Bitcoin Forum

Toward the end of 2017 Twitter was flooded with statements like: “Down with the banks!”; “Crypto vs government!”; “We don’t need regulation!”

All that quickly changed in 2018 after the market crash. Afterwards, the battle cries turned into:
   + We need regulation!
   + Who allowed this to happen?
   + ICO market is full of scams!
   + They changed the terms on their investors, why is nobody doing anything!

Lots of investors can resonate with the latter claims. ICOs have frequently changed their vesting schedule without any warning to investors. Indeed, up until last year, it wasn’t even clear to whom ICO’s had to report their metrics.

Another problem for many ICOs are banks, or more so the lack of banks.

Finding crypto-friendly banks is hard, and most projects you see out there do not have a bank account. Not because banks are worried about going out of business from the pending blockchain revolution or any of that, but simply because the level of KYC & AML done by most ICOs and exchanges does not satisfy required regulatory guidelines. Or at least this is what the banks say.

So, in order to build a global lasting infrastructure, we first wanted to make sure that we establish a solid foundation in a country with clear legal crypto guidelines.

Switzerland: trial and error
We started our journey back in 2017 in Switzerland. Many projects were heading in that direction and it looked like a good idea, especially after FINMA (the Swiss Financial Authority) announced its detailed ICO guidelines in February 2018.

It made sense to attempt to build in an environment with an established set of rules, but things were not as established as they seemed.

Since FINMA was just publishing some guidelines, and there was no bill to explain and enforce the regulations, nothing was actually clear. The market was booming, and Swiss banks were ready to profit of the boom. They told us that our KYC & AML had to be done by a certified KYC provider in Switzerland. Needless to say that the price for this services were 10x the average market price.

After months of trying to get a clear view of what we are supposed to do, what our token will be legally considered, countless discussions with our lawyers, banks, and KYC/AML providers, we decided to give up on this slow and expensive option. It was time to go back to the drawing board and look for a different jurisdiction. One in which blockchain, crypto, and ICOs were regulated, but also one where we could move a lot faster.

More: https://medium.com/elrondnetwork/becoming-a-regulated-ico-ef8f03bd39f5

For more information, please visit us:

Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork
Whitepaper: https://elrond.com/files/Elrond_Whitepaper_EN.pdf
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Community platform: community.elrond.com

About Elrond Network

Elrond contribution proposal:

Adaptive State Sharding - Elrond proposes a dynamically adaptive sharding mechanism that ena-bles shard computation and reorganizing based on necessity and the number of active network nodes. The reassignment of nodes in the shards at the beginning of each epoch is progressive and nondeter-ministic, inducing no temporary liveness penalties. Adaptive state sharding comes with additional chal-lenges compared to the static model. One of the key-points resides in how shard-splitting and shard-merging is done to prevent overall latency penalties.

Elrond solves this challenge by:

    Dividing the wallet address space in shards, using a binary tree which can be built with the sole requirement of knowing the exact number of shards in a certain epoch.
    Introducing a technique of balancing the nodes in each shard, to achieve overall architecture equilibrium. This technique ensures a balanced workload and reward for each node in the network.
    Designing a built-in mechanism for automatic transaction routing in the corresponding shards, considerably reduces latency as a result.
    In order to achieve considerable improvements with respect to bootstrapping and storage, Elrond makes use of a shard pruning mechanism. This ensures sustainability of our architecture even with a throughput of tens of thousands of transactions per second (TPS).

Secure Proof of Stake  - As an improved variation of Proof of Stake (PoS) that ensures long term security and distributed fairness, while eliminating the need for energy intensive PoW algorithms. Elrond introduces an improvement which reduces the latency allowing each node in the shard to deter-mine the members of the consensus group (block proposer and validators) at the beginning of a round. This is possible because the last block's aggregated signature is used as the randomization factor. In addition to the stake factor generally used in PoS architectures as a sole decision input, Elrond refines its consensus mechanism by adding an additional weight factor called rating.

Main problems tackled:

    Full descentralization - Eliminating the need for any trusted third party, hence removing any single point of failure
    Robust security - Allowing secure transactions and preventing any attacks based on known attack vectors;
    High scalability  - Enabling the network to achieve a performance at least equal to the centralized counterpart, as measured in TPS;  Initial tests show 5000tps at 4MB/s average bandwidth with 16 shards. Linearly, Elrond has reached 10000tps at 8BM/s with 16shards and 50000 tps at 8MB/s average bandwidth 64shards.
    Efficiency - Performing all network services with minimal energy and computational requirements;
    Bootstrapping and storage enhancement - Ensuring a competitive cost for data storage and boot-strapping;
    Cross-chain interoperability - Enforced by design, permitting unlimited communication between external services.

