Harmony (ONE)

Basics

• Based in:
• Started in: 2018
• Mainnet release: 19-5-2020

• The Harmony mainnet claims (19-5-2020) to be the first blockchain network to integrate both sharding and staking into its infrastructure.
• From this blog post (6-2019) in which it shows it is not shy of using buzz words:

"We are designing a high throughput, low latency, fully secure blockchain network. It uses an innovative sharding technique called Deep Sharding where the layer on which consensus happens is also sharded along with the transaction layer, to magnify network throughput. The beacon chain, along with the shard chains, improves both the security and the scalability of the network. A host of other such features together guarantee that Harmony will be the blockchain of the future, providing connectivity for billions of people."

History

• From Medium (11-2021):

"Stephen Tse founded Harmony in 2018, but the protocol became live in 2019. Stephen Tse is an experienced engineer in cryptographic protocols, and his aim was to provide a decentralized, open and trustless blockchain platform for DeFi users globally. Tse involved 20 other members in creating the project, whose experience was diverse in areas such as machine learning, software development, artificial intelligence, blockchain technology and virtual reality. The team held consistent meetups in San Francisco, and with time the project started to gain the interest of multiple investors. Harmony raised over $18 million in funding during its fundraising round in 2019."

• From their docs (5-2021):

"Harmony is the beautiful music when we sing in different notes but resonate. It’s analogous to our high-performance protocol of multiple shards but reaching consensus."

• From CoinDesk (24-1-2020):

"Harmony kicks off migration from Ethereum and Binance Chains to its own. Holders of the ONE token should swap their ERC-20 (ethereum) or BEP-2 (binance chain) tokens for the coin on Harmony's blockchain if they want to be able to participate in staking and other network activities. 

Unlike some prior token swaps, such as EOS, there's not a way for users to manually conduct the swap. Holders of either of the tokens will need to load them onto an exchange participating in a bridge with Harmony. Once on such an exchange, the tokens can then be withdrawn, but they will only return as the ONE native coin."

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found here.
• The Horizon bridge is audited and approved by Peckshield Inc. Still got hacked as can be read below.

Bugs/exploits

• Harmony proposes minting billions of ONE tokens to pay back hack victims, but the community seems to be against (28-7-2022). After near-universal condemnation, leaders of the Harmony blockchain scrapped (10-8-2022) their proposal to reimburse community members who lost money in a $100M hack in June.
• From their Twitter (24-6-2022):

"The Harmony team has identified a theft occurring this morning on the Horizon bridge amounting to approx. $100MM. We have begun working with national authorities and forensic specialists to identify the culprit and retrieve the stolen funds. Note this does not impact the trustless BTC bridge; its funds and assets stored on decentralized vaults are safe at this time."

The hack had been prophesized back in April, due to its 2-out-of-4 multisig.

• From their Twitter (18-1-2022):

"We are undergoing an outage due to multiple block propagation issues. Heavy spam traffic in the past 30 hours has halted the network."

Governance

• From The Defiant (10-8-2022):

"Interviews with Harmony validators paint a picture of a community that was dysfunctional well before hackers made off with the $100M and leaders reacted with a “slap in the face” solution. The validators say Harmony has been slow to communicate, if at all; reluctant to address consolidation among validators; broken promises regarding funding of partner organizations; and shown little interest in fixing a broken governance system that has made it impossible to gauge community support for proposals to address important issues within the network.

Harmony leadership did not respond to a request for comment for this story."

• From their docs (4-2021):

"Harmony Network Governance voting is currently available via Harmony Governance App and HMY CLI. As with other projects and networks, the decisions should be made by the community, or in this case, the validators, on what upgrades, incentives or changes we should make for the Harmony network so that it becomes even more attractive to community validators and participants.

As the network and core protocol are complicated and require a deep knowledge of EPoS and some technical/blockchain background, we are only letting validators create and vote on proposals. The network governance model includes proposal, voting, and implementation processes.

