A brief history
Stephen Tse and his team founded Harmony in 2018, with the protocol going live in 2019. Their aim was to provide a decentralized, open and trustless blockchain platform for DeFi users globally. Harmony raised over $18 million in funding during its fundraising round in 2019. Harmony had a pre-mine of 12.6 billion ONE tokens issued on the Ethereum and Binance chains, 36.9% of which were sold in the seed and launchpad sale. Harmony builds off the sharding architecture put forward by Zilliqa in aims to get rid of structural limitations of scalability; it also implements a deep sharding technology which covers not only the transaction validation and network communication but the blockchain state as well. Harmony has additionally innovated when it comes to its consensus algorithm, using Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerance or FBFT- a highly efficient and speedy consensus algorithm built upon the PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) algorithm. Harmony’s FBFT is able to confirm blocks within 2 seconds.

ONE in practice
ONE is the Harmony network's utility and governance token. It’s used to pay for a variety of fees, including transaction fees, storage fees and gas fees. ONE is also used for staking, as holders earn block rewards for staking their tokens to validators. Additionally, holders of ONE get voting rights as part of the platform's governance mechanism. Additionally, in 2021, Harmony announced that it would be partnering with OIN Finance, a decentralized stablecoin trading platform. OIN will use Harmony to create a ONE-backed stablecoin. In its latest press release, as of 11 January 2022, the company confirmed that the ONE-backed stablecoin will be released soon.