Elrond innovation:

    Security through multi signing - This scaling technique can be used in blockchains to partition states and transaction processing, so that each node would process only a fraction of all transactions in parallel with other nodes. As long as there is a sufficient number of nodes verifying each transaction so that the system maintains high reliability and security, then splitting a blockchain into shards will allow it to process many transactions in parallel, and thus greatly improving transaction throughput and efficiency. Sharding promises to increase the throughput as the mining network expands, a property that is referred to as horizontal scaling
    Randomness source - Each node from the list E can be selected as part of j an optimally dimensioned consensus group, by a deterministic function, based on last block’s aggregated signature, the round r and a set of variation parameters. The random number, known to all shard nodes through gos-sip, cannot be predicted before the block is actually signed by the previous consensus group. This property makes it a good source of randomness and prevents highly adaptive malicious attacks. We define a selection function to return the set of chosen nodes
    Performance - Sharding approach shows a linearly increasing throughput.
    Shard storage pruning - To reduce storage requirements and bootstrapping time.

https://icobench.com/ico/elrond-network

This Elrond Network (Blockchain) is highly appreciated, people should not ignore it. This is information about Elrond

https://icodrops.com/elrond-network/

#168 - Interview with Beniamin Mincu, CEO of Elrond
https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-dxxbi-acf0a1

April 4, 2019
The long crypto winter has focused the blockchain world on enterprise projects with customers and solid business models, but we should not forget the importance of Layer One protocols! Behind the hype of STOs, finance platforms, and supply chain solutions lies the world of consensus mechanisms, sharding, proof of stake, and throughput.  And in the middle of this is Elrond.

 

Today we speak with Beniamin Mincu, cofounder and CEO of Elrond, who are combining some of the latest research to make a faster, more secure layer one blockchain.
Please note that the speakers in this podcast are not financial experts and are not offering financial advice

We hope you enjoy our show and feel free to reach out to us at info@analysisinchains.com or on Twitter through @NealKierans and @NWilliamsMBA

Intro reel and music by Sebastian Rodriguez from NTRPY, http://www.ntrpy.berlin

Editing team: Aiden and Jason Lavallee

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-dxxbi-acf0a1

Lucian Todea (@luciantodea)
https://twitter.com/luciantodea (https://twitter.com/luciantodea)

Technology entrepreneur and angel investor. Ironman. Born to run. Co-Founder and COO // Elrond Network.




     https://elrond.com (https://elrond.com) : The user-friendly blockchain for deploying programmable money and unstoppable applications

https://i.imgur.com/RUScIlQ.jpg


Q:What is Elrond?
A:Elrond is a complete rethinking of public blockchain infrastructure, specifically designed to be secure, efficient, scalable and interoperable. Elrond’s main contribution rests on two cornerstone building blocks:

1) A genuine State Sharding approach: effectively partitioning the chain state into multiple shards, handled in parallel by different participating validators;
2) Secure Proof of Stake consensus mechanism: an improved variation of Proof of Stake (PoS) that ensures long term security and distributed fairness, while eliminating the need for energy intensive PoW algorithms.

Q:How does Elrond plan to solve the scalability issue?
A:In Elrond the throughput increases linearly with the number of shards in the network.

Sharding is a scaling technique inspired by traditional concepts of database optimization. Also known as horizontal partitioning, sharding divides the data into several pieces placed on different environments to be processed.

The more validators and shards, the more transactions the network can process. Elrond is performing all network services with minimal energy and computational requirements.

Q:What is Adaptive State Sharding?
A:Sharding is a scaling technique inspired by traditional concepts of database optimization. Also known as horizontal partitioning, sharding divides the data into several pieces placed on different environments to be processed.

In a blockchain context, breaking the network into shards would result in more transactions being processed, verified and validated simultaneously. Each sharding level introduces a certain degree of parallelism, as a result, it becomes possible to process more transactions as the network grows. Implementing any sharding type on a blockchain architecture is extremely difficult.

