Leading interoperability project Orbs continues to expand on its vision of building a chain-agnostic multi-layer infrastructure.
As part of this expansion, Orbs has now successfully integrated with the Harmony network, a leading Ethereum layer-2 scaling protocol. Following this, ORBS, the platform’s native token, is now live on Harmony via Horizon, Harmony’s trustless and low-gas cross-chain bridge.
By design, Horizon enables seamless asset transfer between Ethereum and Harmony blockchains and bridge all ERC-20, LINK, and BUSD tokens. Accordingly, the Horizon cross-chain bridge adds immense scalability potential to the Harmony ecosystem.
The Orbs team shares the vision of interoperability. It is currently integrated with five prominent layer-1 blockchains: Ethereum, Solana, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, and Polygon. Adding to this progress, the Orbs development team recently announced their intention to develop a layer-3 solution that will work in conjunction with layer-1 and layer-2 solutions to cater to the expanding DeFi scene.
The partnership benefits both Harmony and Orbs and the DeFi ecosystem at large. Harmony’s innovative technology stack ensures high scalability, security, speed, interoperability, and cost efficiency - all of which can be leveraged by the Orbs ecosystem. Moreover, integrating with Harmony has also enabled Orbs to tap into the multi-billion-dollar DeFi ecosystem built on top of the Harmony network.
Likewise, Orbs offers unmatched cross-chain capabilities and is already integrated with many layer-1 blockchains. Harmony-based products will also take advantage of the Orbs ecosystem’s deep sharding and scalability to expand their presence into newer markets further.
A Resource-Efficient Layer-2 Solution
While several layer-1 projects like Solana and Binance Smart Chain have emerged in recent years, Ethereum’s dominance in the DeFi and NFT arenas remains relatively untouched. Still, the increased number of projects has impacted Ethereum’s performance, leading to rising gas costs.
As a next-generation shading-based solution, Harmony addresses the problems of layer-1 blockchains by offering full scalability through Fast Byzantine Fault Tolerant (FBFT) consensus with BLS signatures, secure sharding via a distributed randomness generation (DRG) process, efficient and fast consensus via effective proof-of-stake (EPoS) mechanism, erasure encoding toolkit, Kademlia routing, and much more.
Due to the integration of these solutions, Harmony is highly scalable, secure, resource-efficient, resistant to attacks, and extremely cost-efficient. Since its launch, Harmony has established itself as one of the fastest-growing Ethereum-based layer-2 scaling solutions. The platform has over $244.7 million assets across three cross-chain bridges and a total value locked (TVL) of more than $578 million.
With the DeFi sector expansion gaining unprecedented momentum, more dApps and DeFi products will enter the scene. As such, the integration between Orbs and Harmony will play a critical role in facilitating the new wave of dApps that want Ethereum-like ease of use but with better speed and lower costs.
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2021-12-23 13:07:00
