Harmony Becomes 1st Sharded PoS Blockchain
- With 4 shards and a proprietary Effective Proof-of-Stake algorithm, Harmony has laid the foundation upon which developers can build.
- The project’s goals for 2020 include sub-8 second settlement times and transitioning to community governance.
The Harmony mainnet team, including founder and CEO Stephen Tse (middle of bottom row). Harmony
The dapp-focused company announced today that it had successfully deployed a new version of its Harmony blockchain. After years of research and development, Harmony has become the first project to successfully deploy a combination of sharding (4 shards) and proof of stake (Effective Proof of Stake) – the goal of course being scalability.
Anyone can now become a block validator of the network, which seems to be a lucrative opportunity – according to Harmony, stakers can expect “45% to 15% in the first year”. To become a staker, you can visit this page.
In the announcement, the company makes a comparison to Ethereum to point out just how quick transactions are now handled by the network:
“Transactions on Harmony settle in 8 seconds, a welcome change for those accustomed to waiting minutes for Ethereum transactions to finalize. Costs are significantly cheaper as well. A transaction on Harmony will set you back only $0.000·001.”
Currently, there are around 320 public nodes on the Harmony network, with plans to increase that to 1,000 before the end of the year. It is important point out here that Harmony uses a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus algorithm, and not delegated proof of stake. This means that anyone who holds some of the native-to-the-ecosystem ONE token can become a validator and start earning passive income.
Aside from PoS improving how computational resources are spent, the network is also split into 4 shards to ensure faster operations.
Harmony CEO, Stephen Tse, commented on future plans for the project now that it has successfully laid the foundation:
“Now that we’re equipped with a battle-tested base layer, we will shift gears to pursue adoption with the same nonstop execution that enabled us to launch the first sharded PoS blockchain. Our scalability, speed and cost will enable use cases and user experiences that no other blockchain before us could.”
- North Korea’s Lazarus Group has moved around $63.5 million of crypto assets connected to the Harmony bridge hack over the weekend.
- The hackers tried to move a portion of the funds through Binance and Huobi, but the exchanges were able to freeze their account and recover around 124 BTC.
Shutterstock
- Ethereum’s PoS upgrade, also known as the Merge, was executed at 06:44 AM UTC on 15 September, combining the existing blockchain with the parallel Beacon Chain.
- The move has reduced Ethereum’s energy consumption by more than 99%, which is equal to 0.2% of the global electricity consumption.
- Called Coinbase Wrapped Staked ETH (cbETH), the new token will allow Coinbase customers to use their staked ETH while still earning rewards on the exchange.
- cbETH will not track the price of ETH as it represents the stacked token plus all of its accumulated staking interest, which will cause a “divergence” in the price of the two assets.