Orbs Goes Live On Harmony Via The Horizon Cross-Chain Bridge https://ift.tt/3em8cY5

Orbs, the public blockchain infrastructure compatible with EVM-based layer-1 chains, has announced the successful completion of its latest chain integration.

According to the latest press release, Orbs is now live on Harmony via Horizon, Harmony Network’s official cross-chain bridge.

Harmony, an advanced layer-2 scalability solution, recently launched Horizon, its trustless and low-gas cross-chain bridge that facilitates the transfer of ERC-20 assets between Harmony, Binance Smart Chain, and Ethereum.

The Harmony team sees Horizon as one of the primary initiatives that will act as the foundation for many upcoming projects designed to help users and developers seamlessly interact with multiple chains, bolstering a vibrant cross-chain ecosystem within the Harmony universe.

Having set out in 2017, Orbs has quickly expanded its presence in the blockchain ecosystem.

The project is already accessible across five major layer-1 chains, including Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, Solana, and Polygon.

With the integration with Harmony, Orbs has now added a leading layer-2 Ethereum chain to its growing list. 

Harmony offers unmatched transaction speed and gas efficiency, shorter withdrawal times, and great interoperability.

All of these features align perfectly with the Orbs ecosystem and its core vision of offering layer-3 capabilities, which will work in conjunction with layer-1 and layer-2 solutions to enhance the capabilities of EVM-based smart contracts further. 

At the same time, the integration of layer-3 solutions into its ecosystem will help enhance the smart contract capabilities of the Harmony network, allowing the ecosystem to unlock new possibilities for facilitating the development of dApps and DeFi protocols.

Furthermore, this integration will also enable Harmony-based products to leverage the Orbs ecosystem’s features of deep sharding and its overall scalability.

Accordingly, this partnership between Harmony and Orbs serves the interests of both parties while simultaneously supporting the entire DeFi ecosystem.

Merging EVM-Compatibility With Sharding And FBFT

Given the scalability problems with leading layer-1 blockchains, a wave of scaling solutions entered the spotlight over the last year.

Harmony is one such project that has carved a name for itself given how it enables dApps to operate faster by introducing random sharding, allowing block creation within seconds. 

Designed to facilitate the development and use of dApps and DeFi protocols, Harmony focuses on processing speed and validation while ensuring low gas fees. Using sharding, the Harmony team has significantly reduced the time required for node validation.

The ecosystem also uses the Verifiable Random Function (VRF) to ensure node security and ensure unbiased shard membership.

With its new version of proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus called effective proof-of-stake (EPoS), Harmony allows simultaneous staking from hundreds of node validators.

Besides scalability, speed, gas efficiency, and security, Harmony also addresses the problem of cross-chain interoperability.

The platform works seamlessly with prominent chains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polkadot, Binance Smart Chain, Terra, Polkadot, and more.

Moreover, the tech stack boasts a wide range of promising solutions, including the effective proof-of-stake (EPoS) consensus mechanism, Kademlia routing, the FBFT (Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerant) consensus with BLS signatures, and an erasure encoding toolkit.