Harmony, a fast and open blockchain for decentralized apps, is aiming to connect blockchain to all people and any economy. Recently, it revealed its cross-chain pool and cross-exchange roadmap for the unification of the blockchains. According to the roadmap, Harmony will use a ground-breaking method to build a trustless bridge to the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Binance chains.
The roadmap reveals that Harmony plans to embed light clients of different blockchains into their decentralized validators. Most importantly, light clients are not resource-intensive; thus, they are capable of validating transactions at lower fees.
Harmony’s advantage over competitors
Harmony holds a major advantage over its competitors like Cosmos’ IBC and PolkaDot’s XCMP. These projects are also trying to establish cross-chain architecture. However, Harmony’s cross-chain components are already in production. These components are:
1) Custodians
2) Bonds
3) Threshold signatures
4) Multi-party computations
5) On-chain validations (Chainlink Oracle)
Faster, low fees cross-chain settlement
Interestingly, the project has successfully launched multiple ONE-ETH swaps and bridges. These bridges and swaps use Harmony’s 5-second finality to achieve faster settlements. Along with that, these cross-chain transactions attract low fees due to sharding.
Most importantly, the ONE-ETH bridge is trustless and uses a light client. This opens Ethereum’s ecosystem of assets and liquidity to Harmony applications. Furthermore, the project is ready with prototyped bridges for Binance Smart Chain and Polkadot. Pretty soon, it will build prototype bridges for Bitcoin, Cosmos, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Terra, and Kava.
Cross-Exchange Pool with Fiat Gateways
Open finance is the next big thing and is the need of the time. Harmony plans to provide efficient cash-flow management between fiat and crypto by building a liquidity pool for Harmony-ONE assets and USD stablecoins. This product will enable cross-border business between the United States and leading Southeast Asian markets. The team strongly believes that this innovative approach will act as a final crypto-fiat gateway.
According to Harmony, the stablecoins and on-demand liquidity are key for the broad adoption of crypto across borders. Along with that, the Harmony products create a fair economy of marketplaces. However, the team is aware of the technical challenges it will face and is currently working on finding solutions for the same.
Current Harmony ecosystem
Harmony has proven itself in the market with innovative and cutting-edge products.
1) 16 apps, 10 native tokens (BUSD, 1Dai), 3 assets (Sandbox / Animoca NFT)
2) 20 wallets (TrustWallet, Ledger), 13 grants (Connext, JellySwap), 50 angels
3) 12 exchanges, 5 fiat pairings (Binance.US, Huobi, WazirX, ProBit)
Additionally, Harmony has already enabled remittances between the United States and India by integrating fiat gateways. Therefore, Harmony’s cross-chain and cross-exchange roadmap seems quite achievable for the team.
unification of the blockchains.. I like the sound of it