First, a proposal has to be submitted by an elected validator. The proposal shall include a summary in the content and a link to a post in the “Governance” section of the forum that the community can discuss and debate in the forum post. A proposal will be moved forward when the majority is reached. Otherwise, it is rejected. The majority of the quorum is defined as more than 66% of all the staked tokens.

Since only the validators can propose/vote in the proposal, for token holders who delegate to validators, it is highly encouraged to work with your validators to vote on the proposals. Also, in order to encourage the participation of the voting process, additional token rewards may be distributed to validators who voted in the proposals. The detailed plan will be announced later."

Admin Key

• Although the above text from the docs seems to say it is governed by the validators, however there is also a section talking about Multi-sig holders who are "supporting Harmony's ecosystem" (4-2021). Holders mentioned are:

Altonomy, Anmi Capital, Cluster Capital, KysenPool Dragon, Youbi Capital and Jeff Liu.

Token

Launch

• From CoinDesk (24-1-2020):

"Harmony had a pre-mine of 12.6 billion ONE tokens issued on the ethereum and binance chains, 36.9 percent of which was sold in the seed and launchpad sale."

Utility

• Staking, governance, and participating in governance also will reward you, but this is not live yet (4-2021).

Token Details

HRC-20 Tokens

• From their docs (4-2021):

"HRC-20 are fungible tokens minted on the Harmony network, much like ERC-20 tokens are on Ethereum. Functionality wise, the HRC-20 is similar to ERC-20 tokens like USDC, UNI, SUSHI, etc., except that it is issued and used on the Harmony network, instead of on the Ethereum network."

Tech

• Whitepaper can be found here.
• Code can be viewed here.
• Programming language used:

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS):
• Latency: 8 seconds, "producing blocks in 2 seconds with finality." (5-2021).

How it works

• 4-shard network
• Harmony's network consists (19-5-2020) of over 320 public nodes and Harmony plans to increase that number to 1000 and beyond by the end of the year.
• From this mainnet announcement (19-5-2020):

"Proof-of-stake blockchains have been criticized for "rich get richer" economics, in which the largest stakers earn the most. Harmony's novel staking mechanism called "Effective Proof of Stake" counters this problem by capping the rewards of large stakers and boosting the rewards of smaller ones."

• From their docs (5-2021):

"Our Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS) reduces centralization while supporting stake delegation, reward compounding and double-sign slashing. The randomness used in the sharding is obtained with a distributed randomness generation algorithm (based on VRF and VDF) which is unpredictable, un-biased, verifiable and scalable. Harmony reshards the network in a non-interruptive manner using “Cuckoo Rule” to prevent against slowly adaptive byzantine adversaries.

Harmony’s consensus algorithm is called Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance or FBFT. FBFT is a highly efficient and speedy consensus algorithm built upon the famous PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) algorithm which is the cornerstone for distributed systems and consensus research for the past 30 years. Harmony’s FBFT is able to confirm blocks within 2 seconds thanks to the adoption of aggregated BLS (Boneh–Lynn–Shacham) signature. FBFT is also highly optimized in network message processing and block proposal pipelining so that the consensus can scale to hundreds of validators at the same time.

The process to elect validators is called Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS) which is the first sharding-focused PoS mechanism that prevents stake centralization. In EPoS, validators with a large amount of staked tokens are obligated to run more nodes to support the network while validators with less stake run fewer nodes. Besides, EPoS is able to randomly and evenly distribute the stakes among all shards so no shard is less secure than other shards.

Harmony’s network layer is based on the industry-leading p2p protocol named libp2p. We use libp2p’s gossip protocol for network message broadcasting and stream protocol for decentralized state synchronization. To achieve high performance, we adopt RaptorQ fountain code and use Adaptive Information Dispersal Algorithm to quickly and efficiently broadcast large blocks. Harmony also features a design where Kademlia routing is used to achieve cross-shard transactions that scale logarithmically with the number of shards."

• From Medium (11-2021):

"Cross-shard communication is a tech feature that reduces the degree and number of complexities that emerge while running the communication protocol on the platform. Kademlia is a distributed hash table and routing protocol that the system relies on. The concept facilitates the communication system within shards as it enables nodes within a shard to receive and send information within themselves through a shard ID. The approach eliminates the need to broadcast information across other shards."

