Harmony: Work in Tune

When the rise of the blockchain and its spin-off cryptocurrencies completed, everything seemed fine. Everybody thought that a new age began and blockchain-based technologic advancements would dominate the world.

Well, that is not the exact situation right now clearly. Maybe it would be but not in this situation and not with present players at least.

Why I'm thinking so? Because what blockchain offered at the beginning hasn't been met yet:

Decentralization, scalability, security and velocity.

Even if it is the deity of the market, Bitcoin isn't the real candidate for these purposes. Ethereum? It is a handy craft, I give it that but, nope. We need a well designed, purpose-focused project.

Yes, I found one and will introduce it to you. I give you Harmony!

What is Harmony?

ツ As I went through the whole project website and white paper I saw that Harmony wants to be a really, genuinely unique project which can offer both decentralization and complete scalability together. This is the one deal at the beginning as all the crypto enthusiasts know but then again, they are yet to be delivered. Now, Harmony enjoys making them happen.

ツ Also, Harmony intends to integrate its fully scalable infrastructure by taking steady and firm steps. Applying its innovative PoS approach for every level of blockchain consensus mechanism, Harmony aims to create a lightning-fast process ground as promised at first.

ツ Inspired by the well-known project Zilliqa, sharding process is significantly important when we consider Harmony project solidly. Sharding is the new consensus protocol introduced by the Ethereum blockchain which aims to prevent scalability problems as the entire blockchain network grows. PoW protocols can be seen as more secure and reliable but scalability problems would hit eventually. Sharding is the solution and when it combines with Harmony's specific blockchain, we find a fast and fully scalable solution without compromising the security.

ツ Being an open infrastructure for all, Harmony is a marketplace to the entire World which provides the enormous benefits of complete decentralization and scalability.

Features

★ Complete Scalability

The sharding system in Harmony blockchain is for communication via network and validation of transaction as well as for blockchain state. Because of this, Harmony is a unique and completely scalable blockchain ever.

★ Sharding is Secure

Distributed Randomness Generation (DRG) system guarantees the unique sharding process of Harmony fully and flawlessly secure.

★ A New Level of Consensus Protocol

Harmony's PoS based sharding system is incredibly energy efficient and faster.

The Harmony Team

We’re ambitiously idealisticThat’s why we left our jobs at big companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon to create a radically fair economy through blockchain.

Stephen Tse
Stephen Tse 谢镇滔 has been obsessed with protocols and compilers since high school. He reverse-engineered ICQ and X11 protocols, coded in OCaml for more than 15 years , and graduated with a doctoral degree in security protocols and compiler verification from the University of Pennsylvania.
Stephen was a researcher at Microsoft Research, a senior infrastructure engineer at Google, and a principal engineer for search ranking at Apple. He founded the mobile search Spotsetter with institutional venture capital; Apple later acquired the startup.

Nicolas Burtey
Nicolas Burtey founded a VR video startup in 2012 that grew to 40 people and raised $10m. Orah served the needs of thousands of professional content creators in 70 countries by selling GPU-driven live stitching software and 360° cameras.
Nicolas holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science, and a master’s degree in computational photography. His master’s thesis at Ecole Nationale Supérieure Louis Lumière was titled “The representation of space and time in panoramic photography.”

Alok Kothari
Alok Kothari worked on deep learning models for natural language understanding at Apple’s Siri. He conducted research in natural language processing, information retrieval machine learning and published at top conferences like SIGIR, ICWSM and EMNLP. His research paper won the best dataset award at ICWSM 2013.
Alok’s book “Game Changers” chronicles successful entrepreneurs from his alma mater IIT Kharagpur in India. He also co-founded the entrepreneurship cell there, which has produced 60 student startups. Alok obtained his master’s degree in artificial intelligence and language technologies from Carnegie Mellon University.

Rongjian Lan
Rongjian Lan was a search infrastructure engineer for Play Store at Google. He published over 10 academic papers on spatio-temporal querying and map-based visualization. Rongjian started researching on decentralized protocols since early 2017.
Rongjian is the co-chair of ABC Blockchain Foundation, with more than 100 engineers from Google, Facebook, LinkedIn as members. He was a doctoral candidate of computer science at the University of Maryland College Park and obtained his bachelor’s degree from the University of Science and Technology Beijing.

