What is Harmony?

Our vision is Open Consensus for 10 Billion People.

Our open infrastructure is a high-throughput, low-latency, and low-fee consensus platform designed to power decentralized economies of the future.

We aim to deliver both scalability and decentralization. The promise of open consensus is to enable decentralized coordination at scale but no platform has yet been able to achieve both.

Similar to the way that Google vertically integrates its search infrastructure, we take a full stack approach to solve consensus at scale. We apply 10x innovations at every layer in consensus algorithms, systems, and networking to maximize the performance of our network while maintaining decentralization. Our end-to-end integration allows us to iterate faster and make more aggressive optimizations than could be done with a modular approach.

Our Approach

Harmony's technical architecture implements a full & secure sharding scheme, efficient consensus, and scalable networking infrastructure.

Harmony relies on a secure sharding process, where validators are distributed into shards based on a randomness that is both unpredictable and unbiasable. Harmony is a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, where validators needs to stake a certain amount of tokens to be eligible for block validation. Harmony integrates an efficient consensus protocol called FBFT that combines BLS multi-signature and view change protocol to achieve high robustness and low latency. With the adoption of networking technology including RaptorQ fountain code and Kademlia routing, Harmony is able to achieve cross-shard transactions that scale sub linearly by the number of shards.

By innovating on each layer, Harmony aims to provide a scalable, secure, and decentralized system that supports economic activities, including data marketplaces, gaming, and financial transactions, for billions of people.

To participate in our research and technical discussions, join our Research forum on talk.harmony.one.