Harmony’s open, decentralized network is enabled through the use of the native protocol token - Harmony ONE. The token incentivizes and rewards a variety of participants including developers, validators/stakers, investors, and community members who develop, secure and govern the network. In order to use the network, users pay a small transaction fee denominated in the native Harmony token. Harmony’s scalable, high-throughput protocol is powered by a native token which is used for various forms of payment and participation in the protocol (staking, transaction fees, voting & governance). Harmony uses blockchain to align incentives of different stakeholders, developers and businesses while allowing them to build open marketplaces of fungible and non-fungible tokens and assets. Furthermore, the upcoming application of zero-knowledge proofs will allow Harmony to become a data sharing platform that can overcome the conflicting problem plaguing many information and data markets: that individual market participants’ have mutual distrust to share data but strong desire to acquire data themselves. The Harmony token will function in the following aspects of the protocol: The token is used for staking, which is necessary to participate in the POS consensus & earn block rewards and transaction fees. The token is used to pay for transaction fees, gas and storage fees. The token is used in voting for on-chain governance of the protocol.
Zcash is a decentralized and open-source cryptocurrency that offers privacy and selective transparency of transactions. Zcash payments are published on a public blockchain, but the sender, recipient, and amount of a transaction remain private. Zcash is based on peer-reviewed cryptographic research, and built by a security-specialized engineering team on an open source platform based on Bitcoin Core's battle-tested codebase. Our improvement over Bitcoin is the addition of privacy. Zcash uses advanced cryptographic techniques, namely zero-knowledge proofs, to guarantee the validity of transactions without revealing additional information about them. How Zcash works Zcash encrypts the contents of shielded transactions. Since the payment information is encrypted, the protocol uses a novel cryptographic method to verify their validity. Zcash uses a zero-knowledge proof construction called a zk-SNARK, developed by our team of experienced cryptographers based on recent breakthroughs in cryptography. These constructions allow the network to maintain a secure ledger of balances without disclosing the parties or amounts involved. Instead of publicly demonstrating spend-authority and transaction values, the transaction metadata is encrypted and zk-SNARKs are used to prove that nobody is cheating or stealing. Zcash also enables users to send public payments which work similarly to Bitcoin. With the support for both shielded and transparent addresses, users can choose to send Zcash privately or publicly. Zcash payments sent from a shielded address to a transparent address reveal the received balance, while payments from a transparent address to a shielded address protect the receiving value. Check out CoinBureau for guide on What is ZCash.