The goal is to launch Harmony shard 1 as the game shard for all the gamefi projects in the Harmony ecosystem.

*By Leo Chen; (To Be) Approved by Rongjian, Ganesha, Jack and Peter.

The appealing narrative of the game shard should include the following features.

• scaling: dedicated one shard to games can bring attention and branding of the sharding solution we created in Harmony. It is the current scaling solution in the EVM world. Harmony should own the “sharding” as the scaling solution.
• cross-shard NFT: launch NFT in shard 0 and can be used in the game shard as identity and avatar. trading of the NFT happened on shard 0, while utility of the NFT is on game shard
• protocol features:
  • account abstraction: use game token to pay gas fee, impose burning mechanism and more utility for game tokens
  • vrf: true random number generation to provide games with fast/cheap random numbers
  • zkp: configurable privacy asset

PR-FAQ

On June 20th, 2022, Harmony launched a dedicated game shard to support all the gamefi projects in the ecosystem.

Why?

Harmony is the high performance, horizontally scalable layer1 blockchain. Harmony’s scaling solution is sharding. Harmony launched mainnet in June 2019 with 4 shards. Right now, majority of the transactions on Harmony is on shard 0. To showcase the scalability of the sharding solution of Harmony, we will rebrand our shard1 as the game shard to support new gamefi projects launched on Harmony.

There are a few new features will be launched with the launch of game shard. They are:

• cross-shard NFT identity: NFT tokens minted on shard 0 can still be used in the game shard. NFT holders can still trade NFT on the marketplace of shard 0, while using the same NFT on the game shard using the same account.
• account abstraction: gamefi projects can use the game token as the gas fee in transactions. This is the additional utility and burning mechanism for game tokens.
• elastic RPC: elastic RPC will be launched on game shard to support scalable RPC endpoints.
• vrf: verifiable random function to generate the best random number for games.
• cross-shard token transfer using precompile: cross-shard ONE token transfer can be done by calling precompile smart contract.
• cross-shard hrc20 token bridge: HRC20 token launched on the game shard can be tradable on shard 0 via bridging to shard 0 using the horizon bridge.