We can identify 3 sharding types (levels):
1. Network Sharding represents the process of grouping the nodes into shards.
2. Transaction Sharding takes the complexity to the next level and deals with the distribution of transactions across different shards, but all the nodes keep the entire blockchain into their state.
3. State sharding represents the most sophisticated part and is described as a mechanism that allows different shards to deal only with a portion of the state without replicating the data between nodes from different shards. A state sharded blockchain can be seen as a network of fully interconnected blockchains.

In order to match the current scalability needs, Elrond introduces a novel state sharding scheme, called Adaptive State Sharding, with a dynamic model that allows the network to adapt to population and demand changes without compromising security, availability and decentralization.

Q:What is SPoS?
A:In general, Proof of Stake (PoS) concept states that a node’s probability to validate block transactions is proportional to how many tokens it is staking.
Secure Proof of Stake consensus mechanism expands on Algorand’s idea of a random selection mechanism for the validators, differentiating itself through the following aspects:

• Elrond proposes an improvement which reduces the latency allowing each node in the shard to determine the members of the consensus group (block proposer and validators) at the beginning of a round. This is possible because the last block's aggregated signature is used as the randomization factor. In contrast to Algorand’s approach, where the random committee selection can take up to 12 sec, in Elrond the time necessary for random selection of the consensus group is considerably reduced (estimated under 100 ms).

• In addition, Elrond refines its consensus mechanism by adding a additional weight factor called rating. The node’s probability to be selected in the consensus group takes into consideration both stake and rating, promoting meritocracy.

• Elrond uses Bellare and Neven multisignature scheme, which eliminates one communication round in the signing algorithm.

Q:How is Elrond different from other blockchains?
A:• Compared to Ethereum, Elrond eliminates both energy and computational waste from PoW algorithms by implementing a SPoS consensus while using transaction processing parallelism through sharding.

• Compared to Algorand, Elrond doesn’t have a single blockchain, instead it increases transaction’s throughput using sharding. Elrond also improves on Algorand’s idea of random selection by reducing the selection time of the consensus group from max 12 seconds to less than a second, but assumes that the adversaries cannot adapt within a round.

• Compared to Zilliqa, Elrond pushes the limits of sharding by using not only transaction sharding but also state sharding. Elrond completely eliminates the PoW mechanism and uses SPoS for consensus. Both architectures are building their own smart contract engine, but Elrond aims for EVM compliance to to achieve interoperability between blockchains.

Meet our Head of Engineering @AdrianDobrita  - with over 10 years international experience as a software engineer, Adrian has incredible skills in understanding research. He effortlessly applies innovative ideas to the Elrond code and architecture.


https://elrond.com (https://elrond.com) : The user-friendly blockchain for deploying programmable money and unstoppable applications. 10k tx/sec  - minimal latency  -  negligible fees   

What is Elrond Netrork?

What is SPoS?

What is Socail Mining? Regulated ICO?

What is Sharding? Can it solve the public blockchain scalability issue?


Elrond ICO: SPoS? Social Mining? Shrading - Everything you should know


http://coinfunda.com/pow-vs-pos-vs-spos-a-comparative-study-between-consensus-algorithms/

https://ambcrypto.com/can-sharding-solve-the-public-blockchain-scalability-problem-elrond-believes-it-can/

https://www.icoventures.net/elrond-call-synopsis/

Original here: https://www.altcoinera.com/elrond-network-can-potentially-handle-the-transactional-demands-of-the-entire-iot-market/


Elrond Network can potentially handle the transactional demands of the entire IoT Market.

One of the most important technologies of today is the internet of things (IoT). While people can recognize that nearly every household electronic is gaining the capacity to connect to the internet, the IoT ecosystem encompasses much more than consumer goods. Businesses are using IoT sensors to acquire valuable data about their operations, supply chains, facilities, etc., and governments are using them to make cities safer. Thus, it’s no surprise that the IoT market is expected to surpass $500 billion by just 2021.

The internet of things isn’t just growing, it’s also evolving. The number of devices connected to the internet of things is increasing, and these devices are sharing data with each other, enabling the devices to operate better on the network. However, the sharing of data has not reached its full potential and thus the evolution of all things IoT can still be further accelerated. A key hinderance is that, since data is the oil of the digital age, the owners of IoT devices are unwilling to share data for free. Data is valuable and, understandably, those who possess it seek to acquire the fair value for it. The trade of data, though, is slow, inefficient, and marred by the expense of various middleman agencies; this is where blockchain technology can play a pivotal role in the advancement of the internet of things.

