Since the starting time of February, Harmony (ONE) has rallied by 230% and while the proof-of-pale smart contract platform benefited from Ethereum's skyrocketing gas fees, the recent meteoric rise appears to be driven past more than fundamental factors.

Harmony (One), Atom, SOL, NEAR, OMG at Binance. Source: TradingView

Although other scaling-focused solutions such equally Cosmos (Cantlet), Solana (SOL), NEAR, and OMG also rallied during the same time menses, Harmony's performance stands out.

Harmony is a sharding protocol with a trustless Ethereum bridge that separates the chain into segments that procedure transactions and shop data in parallel. It's considered a layer-2 solution every bit information technology splits both the nodes and blockchain states into shards. This means the network can calibration linearly.

Each shard has 250 nodes to guarantee cryptographic randomness and by using a Practical Byzantine Error Tolerance consensus, the network maintains low transaction fees and single block final confirmation.

Harmony's mainnet went live in June 2019 and currently, it offers staking and delegation mechanisms. Almanac issuance is capped at iii%, while transaction fees are burnt to attain near-zero inflation as network usage increases.

Compared to its competitors, Harmony is still in a fledgling stage as its market capitalization stands at $250 million. This pales in comparison with Creation, Solana and NEAR Protocol which accept respective market caps at $5 billion, $2.two billion and $1.26 billion.

Although its market cap may be small, Harmony already has 640 community-run nodes and this is a strong indication that adoption is taking place. While some competitors struggle to develop functional decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, Harmony already has more than 3 in place.

Among these are a cantankerous-asset DEX, UnifyProtocol, and a portfolio remainder DApp called SeeSwap. Harmony also supports a DApp-based prediction market called SeeMarket, and LMA, which is a non-fungible token art gallery.

Weekly DEX volumes (USD). Source: Dune Analytics

Considering the staggering DEX volume growth, which surpassed $14 billion, there seems to be enough room for scaling solutions capable of handling DeFi trades.

Ethereum compatibility created more upside

On Feb. four, Harmony appear total Ethereum compatibility after the developers were able to port their ether.js or web3.js applications to Harmony. Every bit this occurred, Metamask as well became available for asset transactions on Harmony.

On Feb. five, Blits Labs appear a mainnet beta version of a cantankerous-chain lending market place between Harmony and Ethereum. The protocol allows users to collateralize their Ether to take out a loan on Harmony.

On Feb. eleven, Harmony announced a partnership with API3 to natively integrate decentralized API or dAPI. This is expected to provide reliable, transparent, and decentralized data.

Farther success hinges on Harmony's aggressive roadmap

Harmony'southward roadmap includes nugget-bridging with the Bitcoin network and cross-chain communication. Decentralization is some other surface area that remains underdeveloped, as external validators need to proceeds relevance.

Equally for network security, plans include re-sharding for unmarried-shard attack prevention and Harmony plans to add "Fast Sync" capabilities to improve network operation.

While the roadmap is rather ambitious, there seem to be strong prospects for the project judging by the recent deliveries and the ecosystem's accelerated growth.

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