Staking

• From The Defiant (10-8-2022):

"[Has] 900 available validator slots."

• From Medium (11-2021):

"Need to stake a minimum of 10,000 $ONE tokens. The fact that all $ONE tokens earned through transaction fees are burnt is what sets Harmony apart from other Layer 1s. Zero token inflation is brought about by high network usage. The mechanism of issue-and-burn tokenomics that rewards a growing network by reducing inflation ultimately increases the intrinsic value of $ONE token."

Validator Stats

• From CoinDesk (24-1-2020):

"The Harmony network is live now, though not all the features are. For example, validating nodes remain permissioned, but this will eventually become open. Validators will be rewarded with new ONE tokens in reward for securing the network, under Harmony's proof-of-stake system."

• Figment is a staker. From their website (9-3-2020): "Operating multiple investor nodes since network launch. Genesis block producer. Serving many of Harmony’s original VC investors."
• Blockdaemon and Stake.fish are too.
• From their docs (5-2021):

"There are now 1,000 Harmony nodes – so far 640 of them run by the community."

• There is shard 0, shard 1, shard 2, and shard 3 that support 250 validators each (11-2021). About 42% of $ONE tokens are currently staked.

Interoperability

• Has EVM compatibility

• From their blog (7-4-2021):

"Harmony is a sharding protocol with a trustless Ethereum bridge. A cross-chain Uniswap port is already live on our mainnet. Similar to layer 2 protocols, Harmony is now fully interoperable with the Ethereum ecosystem."

Horizon

• Horizon is a cross-chain bridge that allows exchange of crypto assets (e.g., fungible/non-fungible tokens, stablecoins) between Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain and Harmony blockchains
• The Horizon bridge is audited and approved by Peckshield Inc.
• Horizon code is open source.

• Looking in other blog(6-2-2021) posts, it seems they just have SC on both chains as any other bridge, however how they connect is done through a Harmony light client deployed as a SC on Ethereum which connects through relayers:

“Harmony deploys a light client smart contract on Ethereum which will keep track of what is going on in the Harmony chain. This light client is kept up-to-date by any relayer that relays the block header information at every checkpoint.

The user withdrawal process is as follows:

1. Execute burn transaction
2. Compute or obtain proof of burn
3. Wait for the relayer to send the next checkpoint block header info to Harmony light client on Ethereum. Self relay is also possible with some extra cost to further speed up the withdrawal.
4. Submit the proof of burn to bridge smart contract on Ethereum to successfully withdraw.”

In blog they also write (14-1-2021):

“Inspired by Flyclient (already deployed in ZCash), our light client uses Merkle Mountain Range (MMR) and epoch syncing. Later we may employ zero-knowledge proofs such as Plonk to further compress the states of these heterogeneous chains.”

• For more details the whitepaper and tldr can be read here (14-11-2020).

Oracle Method

• Harmony has integrated (1-10-2020) Band Protocol and dedicated a portion of the $7M Grants Program towards Band Protocol. However, it backtracked two days later and said Chainlink was the oracle of choice (3-10-2020). Chainlink is still only on testnet (9-9-2021). Chainlink price feeds went live (14-12-2021).

Their Other Projects

Horizon

• Horizon is a cross-chain bridge that allows exchange of crypto assets (e.g., fungible/non-fungible tokens, stablecoins) between Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain and Harmony blockchains.

SWOOP

• SWOOP is a decentralized exchange (DEX) for swapping assets bridged from Ethereum (13-11-2020).

Roadmap

• Can be found here (5-2020):

"Our main themes are:

1. Adoption — We are bringing utility to users through developers and partners. Hackathons with Gitcoin and workshops at Ethereum events will boost our reach.
2. Interoperability — We are bridging with Bitcoin and Ethereum for broader assets. Our cross-shard and cross-chain transactions will enable new finance applications.
3. Decentralization — We are growing our validator community and network features. External voting power and resharding will guarantee our long-term governance."