By layering the data trade of IoT devices upon a blockchain, tens of billions of IoT devices will be able to abide under the terms of a smart contract and automatically swap relevant data with its fair value. While blockchain technology has the potential to bring an incredible amount of efficiency to the IoT market, the throughput demand of tens of billions of IoT devices is exponentially higher than the maximum capacity of any leading blockchain. The blockchain and the internet of things are cutting-edge technologies of today but for them to be utilized in cohesion, a blockchain must be capable of handling linear scalability. To address this problem, Elrond Network, a blockchain that has been in development for more than one and a half years, utilizes Adaptive State Sharding to deliver a blockchain infrastructure that possesses an unprecedented degree of scalability.

A Blockchain that can handle the Internet of Things

Elrond Network can currently support more than 3,750 transactions per second per shard. This isn’t a theoretical figure, but the delivered performance of the live testnet blockchain. The unique aspect of Elrond Network is that, through Adaptive State Sharding, it can integrate more shards as network demand grows.

Adaptive State Sharding propagates network resource demands to a capacity low enough that even a household laptop can become an active node on the network. These nodes can then be activated in groups, forming new shards capable of processing additional transactions. The network’s linear scalability allows resource supply to match throughput demand. Were a growing number of IoT devices to transact on Elrond Network, the network rewards will increase. As more nodes join the network to benefit from the available rewards, new shards will be activated, allowing the Elrond blockchain to handle a greater number of transactions. Thus, Elrond Network is the first blockchain to possess the technological infrastructure to adjust network throughput in real-time.

Additionally, the Elrond Virtual Machine is compliant with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. This allows the existing IoT solutions that have been developed on Ethereum to be extended on the blockchain for scalability needs. With the aid of the SPOS consensus mechanism, Elrond Network’s scalable nature does not compromise network security. Additionally, the smart contracts operating on the network will be significantly more bug-free as they are formally verified at the point of creation. This will ensure that the automation of transactions between IoT devices will be less prone to bugs or external attacks.

Through the Secure Proof of Stake (SPOS) consensus mechanism, only nodes that have a sufficient stake and network reputation can receive the role of block proposer or validator. Each round, a group of nodes is randomly selected and one of them becomes the block proposer while the others receive the role of validator. The source of randomness is derived from a completely new blockchain for each shard. Each leader signs with its own private key, the previous randomness source; thus, the network avoids all possibilities of bias. Moreover, a block is produced only when 2/3 + 1 validators aggregate a signature to approve a proposed block. Thus, the network is able to maintain practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT).

The internet of things and blockchain are two of the most important technologies of today and their utility will only increase in the future. Blockchain technology holds the key to greatly improving the data and value transfer that takes place between IoT devices, and Elrond Network is the blockchain that possesses the throughput capacity needed to support the massive volume of interactions that take place between IoT devices. The IoT market is already a multi-hundred billion dollar market and Elrond Network stands at the forefront of delivering blockchain-enabled solutions in this sector.

For more information visit https://elrond.com/
Telegram https://t.me/ElrondNetwork
Twitter https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRLKQHcjuWW_-JOZ-DqQTXw

#Press Release This is a paid press release. Altcoin does not endorse and is not responsible for or liable for any content, accuracy, quality, advertising, products or other materials on this page. Readers should do their own research before taking any actions related to the company

Weekly development stats of @ElrondNetwork protocol. Optimized BLS consensus integration, metachain improvements and observer node implementation for blockchain explorer. All this in parallel to #Consensus2019 #NewYorkBlockchainWeek

https://twitter.com/SasuRobert/status/1130025225033322497

TechBullion Exclusive Interview with Beniamin Mincu, CEO of Elrond


What is Elrond?

Elrond is new blockchain architecture that’s designed from scratch to accomplish several things:

(1) Bring 1000x cumulative improvement in throughput, execution speed, and transaction cost-efficiency.

(2) Improve user experience, eliminate required specialized hardware, and enable anyone to run a node and receive rewards.



