Harmony has taken a beating the past week along with many alts. However now might be a great entry point for the ONE coin if you can weather the short term volatility.
What is Harmony (One)?
Harmony is a sharded Proof of Stake blockchain that is EVM compatible. It uses effective proof-of-stake (EPoS) and decentralized randomness in order to allow cross-shard routing and fast block propagation. It boasts a 5 second block propagation, 2 second transmission finality across its shards, and extremely low Tx fees.
It does have the ability to act as a layer 2 solution for Ethereum and believes itself to be comparable to Optimistic and ZK rollups in efficiency. It heavily markets itself as a such for Ethereum based DApps, DeFi, and cross-chain functionality because of its high speed, low tx fees ($0.000001), near instantaneous finality, and ability to process "thousands" of transactions per second. I could only find them bragging of theoretically achieving 10M transactions per second back in 2019, but it seems they have backed off that claim when reality set in- if you're able to find a more precise number feel free to throw it down in the comments.
Nerd-speak: If you want to get down and dirty into the technicals you can find it here: technology but here is a quick overview and comparison pulled from their website.
Ecosystem:
Exchanges: You can find Harmony on 9 different exchanges but almost 85% of volume comes from BINANCE and Binance.US.
Wallets: 6 options including their own One Wallet, Trust Wallet, and Ledger
Staking Pools: 14 to choose from
Investors/Backers: Include Binance Labs & Hashkey
"Partners": The biggest news here is that they are integrating Injective Protocol and Benchmark Protocol. Additionally SushiSwap will now be available on the Harmony block. They also include projects such as SWFT payments, Ankr, Unifi, Magic, Swoop, SeeSwap, Animoco, Quid, Lymp, SafeHaven, Incognito, Debrief, Suterusu, IBC Media
Tokenomics:
Utility: One is the native token used for paying transaction fees, it can be used for staking and rewards, and it is used for open governance.
Harmony has a Max supply of 12.6B tokens with 9.4B in circulation. It has a 3% inflationary rate. However, it caps the annual issuance at 441 million tokens. They claim transaction fees are to be burnt to offset the issuance leading to NO inflation once network usage becomes high. This is one area of possible concern as "high network usage" could be arbitrarily interpreted and they have not started burning yet.
The One coin has already had a great run this calendar year with a January 1 price of $0.004 and an ATH of $0.222 on March 29, 2021. It was in consolidation mode and looked as though it was ready to test its ATH when Bitcoin decided to take a poo on the market and dragged Harmony below its resistance levels. Its 24 hours levels have fluctuated between .113 and .123 the past several days.
Staking your One can be lucrative with many seeing around 12% rewards. If you prefer to keep your Harmony on an exchange for trading opportunities Binance offers 2-3% (held steadily at 2.73% the past 6 months) if you hold 10K coins. They just released this today on Twitter, but it is ONLY for Binance customers- not Binance.US.
Team:
I tend to gravitate to ALT projects that do not have anonymous developers; it lends to more legitimacy when you can G-search or pop on Linked-In and verify that an actual person is in charge. I'm not going to go over qualifications for brevity sake, but you can deep dive here.
Conclusion:
Until Bitcoins settles down a bit One will continue to see short term volatility. Every time BTC farts One tends to pass-out from the smell and drop to the $.113 USD level. That stated there is a lot to like about the continual progress that Harmony makes. They are a very active development team, have a great community, vibrant social media, and seem to be consistently adding usage and utility to their network. If they can prove themselves to be a viable layer 2 solution for Ethereum and continue their development the One coin is riped for a dramatic increase over the next few months.
There has also been a ton of rumors regarding a COINBASE listing. Here are my thoughts: In Q4 2020 they were unable to complete Coinbase's Rosetta Data & Construction API because the API did not allow for BLS signatures. They were able to perform a partial initial implementation and planned to continue progress. Their involvement & initial implementation opened the door for a Coinbase listing, but their heavy reliance and monetary backing by Binance might have initially hurt their listing chances. Now that Coinbase has gone public there is no room for them to turn their noses towards Binance backed projects. They are beholden to their shareholders and have already acknowledged plans to increase their coin offerings to "over 100" according to CEO Brian Armstrong. Therefore I believe they will be listed sometime this Summer as Coinbase lists additional projects. But don't take my word for it- I'm just some a-hole on the interwebs.
Tell me your thoughts on Harmony below. As always Thank You for reading and give me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the content.
Disclosures: I own One & Ethereum
Original photo by Wendy Wei on pexels