Minh Doan
Minh Doan worked on Google’s Assistant, Play and Plus for 5 years. He was a former champion at USA Computing Olympiad Open and many other Informatics Olympiads. Minh holds the patent for “Publisher Click-Ring Fraud Detector” at Google.
Minh was a doctoral candidate in algorithms and distributed systems at the University of California, Irvine. He has a master’s degree in computer science and applied mathematics from Moscow State University. His research paper, “An effective ant-based algorithm for the degree-constrained minimum spanning tree problem”, published at IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation.

Nick White
Nick White holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, where he focused on signal processing, optimization and control. As a graduate teaching assistant at Stanford, he researched artificial intelligence and applied mathematics with Prof. Bernard Widrow.
Nick has served as the AI specialist for Hong Kong-based AI incubator Zeroth.AI, and coached over 20 teams from 5 continents across industries ranging from finance to agriculture to blockchain. He is a certified yoga instructor and an avid surfer.

Sahil Dewan
Sahil Dewan is a graduate of Harvard Business School, where he served as president of the blockchain and cryptocurrency club. He has worked at Draper Dragon Fund and advised several blockchain projects.
Sahil founded FuturEd, an ed-tech startup that pioneered a mobile platform for alumni engagement and fundraising for over 100 educational institutions in India. He was also elected country president for AIESEC India, a youth leadership organization present in more than 125 countries.

Leo Chen
Leo Chen led a team of 8 engineers at Amazon Web Services. There he built high-throughput storage virtualizations for more than 200k EC2 instances. At Amazon Lab126 , Leo built the first generation of Kindle Fire and architected FireOS for all Amazon devices. At Ericsson and Broadcom he worked on their Linux kernel, embedded systems and large-scale distributed systems.
Leo holds a master’s degree in data mining from Simon Fraser University and a bachelor’s degree from Zhejiang University. Leo has completed 8 full marathons and hiked the Grand Canyon R3, John Muir Trail, and soon the entire Pacific Crest Trail.

Eugene Kim
Eugene Kim developed advanced networking protocols during his 15-year tenure at NTT and his 3 years in the networking infrastructure division of AWS. Eugene also built server-side software at Activision Blizzard for the next-generation MMORPG that eventually became Overwatch.
Eugene has long been an active contributor to the open-source community, particularly in the networking and storage subsystems of FreeBSD and Linux. He holds two US patents on GPU-based acceleration of routing decisions in large-scale datacenter networks. As a professional musician with commercially released songs, Eugene cares deeply about digital rights management.

Li Jiang
Li Jiang 蒋犁 has founded a logistic startup during college with the highest revenue. During his six years at GSV Capital, Li organized Pioneer Summit and Global Education Summit with 1,500 attendees including Bill Campbell and Barack Obama.
Li holds an economics degree from Northwestern University. He is an adjunct professor at Northwestern's Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Li trains on ultimate frisbee daily and owns an amateur team that won nationally in 2017.

Chao Ma
Chao Ma was a machine learning scientist at Amazon. He worked on marketplace abuse prevention, retail products pricing and natural language processing. Chao implemented an IPFS prototype in early 2017.
Chao got his bachelor's degree from University of Science and Technology of China, master's degree from Zhejiang University, and Ph.D. in mathematics from CU Boulder. Chao published 6 papers on non-linear analysis and partial differential equations in Advances in Mathematics and other top journals.

Helen Li
Helen Li 李潮文 was a chief writer at CBN Weekly 第一财经杂志 and senior journalist at Bloomberg Business Week. For over a decade, she interviewed tech leaders including the founders of Lenovo and Baidu and wrote over 50 cover stories for CBN Weekly. Since 2018, Helen has led PR & marketing for blockchain projects in both China and the U.S.
Helen graduated with a Master in Journalism and Culture Studies from the City University of Hong Kong. She has received several industry awards including ByteDance’s 今日头条 Top Tech Report Award. Helen has lived and reported in Beijing, Shenzheni, Hong Kong, and Bay Area.

Roadmap

Final Words

As I read and searched through the internet, I realized that I encountered a project which was brilliantly designed and completely focused on solutions blockchain immediately demands.

Harmony offers the ultimate solution for transaction speed issues without compromising reliability.
The unwieldiness of earlier projects is simply erased and replaced by the power of the sharding.
A powerful infrastructure is open for all to carry the blockchains to a high new level.
By doing all of the above energy efficiency of the PoS is at hand.

If you read till here and if you are into blockchain technology then you must be fascinated. Come on, this is exciting, right? Thanks for the great team to creating such a fine piece of work.

And thanks for reading my article.

For more details, please visit the project links below