Harmony (ONE) Things You Need To Know Before Investing

Riya KapoorApril 6, 2022

2 minutes read

Table of Contents

What Is Harmony (ONE)?

Harmony is a blockchain platform designed to facilitate the creation and use of decentralized applications (DApps). The network aims to innovate decentralized applications work by focusing on random state sharding, which allows the creation of blocks in seconds.

According to the project’s website, One is expected to introduce cross-shard contracts and a cross-chain infrastructure by 2021.

Who Are the Founders of Harmony?

Stephen Tse is the founder and CEO of Harmony. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in cryptographic protocols and type theory.

While finishing his degree, Dr. Tse became a research intern at Microsoft. In 2006 he started working as a senior engineer at Google, spending four years in the company. In 2011 he founded Spotsetter, a successful search engine that Apple later acquired. In 2014, Dr. Tse became the principal engineer for Apple.

He founded ONE in 2017. The One founding team comprises twelve people, seven of them being former employees at Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.

What Makes Harmony Unique?

The Harmony mainnet aims to revolutionize block creation by focusing on processing speed and validation. By introducing the sharding process, the company reduced node validation times significantly.

To protect nodes and secure the validation process, ONE introduced the Verifiable Random Function (VRF) for unbiased and unpredictable shard membership. This means that nodes and validators are assigned and re-assigned in a randomized manner.

The project’s ONE Grants program is an initiative that aims to support innovation and attract developers to the ONE mainnet.

How Many Harmony (ONE) Coins Are There in Circulation?

Harmony (ONE) has a maximum supply of 12,600,000,000 tokens. As of February 2021, the circulating supply on the market is about 9,486,327,268.

Out of the total supply of ONE token, 22.4% were dedicated to the initial seed sale. Another 12.5% were set aside for an additional Launchpad sale. The ONE founding team and developers received 16.9% of the total supply. About 26.4% of ONE token were dedicated to protocol development, while another 21.8% were directed towards ecosystem development.

How Is the Harmony Network Secured?

Harmony introduces a new version of the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus. This method is called effective proof-of-stake (EPoS) and allows simultaneous staking from hundreds of validators. This consensus method was developed under the sharding concept utilized in the ONE network.

Unlike proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanisms, EPoS is designed for faster processing times and improved scalability. While PoW requires a lot of electrical and computing power, staking consensus methods rely on many value holders, who become validators.

ONE is also looking to boost staking incentives to attract more node operators. The ONE Open Staking initiative encourages interaction with the network and incentivizes stakeholders with the highest amount of ONE token.