What is Harmony?

Harmony is a fast and secure blockchain with key innovations in distribution and peer-to-peer networking. Harmony aims to help enterprises create marketplaces with interchangeable tokens. Harmony uses the zero-disclosure evidence protocol to simultaneously share data and protect customer privacy. The challenges that Harmony needs to solve are common to the entire blockchain industry - most notably scalability. Harmony aims to be the first scalable production network with a proof-of-stake.
Harmony has the ONE coin that may be used for payments and as a fuel for creating transactions in the Harmony ecosystem. The coin stimulates and encourages many participants, including developers, validators, investors and community members who protect and manage the network.
A method to make Harmony scalable is sharding, a way of dividing a network into several parts called shards. Sharding significantly increases bandwidth, which increases linearly with network size. The implementation of the division into distributed ledgers allows you to combine high productivity and decentralization. Harmony is not the first public blockchain implementing the sharding method but it offers innovative enhancements to this technology.

Where did Harmony come from?

Harmony is well- known for the successful token sale on the Binance Launchpad, which was held as a lottery in May 2019. It was the fifth IEO project on the Binance Launchpad and the second token sale arranged by the new lottery rules.
According to reports, all 1.58 billion ONE coins offered on the token sale were sold to lottery winners. During the initial exchange offer, the price was $0.003175 per coin.

The project team consists of highly qualified industry specialists. Many of them have authority in the technical and scientific communities, but at the current stage, they are not widely known persons in the crypto industry.
One of the most famous team members is Stephen Tse - an experienced engineer and programmer, who has a doctoral degree in security protocols and compiler verification. He worked at Microsoft Research, Google, and Apple. He founded the mobile search engine Spotsetter.
Nicolas Burtey - founder of VR startup who has a master's degree in computational photography and a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science.
Alok Kothari is a deep learning specialist who worked on language recognition systems for Siri in Apple.
The team is including a large number of talented and experienced developers.

What are the advantages of Harmony?

Full scalability
Harmony protects not only network communications and transaction verification, but also the state of the blockchain. This makes Harmony a fully scalable blockchain.
Safe sharding
The Harmony splitting process is guaranteed to be safe thanks to the distributed randomness generation (DRG) process.
Agreed Transactions
Harmony supports transactions between shards when shards directly communicate with each other. The connection between shards allows the entire network to have improved scalability.
Improved consensus mechanism
The Harmony consensus is called FBFT (Fast Byzantine Resiliency). This consensus is an improvement on PBFT and it is specifically oriented to speed the process. The basic principles of their work are similar: both agreed types have a leader node and a validator node. The leader transmits the data, and validators agree whether the data is correct, but the FBFT uses multi-signatures to speed up the verification. Harmony Consensus Validators are selected based on proof of stake - PoS provides added network security.
Decentralization
Sharding divides the blockchain data warehouse into parts, each of them contains a subset of the blockchain state. This makes the Harmony network more decentralized.

What are the disadvantages of Harmony?

Centralized distribution of coins
As is known 22.4% of coins were sold to large investors, only 12.5% were distributed during IEO. The remaining amount is distributed between the team and the project development funds.
The presence of high competition
The main competitors include blockchain platforms that use paging technology: Zilliqa, QuarkChain, Ethereum 2.0. Unfortunately, the project documents do not include a comprehensive comparison of the project with competitors. Therefore, it is quite difficult to find its competitiveness.
Risks associated with the introduction of a large number of new technological solutions
A large number of innovations in the project, on the one hand, forms the potential for its growth. On the other hand, it increases the number of risks.

How to buy Harmony on SimpleSwap?

Harmony is a promising new blockchain platform with a number of innovations in sharding and host technology. The project has a high chance of success and if you want to purchase ONE coins - you can do it on the SimpleSwap platform. Here the tutorial on how to do it:

Choose the currency you want to exchange (e.g. BTC) in the first drop-down list. Enter the amount you would like to swap.
Select ONE in the second drop-down list. You will see the estimated amount that you will receive after the exchange.
Enter the Recipient’s Address. Harmony will be sent to this address. Be careful and make sure you use the correct address.
Check all the information you have entered. If everything is correct click the Exchange button.
You will see the Bitcoin deposit address. You need to transfer the necessary amount of BTC to this address to start the exchange.

Just a few clicks and you are the owner of ONE coins!