‌Harmony is a fast and secure blockchain for decentralized applications. Our production mainnet supports 4 shards of 1000 nodes, producing blocks in 2 seconds with finality.
Our Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS) reduces centralization while supporting stake delegation, reward compounding and double-sign slashing.
Harmony aims to build an open network of nodes operated and governed by a large community. This node community is called Pangaea.
Are we decentralized yet? There’s no consensus without participation. There are now 1,000 Harmony nodes – so far 800 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.
Harmony’s sharding works not only on the network communication and transaction validation, but also on the blockchain state. This makes Harmony fully scalable on all three aspects of the blockchain: network, storage and transaction processing.
Harmony’s sharding process is provably secure against shard attacks because the network validators are randomly assigned and shuffled among shards. 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.
Unlike traditional blockchains which require PoW (Proof of Work) to reach consensus, Harmony is a Proof-of-Stake blockchain which is energy efficient and low-cost for node runners. 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.
Harmony supports cross-shard transactions to achieve composability of assets between shards. We designed a receipt-based asynchronous cross-shard communication mechanism which achieves eventual consistency so no double-spending is possible between shards.
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.
Harmony’s vision is “For One and For All,” creating open consensus for 10 billion people.
Harmony’s community is built on “Handshake & Embrace.” All Is Fair in Love and War. (Euphues [Euphuism]: The Anatomy of Wit, 1579). Read the “ Interview” on our founding story.
Harmony’s 2025 roadmap focuses on achieving 1-second finality, unifying decentralized finance, and creating an open AI ecosystem.
We are continuously upgrading our protocol for seamless performance with enhancements such as Verkle Trees, State Expiry, and improved network resilience through Stream Sync and Leader Rotation. These innovations power platforms like pump.one for memecoin creation and exchange.one for stablecoins and perpetual trading. Meanwhile, the .country top-level domains enable AI agents to own self-custodial wallets and domains.
We aim to simplify DeFi, expand liquidity, and attract new users. Innovations such as yield enhancer and perpetual options markets, combined with AI-driven frameworks like Eliza OS—empowering autonomous agents for trading, governance, and decision-making—are designed to make DeFi intuitive and accessible to everyone. By leveraging AI to create cult-like memes and autonomous agents that amplify engagement through viral narratives and real-time market insights, we aim to redefine community-driven finance with creativity and precision.
These advancements aim to onboard millions of DeFi assets, billions of community memes, and trillions of intelligent models. Together, these efforts reflect our vision for 2025: building a blockchain that is fast, simple, and accessible to everyone.
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Crypto Startup School
Learn how to build a crypto company. The course videos from a16z’s Crypto Startup School, held in the spring of 2020, are now available to all. Use the hours of free videos and the reading materials, below, to navigate the idea maze and start building crypto projects. https://harmony.one/school.
Crypto Thesis for 2021
A Messari report: key trends, people, companies, and projects to watch across crypto, Bitcoin, and Ethereum, with predictions for 2021. https://harmony.one/theses.
NFT Canon
The NFT Canon is a go-to resource for artists and creators, developers, corporations and institutions, communities and other organizations seeking to understand or do more with non-fungible tokens. It’s a curated list of readings and resources on all things NFTs (inspired by the a16z Crypto Canon), and is organized from the big picture of what NFTs are and why they matter, to how to mint, collect, and do more with them — including various applications such as art, music, gaming, social tokens, and others. https://harmony.one/nfts.
Check Coinmarketcap Markets for a list of Exchanges trading Harmony One. You may also want to get them via Defi DApps.
Check for a list of Harmony One wallets.
Check for a list of decentralized applications running on Harmony One.
For those wishing to participate in staking without running a validator, delegation is the best approach to still get involved and earn block rewards. The act of delegating tokens and earn rewards is called staking.
Harmony ONE holders can delegate their tokens to existing validators using our staking explorer: . If the tokens are delegated to an elected validator, a portion of the block reward earned by the validator will be credited to the delegator (according to section ).
The earned block rewards are stored in a separate reward balance of the delegator, which can be immediately withdrawn to the delegator’s account balance. The block rewards can also be staked again to achieve the compounding effect of staking.
Your delegated tokens are also associated with slashing risks of the validator. As a delegator, you should carefully choose validators based on their historical performance metrics such as APR, uptime and commission. In case of indifference or indecisiveness, you should distribute your delegations among multiple validators in order to minimize risk.
New Delegators Quick, Simple Walkthrough:
đź’» Download the ONEwallet extension from
✍️ Using the new extension create a new wallet or recover an existing one using seed words.
🎯 Next head over to the
đź‘€ Choose a validator (or a few)
đź’° Stake your tokens
🤑 Earn block rewards every 2 seconds.
Happen to be a more visual learner? Be sure to like and subscribe if you find the video(s) helpful.
For a deeper understanding of the staking mechanism, please refer to under the Validators section.
For more questions, check our section.
Harmony in 2021 will focus on adoption through developers and partners. We will continue to strengthen our network features, to lead industry in our cross-chain architecture, and to engage broad ecosystem to build with us. There will be explosive growth and new applications this year in blockchains — Harmony is ready to be leading a part of this global fintech revolution.
Towards our mission, Harmony’s current strategy is “Cross-Chain Finance” as decentralized finance and interoperable protocols are the product-market fit in 2021. We are building trustless bridges to Bitcoin and Ethereum for broader access of users and assets with Harmony as a hub. An example of utility is a cross-chain exchange without custodial risks. Our current settlement layer and soon liquidity infrastructure will enable further financial innovations, leading to cross-exchange integrations and cross-border finance.
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