Harmony One Staking Epoch Goes Live

The pre-staking epoch has gone live on Harmony One mainnet. The popular blockchain scalability platform recently disclosed the launch of its pre-staking epoch.

According to a video by Harmony One, only 320 validator seats are available on the platform. This is, however, the first phase of the mainnet staking launch. So, interested persons will have to bid for a chance to stake on the platform.

Harmony One further confirmed the announcement on Twitter. According to the tweet, interested persons will need to submit their entries on Harmony mainnet. More importantly, rewards will be on a first come first serve basis.

Pre-staking epoch has started on Harmony Mainnet!

During this 1.5 days, validators will submit their first bids for the limited 320 committee slots.

Delegators can start choosing validators for delegation at https://t.co/J1llNYCrFA

Hint: Early stakers get higher rewards 🤓 pic.twitter.com/7dLVbZM6Me

— Harmony (@harmonyprotocol) May 14, 2020

Overview of the bidding process

Taking a closer look at the bidding process, users can only acquire a seat on the staking mainnet via bidding. Bidding will ensure the staking process remains fair as well as a “broad distribution of staking power”.

In a Twitter video, Harmony threw more light on the staking process with an example scenario. Let’s say there are four users – Alex, Bob, Carol, and David, who want to stake for three seats. Now, in this scenario, Alex stakes 3, David 4, Carol 10, and Bob 18. So, in this example, Alex, with the lowest number of bids loses access to the bidding seat.

However, Harmony went on to explain that when a staker is outbid, it is not the end of the road for him, as all outbid users can still delegate. Simply put, they can add their stake to any other validator they prefer.

Furthermore, there is an interesting feature of Harmony’s staking process. For example, a high staker like Bob might expect to enjoy more staking power on the network. However, this isn’t true as the platform operates an effective proof-of-stake reward system. Simply put, rewards calculation takes place using the median of the bid.

So, in the example above, with bids 3,4,10, and 18, the median bid is 10. As a result, the highest bidder Bob will effectively have access to a maximum bid worth 11.5 or 115 percent of the median. It is thus fairly evident that instead of carrying out a single huge bid, it is advisable to carry out several smaller bids separately.

You can get a look at the platform’s validator list here.

About Harmony

Harmony One protocol is a decentralized open-consensus scalability platform. Simply put, anyone can join the network. Its open-consensus is facilitated by three main factors.

• Proof-of-Stake – where holders work together to improve the network’s security.
• Deep sharding – where network split results into smaller teams or “shard”, working together to increase efficiency.
• Network optimization – Communication is divided into smaller parts before been shared. This involves using Kademlia routing.

Previously we had reported when Harmony announced a partnership with Chainlink. Also, the platform has been a member of the Mousebelt blockchain alliance.