Chainstack announces support for Harmony

Janson Lee

March 18, 2022 in Announcements

We are ecstatic to announce that Harmony is now supported on Chainstack. Harmony developers now have the simplest method to acquire access to the Harmony blockchain, deploy dependable node access in seconds, and focus on building a more unified and efficient future thanks to Chainstack’s highly resilient and scalable infrastructure solutions.

Harmony is an interoperable sharding protocol with secure bridges offering cross-chain asset transfers with Ethereum, Binance, and 3 other chains. Harmony is an open platform for assets, collectibles, identity and governance. Powered by the Harmony One token (ONE), the Harmony blockchain is an independent blockchain designed to enable ultra-fast transactions and interoperability as an advanced Layer 2 solution. Harmony makes it easy for developers to build and scale creative, intuitive decentralized applications (DApps) that enable frictionless, cross-chain token swaps.

Harmony was established in 2018 and attracted nearly $20 million in funding from both private investors and Binance Labs to create the protocol. The mainnet launched in June 2019. To scale trust and create a radically fair economy, Harmony is granting $300 million to the open DAO community. The total funding will go toward a variety of projects and activities throughout Web3 aimed at connecting all networks and advancing hundreds of DAOs, which will help drive blockchain adoption.

What is Harmony?

Harmony was designed as an interoperable Layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum. The interoperable sharded blockchain is built from the bottom up to address the constraints of security, scalability, and decentralization that continue to affect blockchains.

Harmony uses a technique called sharding to split the blockchain’s network into parallel chains, called shards, to improve the speed and efficiency of the network—at a lower cost. Thanks to this strategy, Harmony’s fast and secure blockchain is designed for decentralized applications, producing blocks in 2 seconds with finality, allowing for trustless, irreversible transactions at lower fees, costing up to 100 times less than other blockchain transactions. Harmony’s sharding works not only on the network communication and transaction validation, but also on the blockchain state, making Harmony fully scalable on all three aspects of the blockchain: network, storage, and transaction processing.

With secure bridges offering cross-chain asset transfers with Ethereum, Binance, and 3 other chains, Harmony provides developers and users with the ability of the frictionless shift of digital assets across the blockchain and bridged chains, greatly supporting the development of both Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Non-Fungible Token (NFT) applications. Though Harmony is not yet completely decentralized, it is a fundamental project objective. Pangaea is Harmony’s plan for a decentralized, open network community of nodes. This effort furthers the Harmony project’s decentralization by establishing a devoted, linked community. Harmony’s strategic development areas and advancements are critical for mainstream adoption of the Harmony blockchain.

Building on Harmony

Harmony blockchain is a sharded blockchain with four shards: the beacon chain (shard 0), as well as shards one, two, and three. The production mainnet supports 4 shards of 1000 nodes contributing to the blockchain’s high transaction per second performance. Harmony is built to support cross-shard transactions to achieve composability of assets and smart contracts between shards. Harmony also features receipt-based asynchronous cross-shard communication mechanism which achieves eventual consistency, preventing double-spending between shards.

Harmony is a Proof-of-Stake blockchain which is energy efficient and low-cost for node runners. Effective Proof-of-Stake (EPoS) is a unique consensus mechanism used by Harmony. The consensus mechanism incorporates improved innovations of the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) to create the Fast BFT (FBFT). This allows for near-instantaneous finality and reduced transaction costs. The purpose of EPoS is to improve network delegation and ensure correct reward compounding, without compromising the decentralization of the network. It allows validators to effectively stake tokens and secure nodes according to the value of those tokens. EPoS is able to randomly and evenly distribute the stakes among all shards, bringing greater decentralization and security to all shards.

Harmony uses the Solidity programming language and supports the Ethereum tooling, which makes it essentially identical to Ethereum in terms of development. It features its own token standards, HRC-20 and HRC-721, for cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens, similar to Ethereum’s ERC-20 and ERC-721.

