What exactly is harmony? (ONE)？

Harmony (ONE) is an open blockchain platform that enables high-volume decentralized exchanges, interactive fair games, Visa-scale payment systems, and Internet-of-Things transactions.

Primary Characteristics

Fully Scalable: Harmony, like Zilliqa, shards not only network communication and transaction validation, but also the blockchain state. As a result, Harmony is a fully scalable blockchain.

Sharding is provably secure thanks to Harmony's distributed randomness generation (DRG) process, which is unpredictable, unbiased, verifiable, and scalable. Harmony also non-interruptively reshards the network to protect against slowly adaptive byzantine adversaries.

Efficient and Quick Consensus: Unlike other sharding-based blockchains that use PoW to choose validators, Harmony is based on PoS and thus uses less energy. A linearly scalable BFT algorithm that is 100 times faster than PBFT achieves consensus.

Adaptive-Thresholded PoS: The stakes required for a node to join the network are adjusted based on the total volume of staking so that malicious stakers cannot concentrate their power in a single shard. Furthermore, the threshold is low enough that even small stakeholders can participate in the network and earn rewards.

Scalable Networking Infrastructure: Using the Adaptive Information Dispersal Algorithm, Harmony can quickly propagate blocks within shards or across networks using RaptorQ fountain code. Kademlia routing is also used by Harmony to achieve cross-shard transactions that scale logarithmically with the number of shards.

Consistent Cross-Shard Transactions: Harmony supports cross-shard transactions in which shards communicate directly with one another. To ensure the consistency of cross-shard transactions, an atomic locking mechanism is used.