Harmony bets on Bitcoin, Ethereum bridges to improve cross-chain ecosystem

ambcrypto.com:

Decentralized platform Harmony saw renewed traction this month. Its native cryptocurrency ONE reaped the benefits of this interest. After hitting a low of $0.13 on 4 December, the price of ONE rose by 163%. Further, the token marked a new all-time high of $0.38 on 14 January.

Interestingly, the token has lost over 53% of its valuation since then. Well, possibly due to larger market corrections. Even so, the platform’s developers have revealed ambitious plans to take Harmony to new heights in the coming year.

According to a recently released roadmap, the main focus of development will be on adoption, interoperability, decentralization, and zero-knowledge proofs. This would be achieved by building bridges with other important blockchain protocols, notably including Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Harmony is a Layer 1 smart contract platform that makes use of sharding for its consensus mechanism. This allows the protocol to scale significantly with increased block sizes and throughput. Thus, making it fully Ethereum interoperable “similar to layer 2 protocols.”

The blog post noted that both the Bitcoin and the Trustless Ethereum Bridge were released on Harmony’s Testnet in November last year. This, in order to further its use cases.

“An example of utility is a cross-chain exchange without custodial risks… Ethereum developers can easily scale their applications with Harmony to enjoy our 2-second finality and cheap fees.”

Moreover, apart from the top two blockchains, the development of bridges with other decentralized protocols is also underway, the announcement noted. These include Polygon, Terra, Cosmos and Polkadot, among others. The roadmap also highlighted that a host of other ecosystem-centric developments are in different stages of