In a recent effort to avoid paying rising gas fees, Harmony had decided to establish a relationship with Ethereum, much to its delight. This bridge was constructed in order to ensure that transactions can be processed in chains (which the segments are broken up into) and to also enable the parallel storage of data.
Although Harmony has certainly benefited from this arrangement, it must nevertheless be mentioned that this decision was also due to a few other fundamental factors which ultimately led to this moment.
Harmony’s Performance Stands Out Amongst Competitors
Numerous other scaling solutions such as NEAR, OMG, Solana, and even Cosmos were also able to regroup during this time, however, it is abundantly clear that the performance of Harmony stands clear and cut above the rest, despite being comparatively smaller. Many still consider Harmony’s status to still be that of a fledgling, mainly due to its overall capitalization of the market currently being at $250 million, whereas Cosmos stands capped at $5 million and NEAR being capped at $1.26 billion.
It is nevertheless important to understand how Harmony works, though in its relation to Ethereum, as a layer-2 solution is often utilized here. This essentially means that the protocol manages to separate blockchain states along with the nodes into shards. This is extremely beneficial as it results in the network being able to scale much more linearly.
Furthermore, 250 nodes are allocated to each shard in an attempt to all but guarantee the cryptographic randomization of the entire process. This, in turn, leads to low transaction fees being maintained by the network with the assistance of a Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance Consensus. Lastly, single block final verification is also assured.
Full Compatibility Reached With Ethereum And Future Plans For Harmony
Complete compatibility to Ethereum had been officially announced by harmony on the 4th of February earlier this month. The very next day, a protocol that allowed the cross-chain lending process within the marketplace between Ethereum and Harmony was also announced by Blits Labs. By February 11th, transparent, reliable as well as decentralized data will be the norm after a partnership between Harmony and API3 was made official as well.
Looking towards the future, Harmony plans to bridge even more assets with Bitcoin and their network, along with focusing on decentralization and cross-chain communication as well.
