Over 26% growth for blockchain utility thanks to DeFi, games and NFT products
The Harmony blockchain ecosystem sees healthy growth across all its verticals, as dapp developers and users alike experience the platform’s benefits. Sharding creates a unique opportunity for blockchain solutions to scale their platform, and Harmony is reaping the rewards.
Harmony is a new generation of sharding-based blockchain. It is fully scalable, provably secure, and energy-efficient. The scalability issue has critically limited the sustainable development of the blockchain ecosystem. Harmony addresses this problem by combining the best research results and engineering practice in an optimally tuned system. Notably, the outstanding performance of harmony has been proved by its ever-expanding ecosystem.
The scalability of blockchain technology has always been the focus of the industry. Most public chains that came after Ethereum have been committed to solving this problem. As a result, the explosive increase of public chains has ushered in. Harmony is one of the rising stars using this technology, and its TVL has grown over 20% in the past week. This signals confidence from both users and dapp developers.
The growing Harmony ecosystem
The excellent performance of Harmony makes it stand out among many competitors. At present, there is a myriad of dapps that have chosen to embrace Harmony. The ecosystem works with all kinds of different products, including games, NFTs, and DeFi. Harmony rapidly thrives in all sectors, including games, NFT, DeFi, etc. Its ecosystem is expanding healthily and rapidly, as the Total Value Locked (TVL) in Harmony smart contracts grows.
The chart below shows the 7-day trend for the TVL on Elrond, Zilliqa, and Harmony from February 25 to March 3, 2022. When compared with leading blockchains like Ethereum, BSC, and Polygon, these numbers aren’t impressive. Therefore Harmony’s growth is best compared to competing for blockchain ecosystems.
As can be seen, the upward trend is most pronounced on the Harmony blockchain. Specifically, the data grows from $632.62 million to $801.3 million within a week, registering a growth rate of 26.7%, according to DeFi Llama. TVL is the overall value of crypto assets locked, or deposited, in a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol. Every service in a blockchain ecosystem relies on DeFi to power its own economy. Therefore, TVL is a key metric for gauging interest in an entire ecosystem.
Next, let’s take a look at three sets of data that reflect the overall performance of the top dapps on Harmony. DappRadar tracks and ranks a great number of applications on the Harmony blockchain. We picked five from the top-ranked Harmony-based dapps, and they are DeFi Kingdoms, ViperSwap, MarsColony, NFTKEY Marketplace, and Unite Finance. These dapps cover the fields of DeFi, NFTs, and Metaverse. Undoubtedly, the Harmony ecosystem has emerged as a diversified and dynamic one.
We aggregated the number of users, volume, and transactions on these five dapps, then looked into the trends over the past 30 days (as of the time of the writing). The chart shows despite the recent turbulent cryptocurrency market, the performance of the Harmony dapps appears to be very stable. More notably, the seven-day user data of ViperSwap, Unite Finance, and Mars Colony increased by 1.75%, 7.65%, and 13.13%, respectively compared with the previous week as of the time of the writing.
What is Harmony
Harmony is an open and fast blockchain. The Harmony mainnet runs Ethereum applications with 2-second transaction finality and 100 times lower fees. Harmony’s secure bridges offer cross-chain transfers with Ethereum, Binance, and 3 other chains.
Notably, Harmony is also a public blockchain that uses sharding. Let’s get a handle on what sharding is. Sharding is not new to the internet world as it generally refers to database sharding. Simply put, it is a strategy to allocate the data processing work from a single database to multiple databases. Therefore it increases the efficiency of data handling. Theoretically, sharding enables the infinite horizontal expansion of the database.
Sharding in blockchain bears a similar nature. A network backed by sharding strategy creates multiple groups (i.e., shards) of validators and lets them process transactions concurrently. In this way, the total transaction throughput increases linearly as the number of shards grows.
Harmony, the next generation sharding-based blockchain, is fully scalable, provably secure, and energy-efficient. Moreover, Harmony provides an unparalleled technical solution for dapps to have peace of mind when serving large users and facing high-frequency transactions. Harmony has various features to give the ecosystem its own uniqueness.
Unique technical features of Harmony
- Fully Scalable – Harmony applies sharding to network communication, transaction validation, and the blockchain state. This makes Harmony a fully scalable blockchain.
- Secure Sharding – Harmony’s sharding process is provably secure thanks to the distributed randomness generation (DRG) process, which is unpredictable, unbiased, verifiable, and scalable. Harmony also reshards the network in a non-interruptive manner to prevent slowly adaptive byzantine adversaries.
- Efficient and Fast Consensus – Harmony is based on PoS and thus energy efficient. Besides, the consensus is reached with a linearly scalable Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) algorithm that’s 100 times faster than Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT).
- Adaptive-Thresholded PoS – The threshold of stakes required for a node to join the network is adjusted based on the volume of total staking in a way that malicious stakers cannot concentrate their power in a single shard. Moreover, the threshold is low enough for small stakers to participate in the network and earn rewards.
- Scalable Networking Infrastructure – With RaptorQ fountain code, Harmony can propagate blocks quickly within shards or across networks by using the Adaptive Information Dispersal Algorithm. Harmony also adopts Kademlia routing to achieve cross-shard transactions that scale logarithmically with the number of shards.
- Consistent Cross-Shard Transactions – Harmony supports cross-shard transactions with shards directly communicating with each other.
Closing words
In summary, high-quality dapps hope to have stable, efficient, and cheap blockchain technology as the soil to nurture their projects. On the other hand, the comprehensiveness of a blockchain ecosystem requires various high-quality dapps to enrich the scope of services to its users. In the case of Harmony, we have seen the relationship between dapps and the technical infrastructure is a healthy one, in which the flywheel effect positively impacts the Harmony ecosystem and that of individual dapps as well.
