May 21 2020 | AtoZ Markets – Open blockchain platform Harmony announced that it will now support staking along with sharding. The platform aims to create a blockchain infrastructure that attains high scalability.
Harmony launches staking
Harmony claims it is the first to ever integrate staking into a blockchain network also utilizing sharding to attain high transaction throughput.
Sharded PoS is now a reality!
— Harmony (@harmonyprotocol) May 19, 2020
On Saturday, May 16 at block 3375104, Harmony's Mainnet entered its first #staking epoch and in so doing, claimed a little piece of history as the very first sharded PoS public network.https://t.co/L15sMqMe2r
Nick White, Harmony co-founder said:
“You will not find another chain that can support the same throughput, same speed of settlement, same extremely low cost, and the same level of decentralization. This puts us in a sweet spot for growth.”
What is staking?
Staking is the process (utilized in Proof-of-Stake blockchain protocol) where users on the network stake their cryptocurrency holdings to support network operations. The network then rewards the users for their contribution, the larger the amount at stake, the bigger the reward.
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Harmony CTO Rongjian Lan said that the convergence of staking and sharding was an “order of magnitude more complex to build and design.”
However, with its new staking mechanism namely “Effective Proof-of-Stake”, Harmony claims it will strike a balance between large and small scale stakers.
How to Optimize your Staking Rewards:
Our novel #Staking mechanism “EPOS” is capping the rewards of large stakers & boosting the rewards of smaller stakers.
If your stake is > than the upper threshold of Median Stake, you should add more BLS or delagate to another validator. pic.twitter.com/fslzqLLmMk— Harmony (@harmonyprotocol) May 17, 2020
Basically, the network will cap the reward processed to those with higher stakes and boost it for those with a relatively smaller amount.
Pushing for adoption
At the moment the network counts on 320 public nodes. However, this number is expected to grow to 1,000 by the end of the year. Harmony also aims to further decrease the network settlement time and bring it below 8 seconds.
Harmony CEO Stephen Tse said that, after making the network more scalable and decentralized, they will look towards solving the harder challenge, i.e. adoption:
“We will shift gears to pursue adoption with the same nonstop execution.”
It is also worth mentioning that the launch has the support of exchanges and validators. These include Blockdaemon, Stake.fish, Staked.us, Wetez, Sesame Seed, Everstake, and InfStones. Binance, BitMax, and Kucoin will give support to Harmony staking on their platforms.
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