Many solutions seem promising, but a couple of ideas that work long-term are:

• Scalable parallelization of transactions (adaptive state sharding)
  
• Efficient consensus and fast execution speed (secure proof-of-stake)

Read More https://www.techbullion.com/tech-bullion-exclusive-interview-with-beniamin-mincu-ceo-of-elrond/

ELROND TESTNET UPDATE

1/ For the past 1,5 years we've been working on a new blockchain solution designed to brings a 1000-fold improvement in throughput, execution speed and transaction cost In short @elrondnetwork can process 10k+ TPS, with 5sec latency and negligible cost💡

Full: https://twitter.com/beniaminmincu/status/1130529663862939654

Campaign: I see Elrond everywhere : https://medium.com/elrondnetwork/campaign-i-see-elrond-everywhere-a46b7fd13a73

As a blockchain startup, we understand the power of community, and therefore have planned a new, more inclusive campaign where all that counts is your creativity.

Before we present the outline of this campaign, we’d like to say that it is intended as a chance to level the ranking field between all community platform users. Even if you registered less than a week ago (or if do so right NOW), you will have the opportunity to catch up on reputation and points.


To get rewarded please upload your creative content on the platform, and share it with our Telegram community. We will only choose and reward the most creative, fun or relevant content.

The duration of this campaign is two weeks. Points and reputation will be assigned at the end of it:
Rank one: 4 reputation + 1500 points

Rank two: 3 reputation + 1000 points

Rank three: 2 reputation + 500 points

Rank four: 1.5 reputation + 300 points

---

Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Social Mining: http://bit.ly/elrond-socialmining
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

Elrond Network ICO Review & Rating
Rating: A

What is Elrond Network?
Elrond introduces a novel blockchain architecture which goes beyond state-of-the-art and is designed for practical scalability via Adaptive State Sharding and Secure Proof of Stake (SPoS). On the one hand our solution offers scalability while preserving security and decentralization; on the other it ensures large scale efficiency and sustainability by eliminating intensive PoW energy and computational waste. Last but not least, we believe interoperability to be instrumental for the future of the blockchain ecosystem, hence we design Elrond to be EVM compliant and cross-chain interoperable.

What are the value drivers behind the token price of ERD?
The main value drivers behind ERD are the underlying technical solutions, such as Secure Proof of Stake and Adaptive State Sharding. The Elrond ecosystem consists of multiple different layers that add value to users of the ecosystem.

Intent Forms for Developers
We have opened two intent forms for any developer that wants to have early access to our testnet [ https://elrond.com/testnet ] and an intent form for presale participants [ https://elrond.com/presale ].


Elrond Network ICO Review and Analysis

Review and analysis of Elrond Network by ICO analysts:

Strengths

    The project has attracted a lot of industry experts as advisors and has strong technical team to reach the milestones of the project
    The written marketing materials of the project seem professionally crafted and are visually pleasant, especially the pitch deck
    Community support is pretty good with 10.6k Telegram members and 1.2k Twitter followers

Potential concerns

    The allocation of tokens for advisors, team members and company reserve is 40% of total tokens, which is a little on the higher side from potential investor’s point of view.


What is the value proposition of Elrond Network?
Elrond is a complete rethinking of public blockchain infrastructure with following benefits:

    High Scalability – Comparable or surpassing throughput as to centralized counterparts
    Efficiency – Performing all network services with minimal energy and computational requirements
    Robust Security – Enabling secure transactions and maintaining security in face of attacks
    Cross-chain interoperability – Enforced by design, permitting unlimited communication between external services

The ERD token

    Token symbol: ERD
    Total supply: 20 000 000 000 (20 billion)
    Whitelisting: Yes

Elrond Network ICO Roadmap

Q3 2017 Technical work begins

Q2 2018 Preliminary technical Proof of Concept finalized

Q3 2018 Elrond Prototype

Q1 2019 Fully Featured Testnet

Q2 2019 Elrond Mainnent

Q3 2019 Elrond Hub

Q4 2019 Valar society

https://topicolist.com/elrond-network/

1/ ZERO TO ONE - MAJOR MILESTONE FOR THE BLOCKCHAIN SPACE
Elrond testnet has been released yesterday, validating that Adaptive state sharding and Secure proof of Stake work at scale
Just take a look at this beauty: elegant, clean and fast: (link: http://testnet.elrond.com) testnet.elrond.com



2/ With only 5 shards(plus metachain) and 126 node, run in AWS & distributed in 6 geo locations, we have achieved 10k TPS with 6 sec latency
Now devs and startups have a high performance blockchain architecture that actually makes sense for real world applications ⚡️

