Protocol 2022 Roadmap

2021 is the year for ecosystem growth of Harmony. Our ecosystem grew literally 10x in 2021 with the support of our current stage of mainnet which is fast and stable, but not fully decentralized. 2022 will be the year when Harmony blockchain is fully upgraded with all the promised features of sharding and security, thus providing our community with a fully trustless and decentralized network without the reliance on the core team.

Faster and Full-featured Platform

Harmony as a developer and user-focused blockchain platform strives to offer the most advanced and comprehensive feature set. We will implement cross-shard smart contract support to open up the capability of all shards, launch staking precompiles to support staking derivatives and decentralized basic income, follow latest account abstraction design as Eth2.0 to support gas-less wallet.

  • Along with MuKn's help, we will design and implement cross-shard smart contract transactions to unlock the full potential of sharding on scalability.
  • We will launch staking precompiles (already in progress as a bounty) to support staking derivatives.
  • Epoch-block-based fast synchronization will be implemented both for fast validator setup and resharding.
  • 1-second finality will be launched to set Harmony as the fastest chain in industry. We will also upgrade BLS library with a faster implementation to speed up onchain signature signing and verification.
  • Upgrade in block structure will be done to enable FlyClient for trustless bridges.
  • We will closely follow the latest standard of Account Abstraction and implement it for various features such as trustless smart contract wallet and gas-less transactions.

Security & Decentralization:

There is no consensus without security and decentralization on Harmony network. We will continue strengthen our protocol design and add missing security mechanism to achieve full decentralization in 2022. Attack vectors on the leader node will be fully eliminated and leader rotation will be implemented to prevent leader malicious behaviors. Token incentive model will be further optimized to achieve full incentive-compatible gas fee and block reward distribution. The final design for resharding will be finished along with our Research DAO and its launch will be the main focus for 2022.

Leader Security:

  • Prevent leader from sending invalid blocks to selected nodes.
  • Prevent leader from censoring transactions, validator signatures or not proposing crosslinks.
  • Leader rotation within internal nodes and then extend to external validators.

Incentive Updates:

  • Incentive-compatible gas fee burning model to maximize transaction inclusion.
  • Incentive-compatible signature inclusion mechanism to discourage signature censoring.
  • Slashing model upgrade to avoid corruption between validator and slash reporter.

Resharding:

  • Bounded-cuckoo-rule election and slot shuffling to allow full security of sharded network.
  • Validator node state trie downloading/verification and shard transition.
  • Epoch-block-based fast synchronization for fast shard transition.
  • Launch decentralized state sync to avoid single-point-of-failure due to DNS nodes.

Efficiency and Performance

The global consensus and open economy requires an extremely fast and scalable blockchain and Harmony will be the one. 1-second finality will be launched for Harmony to be the fastest blockchain in transaction processing speed. Our node binary will be further optimized in memory, disk, and CPU so low-end machine can also run as leader node. P2p network topology will be optimized based on the shard structure to speed up message broadcasting time within shards.

Remove memory and storage footprint:

  • Reduce the cache size across the codebase.
  • Remove unnecessary storage of off-chain data such as indexes and staking history records.
  • Validator node history block (validator wrapper) and related db storage pruning.
  • Break down validator wrapper data into individual state object key-value entries.

RPC Stability and Performance:

  • Load-testing and rate limiting on each RPC based on its cost.
  • Separate costly and non-eth-compatible RPCs to be served individually.

P2p network

  • Update p2p network to be sharded in connectivity and network topology.
  • Only broadcast block header with transaction id list and let validator reconstruct the full block.

Bring Best Research to Production

Bringing the best research to production is the foundation for the success of Harmony blockchain. We will continue researching and productionize the latest technology of zero-knowledge proofs to achieve privacy and reduce complexity and cost for light clients.

  • We will explore the performance gain of using zero-knowledge proof for fast state verification which could help on many areas including bridges, resharding and general light clients.
  • Privacy is still a missing primitive on Harmony and we will dive deep into zero-knowledge proof and related technology and bring privacy on Harmony.