new version of Proof-of-Stake (PoS), which it calls Effective PoS (EPoS), on its consensus layer to provide Sybil resistance. EPoS allows participants to either stake directly or delegate their holdings to an active validator in exchange for block rewards. It also incentivizes users to delegate to smaller validators, thus aiming to reduce the tendency of stake centralization. Other EPoS components include reward compounding, double-sign slashing (to keep validators in check), and unavailability checking.
Harmony raised an $18.3 million private round, a $5.5 million node round (led by Binance Labs and HashKey Capital), and a $5 million initial exchange offering (IEO) through Binance Launchpad.
At present, Harmony consists of 1,000 nodes, with 640 managed by community members. The Harmony Foundation maintains the remaining nodes, but the organization does not collect any staking rewards. As the network progresses, the team intends to open up the remaining node slots to the community.
