Harmony is a fast and secure blockchain for decentralized applications. Harmony's main focus is on achieving scalability by dividing not only the network nodes but also the blockchain states into shards, "scaling linearly in all three aspects of machines, transactions and storage".
Harmony's sharding benefits by Verifiable Random Functions for secure and random state sharding. The consensus mechanism of Harmony, Effective Proof-of-Stake, innovates on Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus mechanisms to further reduce centralization, while supporting stake delegation, reward compounding and double-sign slashing.