Harmony Blockchain Scales Decentralization with Sharding Architecture

Harmony blockchain has been around since its mainnet launched in 2019. The project's goal is to solve the problem of balancing speed and decentralization on a blockchain network.

The developers achieved this by splitting their network into shards, which are subsets of the overall network that handle their own transactions and keep their own copy of the ledger.

Currently, Harmony has four shards, each producing a new block every two seconds. Transactions that cross between shards reach finality within two block times.

This sharding architecture allows nodes to only track their own slice of the network, rather than the entire thing. This makes it possible for smaller participants to keep up with the network's activity without needing enterprise-grade hardware.

Harmony also employs a consensus mechanism called Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS), which is designed specifically for sharded networks. EPoS uses validators who stake Harmony's native token, ONE, to get elected into committees within each shard.

The voting power of these validators within a shard isn't solely based on the number of tokens they hold, but rather an 'effective stake' that prevents any single large holder from dominating a shard's committee.

ONE is also used for paying gas fees, staking, and governance. The tokenomics are designed such that new ONE issuance is cancelled out by transaction fees burned on the network. This means that as more people use the network, less new ONE gets created over time.