Elrond is a high-throughput public blockchain, focused on providing security, efficiency, scalability and interoperability by integrating two essential elements: Adaptive State Sharding and a new Secure Proof of Stake (sPoS) consensus mechanism. And this is not all, it is also a complete DeFi, Fintech & IoT ecosystem, providing a scalable and secure platform for building distributed applications called dApps.

Elrond generates its value from its technical potential, the technology behind the project, its ability to scale, its offering of enterprise grade solutions for dApps and digital assets, and its vast utility in general. It has the most advanced technology of all blockchains today. Elrond is a cryptocurrency with an infrastructure and native features far superior to those of Ethereum and has good chances to overtake it. Elrond is a project which is able to bring blockchain technology to mass adoption.

Elrond's vision consists of an amazing team, respecting their targets, an ambitious roadmap and a strategic token, $EGLD. It brings a genuine technological revolution by successfully implementing the concepts of "sharding", "consensus", "virtual machine" and "smart account".

The Elrond project started in 2013 with a team composed of three people: Beniamin Mincu (CEO), Lucian Todea (COO) and Lucian Mincu (CIO). They brought later together many experts from prestigious companies such as Intel, IBM, Microsoft and Google, and established to solve the famous blockchain trilemma: decentralization, security and scalability.

The amazing capabilities of the Elrond blockchain

During the testing phase, the Elrond blockchain achieved a peak of 260,000 transactions per second (TPS)! In order to make a comparison, Bitcoin can perform 7 TPS and Ethereum 20 TPS. Elrond also exceeds Visa's/Mastercard's performance, that of 24,000 TPS.

After the very successful testing period, the Elrond mainnet was launched on July 30th 2020. After the launch, hundreds of important companies have signed partnerships with Elrond. The list of partners includes worldwide leading exchanges and wallets (Binance, Crypto.com, Coinbase, Bithumb Global, eToroX, Ledger, Coin98 Wallet, Trust Wallet etc.), dozens of verified Staking Providers (Binance Staking, Just Mining, Everstake, ARC Stake etc.), DeFi integrations, multiple startups building on Elrond, infrastructure integrations, oracles, research partners, capital investment companies, launchpads, media partners and many, many others.

Elrond's main ambitious and long term targets are:

  • offering all businesses the possibility to build dApps on the Elrond Network
  • making achievable for all individuals to use $EGLD as an exchange token
  • giving the $EGLD coin the status of store of value
  • facilitating the tokenization process of data, identity and property.

$EGLD, the native coin of the Elrond blockchain

The eGold coin ($EGLD) is the digital and improved version of pure gold. It maintains the status of store of value and is lighter, more liquid and more practical than physical gold. The token has a strong utility at multiple levels (e.g. value transfer, transaction fees, rewards payment, deployment and execution of smart contracts, swaps on Maiar Exchange).

The current circulating supply is $EGLD 20,508,243. The theoretical maximum circulation would be of $EGLD 31,415,926, which makes very small fractions of $EGLD available for the total world's population of around 8 billion.

Sharding

Elrond is the only highly scalable blockchain, without compromising security or decentralization. It manages to solve completely the blockchain trilemma, without sacrificing any element. Elrond uses three main types of sharding: network sharding, transaction sharding and state sharding. The Elrond Adaptive State Sharding ensures that the network can process thousands of transactions per second, with extremely low fees.

The scalability on the Elrond blockchain is technically infinite, thanks to the sharding. Sharding means the partition of a larger part into smaller parts, called fragments. Having 3 shards, the Elrond network can easily support 15,000 TPS, but this number can be increased when needed. Each shard contains addresses, smart contracts, blockchain and transaction processing.

The Metachain runs in a special, dedicated shard, where the main tasks are not processing of transactions, but managing and finalizing the processed shard block headers, facilitating communication between shards, storing and maintaining a registry of validators, triggering new epochs, processing fisherman challenges, rewarding and slashing.

Nodes

What's unique about the Elrond network is the large number of nodes and the remarkable level of security. The Elrond network is composed of 3,200 nodes, scattered mainly in Europe (59%), North America (34%) and Asia (6%).

A node is an application started on a computer, which runs the Elrond protocol. There are four types of nodes: "full participating", "full non-participating", "light participating" and "light non-participating".

Consensus

Proof-of-Work (PoW) or "mining" is the consensus specific to Bitcoin and Ethereum, which is slow and energy consuming. Elrond created a far superior version of Proof-of-Stake, the Secure Proof-of-Stake (sPoS), which goes much further with the implementation of improvements that make it even more secure and fair.

Chronology on Elrond blockchain is counted in rounds and epochs. A round is a block validation, with a fixed duration of 6 seconds (10 minutes on Bitcoin and 15 seconds on Ethereum). An epoch is a 24 hours period, during which thousands of rounds follow one another.

The Elrond virtual machine (WASM VM)

The Elrond WASM VM is an exceptionally fast virtual machine for executing smart contracts, written in any programming language that can compile to WebAssembly, such as C, C++, C#, Rust, Go, TypeScript, and many others. Its attributes are stability & security, high performance, stateless execution, composability and predictability.

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