Hello everyone,
A few days ago I posted a poll about which projects you are most interested in to see a review about. All projects started with an “O”; ONE, OPCT and OSWAP.
Harmony ONE won the poll. So here is my honest but subjective review about Harmony ONE.
What is Harmony ONE?
Lets start with what Harmony is so that everyone is on same page.
Imagine Ethereum, then remove all the bad parts and you have Harmony. That's it.
Jk, it does more. The Harmony team looked at Zilliqa, Omniledger and RapidChain, took inspiration from them and made a chain that removed the limitations the other chains had. This resulted in a chain that is Energy efficient, fast, scalable and secure. Because Harmony does not rely on PoW like Ethereum, Bitcoin or Zilliqa, it can scale its shard linear with the amount of nodes.
This resulted in 500 TPS per shard, with currently 4 shards this means 2000 TPS. Because of this Harmony aims to have a transaction finality of 2 seconds with gas fees being a fraction of a dollar.
To make the chain more secure it uses a beacon chain and a slashing fee. It is explained more in the whitepaper, but it basically means that if an attacker wants to corrupt the network, it needs to corrupt a shard and the beacon chain. If another validator finds out that the attacker is doing this, the network slashes the total stake of the attacker on that chain and awards it to the validator that proved the misbehavior.
In short; Harmony is a fast, reliable, cheap alternative to Ethereum, that can be used with Metamask. Their goal is forming a bridge between ecosystems.
What do I like and what do I not like?
I really like that Harmony is its own chain that is energy efficiency, being fast and at the same time not being crazy expensive or being a layer 2 relying on Ethereum.
But u/GoodJobNL, what about Polygon you ask?
I like Polygon a lot as well, but personally I do not think it is the best chain out there. It uses Ethereum to validate transactions for security, but has the downside that when Ethereum is congested, Polygon transactions are getting stuck. Also, when Ethereum 2.0 arrives, it basically makes Polygon useless. It would be running a Proof of Stake layer 2 chain on a chain that is then already Proof of Stake. But hey that's my opinion.
Harmony is it's own chain, but is fully EVM compatible allowing for easy bridging of the Ethereum ecosystem.
What I like less about Harmony is that they are slow with bridging to more chains. They have an awesome bridge between Eth<>Harmony<>BSC, they just need to get it working for a lot more chains. It is by far the best bridge out there.
Another thing I don't like is that on their ecosystem page they have a lot of projects, but a decent part of these never saw the day of light. On top of that, it is almost impossible to find info on a lot of them, except for an announcement. This way of advertising is giving the wrong impression. The bridge to Polkadot for example is no where to be found, even though they are proudly advertising it in the middle of the picture.
On top of this, the general documentation, marketing archive, etc. is very poorly organised. A lot of things are hard to find, and you need to get the info through other community members. Did you for example know Harmony is having a 300 million dollar bounty? I didn't know at least till someone told me, while I actually had been looking for it.
What about the chain itself? Yes it is fast and beautiful, but no one uses the other shards, it is complicated for beginners and projects are less attractive when launched on other shards. This makes the TPS limited at 500, which sometimes leads to congestion. The other shards are just producing empty blocks. When Harmony gets more congested, they will probably look into it more, but gas fees already more than 10x'ed on shard 0. It is still less than a fraction of a dollar, but 10x is a lot.
As last, Harmony is inflationary, which kinda sucks. It is not the biggest deal, but from an investment standpoint it means that the marketcap needs to grow with around 3% per year to stay stable.
In conclusion
Harmony ONE is a nice chain, but they have some hurdles to take. If you like Zilliqa, Polygon, Ethereum, Binance smart chain, or anything similar, then it is smart to take a look at Harmony as well. It promises a lot of good things, and if they can improve on their current flaws, then it could become a big player.
This is just my slightly rushed opinion, feel free to discuss in the comments. Battery is running out now, enjoy the read.