Cross-Chain Interoperability
Harmony’s bridges can connect any Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake chains. Our FlyClient architecture is fully trustless and highly gas-efficient. Currently, our bridges for Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain secure tens of millions cross-chain assets.
Developers simply change Chain ID and enjoy faster EVM executions identical at the bytecode level. They can use their familiar and standard Web3 tooling to easily migrate to Harmony.
What about users? They can continue to use MetaMask or Ledger — but now pay minimal fees. Any Ethereum wallets or portals can work on Harmony without code changes or new installs — we are fully compatible for both transaction messages and execution environments.
Protocol Strengths
1. Secure, Random State Sharding
Harmony has transcended the blockchain trilemma by bringing the best research to production. Sharding is proven to scaleblockchains without compromising securityand decentralization.We divide not only our network nodes but also the blockchain states into shards, scaling linearly in all three aspects of machines, transactions and storage.To prevent single shard attacks, we must have a sufficiently large number of nodes per shard and cryptographic randomness to re-shard regularly. Each shard has 250 nodes for strong security guarantee against Byzantine behaviors. We use Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) for unbiasable and unpredictable shard membership.
2. Fast Consensus w/ Instant Finality
Harmony has innovated on the battle-tested Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) for fast consensus of block transactions. Our Fast BFT (FBFT) leads to low transaction fees and 1-block-time finality in Harmony Mainnet.We use Boneh–Lynn–Shacham (BLS) constant-sized signatures to commit blocks in a single round of consensus messages. We achieve 2-second block time with view changes in production against adversarial or unavailable leaders.Harmony Mainnet was launched in June 2019. Our network has produced 30M+ blocks with 450k+ transactions in publicly traded, native ONE tokens.
3. Effective PoS & Token Economics
Harmony has designed a novel Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism for network security and economics. Our Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS) reduces centralization and distributes rewards fairlyto thousands of validators.Our staking mechanism supports delegation and reward compounding. To support 100% uptime but fully open participation, EPoS slashes validators who double-sign and it penalizes elected but unavailable nodes.Harmony Economics Model caps the annual issuance at 441 million tokens (about 3% rate in long term). Our model gives validators a simple and predictable return. All transaction fees are burnt to offset the issuance, naturally leading to zero inflationwhen our network usage becomes high.
