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- Harmony, a decentralized blockchain platform, witnessed renewed traction this month. The price of ONE, its native cryptocurrency, hiked by 163%. The token reached its ATH of $0.38 on January 14.
- Harmony aims to improve its ecosystem through the introduction of bridges of blockchains including the two top blockchains, Bitcoin and Ethereum. The focus of the protocol will be on decentralization, interoperability, adoption, and zero-knowledge proofs.
- Harmony might be giving a tough time to layer 2 protocols, the protocol fighting some tough battles from blockchains similar to it such as Fantom, NEAR protocol, and Cosmos.
This month, Harmony, a decentralized platform, experienced renewed traction. ONE, its native cryptocurrency, facilitated this interest. The price of ONE increased by 163% after dropping to a low of $0.13 on 4 December. On January 14, the token hit its all-time high of $0.38.
However, since then the token has experienced a loss of more than 53% in its valuation. A larger market correction is being seen as the possible reason behind it. Whatever it may be, the developers of the platform revealed their enthusiastic plans to take Harmony to a new level in the coming year.
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Harmony To Develop Bridges For Various Blockchain Protocols
Interoperability, Decentralization, adoption, and zero-knowledge proofs will be the main priority of the development as per the latest released roadmap. The plan is to achieve this through the construction of bridges along with other significant blockchain protocols, including the two most popular cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum.
A layer 1 smart contract protocol, Harmony for its consensus mechanism utilizes sharding, making the protocol highly scalable with increased block sizes and throughput. Hence, making the protocol completely Ethereum interoperable just like layer 2 protocols.
According to the blog post, in November last year, both the Trustless Ethereum Bridge and the Bitcoin were launched on the testnet of Harmony to further increase its application.
A cross-chain exchange devoid of custodial risks is an example of utility. Using Harmony, Ethereum developers can scale their application without any difficulty and relish their inexpensive fees and 2-second finality.
The announcement further revealed that besides the top blockchains, the creation of bridges along with other decentralized protocols is also in progress. Cosmos, Polkadot, Terra, Polygon, and others are included in it.
The roadmap also underlined the fact that various other ecosystem-centric developments are in different phases of release which includes secure resharding, decentralized nodes, and derivatives staking.
The Protocol Also Plans To Release Cross-Chain Communications and Cross-Shard Composability
Harmony’s move towards interoperability will also incorporate the launch of Cross-Chain Communications and Cross-Shard Composability. The former will target the creation of chain relays as smart contracts and data availability layers while the latter’s priority will be atomic swaps of assets.
After the increase in the rapid adoption of the protocol, its plan to further grow its ecosystem can not be called dubious. As of early this month, the TVL in the protocol reached its ATH of $1.25 billion climbing from a mere $135 million at the beginning of October.
Although it is giving a tough fight to layer 2 protocols, Harmony is still running a competitive race with blockchains such as Fantom, NEAR protocol, and Cosmos, which are similar to it.
According to the coinmarketcap, this bunch of alternate layer-1 blockchains recently has also surpassed more prominent ones like Terra and Binance Smart Chain.
In recent months, there is also seen a dramatic increase in on-chain activity, DApp ecosystems, wallet counts, and total value locked or TVL.
Steve Anderson is an Australian crypto enthusiast. He is a specialist in management and trading for over 5 years. Steve has worked as a crypto trader, he loves learning about decentralisation, understanding the true potential of the blockchain.
