Holders of the ONE token of the Harmony team will soon have to exchange their ERC-20 (Ethereum) or BEP-2 (Binance) tokens for the currency available on the Harmony blockchain if they want to participate in the staking and other network activities.
Harmony recently announced that the token-currency exchange on the platform is ready for use.
“The ONE token swap is the first of many steps we will take in 2020 towards a full-scale Harmony platform. Mainnet ONE owners will soon be able to bet their money to earn prizes and access our secure, fast and cheap blockchain, "said Nick White, co-founder of Harmony, on CoinDesk.
Harmony is a proof-of-stake blockchain that uses sharding with the goal of reaching an extremely fast large-scale settlement for millions of users.
Last year, it raised $ 18 million in a token sale to strategic investors, followed by an initial exchange offering on Binance's Launchpad in May, selling tokens for an additional $ 5 million.
How the swap token will happen
For users of certain exchanges, the token-currency conversion will be automatic. Unlike some previous swap tokens, such as EOS, in this case users will not be able to swap manually.
Token holders will need to upload them to an exchange by participating in a bridge with Harmony. The tokens can then be withdrawn, but only in the form of ONE native currency.
Holders will be able to earn additional ONE currencies with the staking, but to do this they will need the native version. Harmony has also integrated with several hardware wallets for offline storage, such as Ledger and SafePal.
The Harmony network is now active, although not all features are. For example, the validation nodes remain with authorization, but in the final version they will be open. The validators, who with their work guarantee network security, will be rewarded with new ONE tokens, based on Harmony's proof-of-stake.
Harmony had a pre-mine of 12,6 billion ONE tokens issued on the ethereum and binance chains, 36,9% of which was sold via seed and launchpad.
The company has not yet announced whether there will be a swap deadline.
Swap tokens on other platforms
Swap tokens were one of the main themes of 2018 that saw the first boom of cryptocurrencies, but they were less common than the latter since many companies avoided selling cryptocurrency in advance of planning their functionality.
According to a spokesperson for Harmony, only Bitmax currently has active swap. Binance is expected to activate it from February 3. The announcement also indicates that other partners will soon allow the swap, including HonestMining (a service of staking) and exchanges including Huobi, Gate.io and Kucoin.
