4 shards on Mainnet
Harmony scales to tens of thousands of nodes with full sharding of computation, states and communication. Inspired by Omniledger and Rapidchain, our approach incorporates staked voting and secure randomness for a modern scalable architecture.
Harmony contains a beacon chain and multiple shard chains. The beacon chain serves as the random beacon and identity register, while the shard chains store separate blockchain states and process transactions concurrently. Harmony proposes an efficient algorithm for randomness generation by combining Verifiable Random Functions (VRF) and Verifiable Delay Functions (VDF). Harmony also incorporates PoS in the sharding process, which shifts the security consideration of a shard from the minimum number of nodes to the minimum number of voting shares.