Harmony – Open Consensus for 10B

Sharding and Staking on Mainnet

Harmony is a fast and secure blockchain for decentralized applications. Our production mainnet supports 4 shards of 1000 nodes, producing blocks in 5 seconds with finality.
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Our Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS) reduces centralization while supporting stake delegation, reward compounding and double-sign slashing.

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Platform Strengths

Secure, Random State Sharding

Harmony has transcended the blockchain trilemma by bringing the best research to production. Sharding is proven to scale blockchains without compromising security and decentralization.
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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.
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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 Random Function (VDF) for unbiasable and unpredictable shard membership.

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.
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We use Boneh–Lynn–Shacham (BLS) constant-sized signatures to commit blocks in a single round of consensus messages. We achieve 5-second block time with view changes in production against adversarial or unavailable leaders.
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Harmony Mainnet was launched in June 2019. Our network has produced 10M+ blocks with 20k+ transactions in publicly traded, native ONE tokens.

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 fairly to 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 insurance, naturally leading to zero inflation when our network usage becomes high.

Read Harmony API Documentation and Download SDK

Open Community

Harmony launches on Binance US feat. Simon Wan

Harmony ONE launches on Binance.US to users based in the United States. In this film, we celebrated great American pioneers and the progress of technology.

Harmony + BUSD – Payment Solutions for Cross-Border Finance

Adding Binance’s USD stablecoin is the first major step towards our vision of enabling cross-border finance on Harmony.

Harmony AMA with Binance US CEO Catherine Coley

In our AMA with Binance.US, we discussed our roadmap on cross-chain decentralized exchanges and cross-border finance.

Watch Our Weekly Video Updates and Explainers

Open Development

Binance.US Launch, Chainlink, DeFi on Mainnet, August Update

We launched ONE on Binance.US with USD fiat, USDT & BUSD pairs. Our team built Maker, Curve, Balancer and Yearn demos on mainnet.

We supported 7 $25k grants on wallets, bridges & cross-border remittances and are integrating Chainlink oracle for cross-chain DeFi liquidity.

Ethereum 3.0? “Scaling Cryptography in Blockchain”

Ready for Ethereum 3.0? Our CEO presents cryptography already in use on blockchain mainnets.

We survey the latest usage metrics, competitive landscape and why cryptography is the 1000x magic for building open platforms.

Harmony $7M Grant: Cross-Border Finance & Zero-Knowledge Proofs

Our grants are to drive our platform’s mainnet utility, decentralized community, and cryptographic innovations — aligned with our 2020 roadmap on cross-border finance and auditable privacy.

We allocate 154.2M tokens per month for protocol and ecosystem development.

Read Our Monthly Newsletters and In-Depth Blogs

Learn More About Our Angels and Governors

Founding Team

Stephen Tse

Stephen Tse 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.

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 decentralized protocols and sharding in early 2017.

Nick White

Nick White holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
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As a graduate teaching assistant at Stanford, he researched artificial intelligence and applied mathematics with Prof. Bernard Widrow.

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.

See 25 Harmonauts and Team Culture

Decentralized Validators

Harmony aims to build an open network of nodes operated and governed by a large community. This node community is called Pangaea.
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Are we decentralized yet? There’s no consensus without participation. There are now 1,000 Harmony nodes – so far 320 of them run by the community – in line with thousands of Bitcoin and Ethereum nodes. Pangaea consists of volunteers and validators from more than 100 countries and most of them have never run a node before.

Join 320 and More Validators

“Harmony recently raised $5 million through an IEO on Binance...the vetting was
far more rigorous than the ICO process, and showed how the industry was maturing.”

"Bringing forward the product from the testnet to the real world is the actual challenge; and Team Harmony definitely possesses the talent to implement their vision."

"Harmony’s core architecture and approach are the right ones to scale blockchain protocol (state sharding and peer to peer networking)"

"Blockchains provide a secure, immutable, and transparent tech infrastructure that allow payment services with extremely low transaction costs."