Harmony ONE / Harmony

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 the way decentralized applications work by focusing on random state sharding, which allows creating blocks in seconds.

According to the project’s website, Harmony is expected to introduce cross-shard contracts and a cross-chain infrastructure by the end of 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 which Apple later acquired. In 2014, Dr. Tse became the principal engineer for Apple.

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

What Makes Harmony Unique?

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

To ensure the protection of nodes and secure the validation process, Harmony 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 Harmony Grants program is an initiative that aims to support innovation and attract developers to the Harmony mainnet.

Harmony’s Horizon Bridge Hack

Like most cross-chain bridges, Harmony’s Horizon bridge allows crypto holders to move assets between Harmony's network and the Ethereum network, Binance Chain and Bitcoin. In June 2022, the bridge was exploited for approximately $100 million in altcoins (which the attacker swapped for Ethereum) after two of its five validator nodes were compromised.

Although the Harmony team offered a $1 million reward for information leading to the return of the stolen funds, security experts discovered that the attacker(s) had begun moving the loot through the now-defunct Ethereum mixing service, Tornado Cash. There were also reports that the hack was linked to Lazarus Group, a notorious North Korea-affiliated cybercriminal organization.

Interestingly, it appears all hope has not been lost. In January 2023, Binance and Huobi crypto exchanges teamed up to recover some of the stolen funds.