Exchange Harmony

Harmony (ONE) is a native token on the Harmony platform — a solution aimed to provide scalability for the blockchain developers, to give them tools to build and deploy their dApps. Harmony was founded in 2017 by Stephen Tze, who had previously worked for Microsoft, Google, and Apple.

To provide scalability, Harmony uses sharding — a technology splitting the network into segments, or shards. All of the shards can validate their own set of transactions simultaneously, thus improving speed. Moreover, this setup is secured using the modified Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithm based on Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS) consensus protocol, unlike some other blockchain platforms that use sharding but employ Proof-of-Work. This also helps speed up block confirmation, resulting in transaction finality times of about 2 seconds. 

As an additional security measure, the choice of nodes for the shards is made using a Verifiable Random Function, which makes it unpredictable. Therefore, the shards forming process is supposed to be resistant to collusion by malicious actors. There is also a re-sharding process in place, changing the configuration of nodes in the shards regularly and minimizing the possibility of corrupting a shard over time.

ONE token is used for staking by validators, to vote in the consensus, with penalties in place for the dishonest nodes. Honest validators also get rewards for their participation in securing the system.