what is harmony / what does solve

• 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.
• 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 introduces a new version of the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus. Called effective proof-of-stake (EPoS), this method allows simultaneous staking from hundreds of validators. This consensus method was developed in accordance with the sharding concept utilized in the Harmony network. Unlike proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanisms, EPoS is designed for faster processing times and improved scalability. While PoW requires a lot of electrical and computing power, staking consensus methods rely on an abundance of value holders, who become validators.
• Shard Chain - is a blockchain that processes and validates its own transactions and stores its own state. a shard only processes tractions that is relevant to itself. although a shard chain is relatively independent.
  • Cross-Shard Communication - key component of any sharding based blockchain. C.S capability breaks the barrier between shards and the extends the utility of a single shard beyond itself. there are three categories of cross-shard com
    • 1- main chain driven - projects like Zilliqa rely on the main chain to achieve transactions across shards
    • 2- client driven - omniledge proposed a client driven cross shard transaction mechanism where the messages between shards are collected and sent to shards by clients
    • 3- shard driven - rapid chain proposed that the messages between shards are directly sent by the nodes in the shard without external help
• when validators join a new shard, they will need to quickly synchronize to the current state of the shard in order to validate new transactions.
• in Harmony, new validators joining a shard first download the current state of trie of that shard so they can start validating transactions quickly.

Ecosystem harmony chills with

• Ledger
• De-Fi Kingdoms
• Metamask
• Sushiswap
• Davinci
• Atari
• Travala.com
• Chainlink
• Edgeware