• From this mainnet announcement (19-5-2020):

"Now that the core protocol work is complete, Harmony will shift focus to solving a potentially harder challenge: adoption. Harmony's EVM compatibility makes it easy for developers in the Ethereum ecosystem to test out the new network. In addition to the protocol's features, a comprehensive set of developer grants are planned to encourage developers to take the leap."

Usage

• From Our Network (20-11-2021):

"In a span of three months DFK's player base has grown from under 1k to 41k — including $904 million in total transaction volume and $2.12 billion in assets. Thanks to DFK's recent success, TVL on Harmony (including staked tokens) hit record highs of $550 million earlier this week. DFK's TVL, which grew by 47% to $310 million in the past week, now accounts for 55.19% of Harmony's TVL. For comparison, SushiSwap is the next largest protocol at $95 million TVL."

• From their blog (7-4-2021):

"Since the launch of the Harmony to Ethereum Bridge, smart contract activity on Harmony has ballooned, with transactions booming from a cumulative amount of 230,643 when the bridge launched on October 19 to 1,580,021 on April 5, 2021, representing a 585% increase!

Equally impressive is the growth of new wallets on Harmony since the launch of the bridge. At launch of the bridge, we had 18,649 active wallet addresses (defined as a wallet with at least 1 ONE token in it). As of April 5, 2021 we have 55,163 active wallet addresses, representing 195% increase in wallet addresses!"

Projects that use or built on it

• From The Defiant (9-9-2021):

"Some DeFi projects have been quietly expanding onto Harmony in recent months. SushiSwap opened up on Harmony in April. The semi-algorithmic stablecoin Frax moved some of its supply onto Harmony, primarily via a SushiSwap liquidity pool. Chainlink runs its price feeds on the Harmony testnet, a prelude to moving to mainnet, as the oracle prodiver did in August on Solana."

• SushiSwap; live (7-4-2021).

Pros and Cons

Cons

• From The Defiant (10-8-2022):

"Interviews with Harmony validators paint a picture of a community that was dysfunctional well before hackers made off with the $100M and leaders reacted with a “slap in the face” solution. The validators say Harmony has been slow to communicate, if at all; reluctant to address consolidation among validators; broken promises regarding funding of partner organizations; and shown little interest in fixing a broken governance system that has made it impossible to gauge community support for proposals to address important issues within the network.

Harmony leadership did not respond to a request for comment for this story."

Competition

• Layer 1 blockchains.

• From their blog (14-1-2021):

"Harmony’s shards are similar to Cosmos’s zones and Polkadot’s parachains, but our shards offer simpler interface and more uniform security for developers. We are developing cross-shard transactions, comparable to Cosmos’s Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) and Polkadot’s Cross-Chain Message Passing (XMCP) but specialized for uniform shards."

Team, funding, partners

Team

• Full team can be seen here (14-5-2021).
• Nick White; Co-Founder (now in the external team, 14-5-2021)
• Stephen Tse; CEO
• From The Defiant (10-8-2022):

"led by Tse, Rongjian Lan, Leo Chen, Li Jiang and Ganesha Upadhyaya"

Partners

• Chainlink (6-2019)
• XYO
• From this mainnet announcement (19-5-2020): "Blockdaemon, Stake.fish, Staked.us, Wetez, Sesame Seed, Everstake and InfStones are among 16 staking partner. Binance, BitMax and Kucoin will support Harmony staking on their platforms."
• Started a full-stack partnership with Terra (7-7-2021).

Funding

• From CoinDesk (24-1-2020):

"It raised $18 million in a token sale to strategic investors last year, followed by an initial exchange offering on the Binance Launchpad in May, selling an additional $5 million worth of tokens."

• Harmony has integrated (1-10-2020) Band Protocol and dedicated a portion of the $7M Grants Program towards Band Protocol.
• Harmony unveiled a $300M ecosystem fund today to back startups working on applications and protocols (9-9-2021). According to The Defiant and its interviews, the community feels this fund was grossly mismanaged.

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