Summary of the Harmony blockchain in 2022 and outlook for 2023
The Harmony blockchain has achieved impressive progress in 2022 in terms of technology and ecosystem building. By exploring the possibilities of sharding technology, the blockchain promises to create a scalable, secure, and affordable network. This article will take you on a quick tour of Harmony’s technical advantages and ecosystem highlights.
Harmony is an open-source, scalable, and Ethereum-compatible blockchain. Since its mainnet went live in June 2019, Harmony has been at the forefront of perfecting sharding technology, building the groundwork for blockchain scalability.
The network continues to explore the development of a cross-chain ecosystem. In this regard, Harmony provides developers with powerful cross-chain tools to port assets easily. This should then eventually lead to a seamless experience for usage of blockchain applications.
Content:
- Technical highlight: a look at Harmony’s scaling solution
- Ecosystem highlight: projects that come out on top
- Harmony’s 2023: unleashes creator economy and Web3 identity
- Harmony 2023 Roadmap
Technical highlight: a look at Harmony’s scaling solution
As blockchain technology becomes increasingly used in various industries, it underscores the urgency to solve the scaling problem. Networks have made various attempts to achieve increased throughput, such as adopting modularity, transferring the transaction load off-chain, and so on. However, all these solutions sacrifice security and decentralization to some extent.
Harmony decided to employ sharding technology. Sharding is a method to break up data into smaller chunks. It’s commonly used in databases. In blockchain technology, sharding fulfills the same purpose. It is used to distribute the computational and storage workload across a decentralized network.
Its solution is considerably comprehensive because it implements deep sharding, including network sharding, transaction sharding, and state sharding, to achieve linear scaling performance. This means that the transaction processing capacity of the network rises as usage increases.
At peak, Harmony’s protocol achieved 500 transactions per shard per second in production. During the same period, the network accrued $1.41 billion total value locked, $1.48 billion stakes, 120 active apps, more than 371,000 monthly active users, and around 656,000 wallets.
In the video below, founder Stephen Tse provides a more in-depth review of Harmony’s scaling technology.
Ecosystem highlight: projects that come out on top
DappRadar tracks a wide variety of dapps on the Harmony network, covering games, DeFi, social, and more. After a year of development, many Harmony-based projects have achieved several milestones. Let’s look at some of the most notable projects.
1Wallet
1Wallet is an open-source social mobile wallet that stores private keys on users’ mobile devices instead of on custodial servers. It leverages Apple Keychain integration and multi-party computation for wallet recovery, eliminating the risk of seed phrase mismanagement.
It’s worth noting that the dapp has gained traction with Gen-Z users. They utilize 1Wallet to curate communities, chat about NFT airdrops, and create exclusive content access and generative 3D avatars. Currently, this Harmony-native dapp has over 1,000 daily users engaging with their feed covering events, street fashion, collegiate sports, and other cultural experiences.
MADNFTs
MADNFTs is an NFT launchpad and marketplace built for creators. What makes MADNFTs unique is that it focuses on exploring NFT use cases by incorporating Web3 social networking into the platform.
Artists and creators can leverage MADNFTs to create genuine community engagement through rankings, social engagement, and various creative campaigns. It also greatly reduces the barrier for users to enter the world of NFT. To this end, MAD has an Academy that provides creators with step-by-step guides to understanding NFTs and smoothly getting on board the platform.
Tranquil Finance
Tranquil Finance is a multi-primitive DeFi dapp on Harmony that supports DEX, lending, and liquid staking. It is part of the Defira metaverse, enabling the GameFi layer of the virtual world. Defira’s players can use Tranquil to trade tokens, supply and borrow assets via Tranquil Lending, and stake ONE for rewards.
Harmony’s 2023: unleashes creator economy and Web3 identity
Harmony has launched a set of new domain systems to unify internet domains and crypto names as Web3 nations, introducing .1 and .country. On-chain domains like test.1 store users’ wallet addresses, digital collectibles, and social reputation on Harmony. Then is test.country, the browsable domain that displays creators’ content and engagement gimmicks for fans to interact with.
The new domain system aims to facilitate a decentralized and accessible digital economy and identity system, providing a base layer to form Web3 communities. Furthermore, the technology integrates with the existing web infrastructure to give anyone a seamless and user-friendly experience accessing all kinds of blockchain-based applications.
Watch the video below to learn more about it.
Harmony 2023 Roadmap
2023 Q1
- Harmony 2023 Whitepaper & 10 Sharding Fellows (4 mentors)
- Single-block composable cross-shard transactions
- 20% matching traffic to Shard 1 (whereas 80% to Shard 0)
- Games: wallet integrations for desktop-mobile sync & approvals
2023 Q2
- Validator resharding every 18-hour epoch with gradual state sync
- Games: on-chain escrows for tournament prizes (esports, sport betting)
- Cross-chain: chain-agnostic toolings and shard-independent interface
- Community: social curation (reputation), creator-fan economy (events)
2023 Q3
- Account abstractions for smart wallets with social recovery
- Community: seasonal governance (quadratic stakes with recency bias)
- Games: embedded marketplaces (minting editorials, trading analytics)
- Cross-chain: zero-knowledge-proof bridges, modular data availability
Useful links
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