Harmony on Chainstack

Harmony’s integration on Chainstack is another step toward our goal of creating a genuinely multi-chain platform that allows the community to customize their experience while also boosting accessibility and scalability. Harmony and Chainstack’s collaboration will assist with both infrastructure scalability and the healthy expansion of on-chain utility and network features. Developers and builders in Harmony’s ecosystem will now have greater customization for alternative RPC service endpoints, WebSocket connections, and indexed datasets. Furthermore, Chainstack’s node infrastructure will enable improved responsiveness when interacting with the blockchain, bringing it closer to Harmony’s underlying 2-second on-chain finality with flexible deployment locations. Harmony developers and builders will now benefit from a lower latency connection and increased request throughput.

Our partnership with Chainstack is a major step forward toward Harmony’s goals of adding an increasing number of partners that can help Harmony scale to billions more transactions per day. We’re thrilled that Chainstack is supporting the tremendous growth in demand for Harmony’s dataset enabling billion dollar TVL DeFi ecosystems and numerous GameFi and Metaverse projects being built on Harmony to now have access to blockchain dataset at scale. Using Chainstack’s game-changing infrastructure, many more projects can now get started and contribute to the Harmony Ecosystem’s growth. We’re excited to collaborate with Chainstack to ensure continuous innovation and growth of Harmony’s infrastructure, user experience, and interoperability.
Jack Chan, Engineering and Partnerships, Harmony

Chainstack allows developers to deploy and synchronize their nodes within minutes, with predictable pricing that is industry-leading, a high degree of automation, and enterprise-grade infrastructure and engineering. Web3 and DeFi developers and builders that want to build high-performing projects on Harmony now have the option to scale with enterprise-grade infrastructure that can be depended on across various cloud networks and locations. Chainstack blockchain managed services include developer tools and services that make building and managing a DApp, a DeFi platform, or an NFT marketplace easier, in addition to node management and operations.

How to use Harmony on Chainstack

Chainstack is a dependable and simple-to-use platform for quickly deploying nodes on a variety of hosting platforms, including fully managed public clouds like AWS, Azure, and GCP, as well as on-premises.

Companies can now deploy Harmony RPC nodes in the same easy and cost-effective way, without needing to invest precious time and resources in setting up enterprise-grade infrastructure.

Developers may entrust their projects to Chainstack and significantly shorten their time-to-market while also benefiting from high-performing and dependable infrastructure.

Pricing

Thanks to its world-class engineering and lean infrastructure, Chainstack has a distinctive price advantage compared to other providers. This is reflected in the introductory pricing for Harmony, which offers shared full nodes starting at $0/month on the Developer plan, along with 3M requests included.

Subscription tiers are well planned out to be highly cost-efficient, supporting all projects and use cases in different stages and types. The Growth plan provides 8M requests and the Business plan provides 20M requests. Unlimited requests are available on all dedicated nodes deployed starting on the Business plan.

For all requests beyond those included in the plan, the price for the first 20M extra requests is $0.1 per 10K requests; then $0.05 per 10K requests. See also the full pricing information and a handy calculator.

Working together on making Web3 faster and better

Chainstack is committed to delivering extremely powerful infrastructure solutions and addressing scalability issues with many protocols and chain types to make Web3 available to everyone. Harmony enables developers and builders to create high-performing and customizable applications by utilizing blockchain technology that is designed for interoperability and built in a way that is familiar to developers. Developing at a rapid pace and collaborating with the industry’s most recognized smart contract-enabled blockchains, transactions between the Harmony and other blockchains are almost instantaneous and nearly free, paving the way for a more connected Web3.

Harmony’s focus on growing the network’s features is supported by an incredible community and ecosystem. The cross-chain architecture bodes well for the blockchain’s future and greater adoption. We’re delighted that Chainstack will now give Harmony developers and the community more access to on-chain utility with enterprise grade blockchain infrastructure, assisting them in addressing blockchain scalability challenges.
Eugene Aseev, Founder and CTO of Chainstack

Chainstack’s enterprise-grade, easy-to-use infrastructure, tools, and services enable developers and project teams to focus on developing breakthrough blockchain solutions and apps by reducing friction and improving operational operations. The addition of Chainstack’s enterprise-grade infrastructure to Harmony’s ecosystem accelerates blockchain adoption, paving the way for a more connected and efficient future in which projects and end-users can benefit from decentralized applications’ innovative power while also enjoying higher performance and lower fees.