Harmony, a secure proof-of-stake blockchain designed for fast, large-scale settlement of millions of transactions has revealed a successful upgrade of its main net.
The latest upgrade has in-built support for staking, making the project the first blockchain to combine proof-of-stake with sharding.
Binance, Huobi, Other Major Crypto Players Support Harmony Staking Launch
On May 19, 2020, Harmony revealed that it has successfully combined proof-of-stake and sharding following an upgrade to its unique, 4-shard network to fully support staking – a popular and rapidly growing trend in the cryptocurrency market.
Staking has already made many interesting crypto projects that much more attractive, especially Harmony. And how? Stakers can earn annual yields ranging from 15% to 45% in the first year alone.
The addition of staking and the latest main net upgrade builds on top of Harmony’s combined solution of proof-of-stake and sharding that keeps transaction throughput high but costs low. Transactions are settled in just 8 seconds, with fees as low as $0.0000001.
The highly decentralized network has grown to over 320 public nodes and is expected to increase to more than 1000 and beyond before the end of this year.
Harmony also has garnered the support of a variety of top names in the cryptocurrency space who are either helping bring attention to the project’s main net upgrade and addition of staking or are serving as validators for staking themselves. Partners include Binance, Huobi, BiMax, Blockdaemon, Stake.fish, Figment Networks, Sesame Seed, and many more.
Harmony Moves Towards Adoption Following Completed Core Development
Now that Harmony has completed its work on the core protocol, the project plans to move towards pushing forward the case for real-world adoption.
“Now that we’re equipped with a battle-tested base layer, we will shift gears to pursue adoption with the same non stop execution that enabled us to launch the first sharded PoS blockchain,” Harmony CEO, Stephen Tse explained.
Tse expects that the project’s offering of speed, scalability, and cost will enable “use cases and user experiences” that simply cannot be matched on other competing blockchains, which in turn will help with the rapid growth of a loyal user base.
The company’s roadmap also includes an aggressive push to reduce settlement times to under 8 seconds, beginning a community governance movement, and exploring additional pursuits around cross-border transactions and even digital collectibles.
Harmony’s EVM compatibility makes it especially attractive for creative and skilled developers to build user experiences that will drive future adoption. Harmony also intends to offer grants to incentivize developers to utilize its sharded proof-of-stake blockchain.
All this ensures a bright future for Harmony’s development community, and these latest upgrades/additions cement Harmony as one of the most interesting blockchain projects to watch this year.