3/ Elrond testnet is t most advanced validation of State sharding & PoS to date; implementation includes a new blockchain built from scratch, with state sharding, stake + pbft consensus, schnorr sig for transactions, modified BLS for randomness gen, and BLS multisig for consensus

4/ THAT’S 1000X IMPROVEMENT IN THROUGHPUT, UP AND RUNNING RIGHT NOW: (link: http://testnet.elrond.com) testnet.elrond.com 🔥

5/Another major achievement is the Meta VM Elrond brings by building a GO backend to K framework. Through this we will support 3 VMs at the same time for max flexibility: EVM, WASM, IELE + formal verification
IELE has passed all tests and works, so we're supprting solidity alrdy

6/ By the way, huge shoutout to @rosugrigore  and @rv_inc  for building K framework; great tool to build on!

7/ Detailed recording from yesterday's release event can be found here: (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChjxEI3Ed7E)
Event structure: intro to Elrond & milestone overview, prototype lessons, testnet achievement, tech demo with live bootstrapping and network testing, and AMA session at the end

8/ Extremely proud of @elrondnetwork  team, and thankful for the effort everyone has put into this. Together we can conquer the world!
Also very thankful to advisers and closer friends who've been supporting us throughout this journey

9/ Elrond grew in many ways due to your feedback; Thank you!
@alexiskold  @alextabbarok @canesin  Andrei Pitis @raulitojordan @unignorant @RosuGrigore

10/ Las but not least, huge thanks to our community for ongoing support and contribution!
We've seen tremendous excitement and growth during the last months and appreciate all the effort we can get.

11/ Next Tuesday we'll let the community play with the wallet binaries, helping stress-test the network + share more info on the network status +  small surprise demo
In 2 weeks we'll have the official Game of Stakes announcement with first proposal for rules and documentation

12/ We have scheduled new releases for the testnet every sprint(3 weeks) but will probably have them coming faster during the next period
Lots of improvements and more complexity will be added shortly
We've just began, and this is just the first testnet version. Onwards!

---

Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Social Mining: http://bit.ly/elrond-socialmining
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

10 Romanian startups to look out for in 2019 and beyond



Elrond – Everything changed when the internet transitioned from dialup to broadband. Founded in 2017 in Sibiu, Elrond brings broadband performance to blockchain. Specifically, Elrond brings a 1000x improvement in throughput, execution speed, and transaction cost. It also improves user experience and lowers barriers to entry for network participation through low computational requirements and staking cost.


https://www.eu-startups.com/2019/05/10-romanian-startups-to-look-out-for-in-2019-and-beyond/

 :)

Summer is here but there’s no time for picnic. Elrond #TESTNET is LIVE and exciting things are happening. Find out our latest news on the interview with @TheCryptoLark

Supercharged Blockchain Ready to Shock Crypto Into The Mainstream- Elrond

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tU7-0pdBcI

  ;)

General

Q: What is Elrond?

A: Elrond is a complete rethinking of public blockchain infrastructure, specifically designed to be secure, efficient, scalable and interoperable. Elrond’s main contribution rests on two cornerstone building blocks:

1) A genuine State Sharding approach: effectively partitioning the chain state into multiple shards, handled in parallel by different participating validators;

2) Secure Proof of Stake consensus mechanism: an improved variation of Proof of Stake (PoS) that ensures long term security and distributed fairness, while eliminating the need for energy intensive PoW algorithms.



Q: How does Elrond plan to solve the scalability issue?

A: In Elrond the throughput increases linearly with the number of shards in the network.

Sharding is a scaling technique inspired by traditional concepts of database optimization. Also known as horizontal partitioning, sharding divides the data into several pieces placed on different environments to be processed.

The more validators and shards, the more transactions the network can process. Elrond is performing all network services with minimal energy and computational requirements.



Q: What is Adaptive State Sharding?

A: Sharding is a scaling technique inspired by traditional concepts of database optimization. Also known as horizontal partitioning, sharding divides the data into several pieces placed on different environments to be processed.

In a blockchain context, breaking the network into shards would result in more transactions being processed, verified and validated simultaneously. Each sharding level introduces a certain degree of parallelism, as a result, it becomes possible to process more transactions as the network grows. Implementing any sharding type on a blockchain architecture is extremely difficult.

We can identify 3 sharding types (levels):



1. Network Sharding represents the process of grouping the nodes into shards.



2. Transaction Sharding takes the complexity to the next level and deals with the distribution of transactions across different shards, but all the nodes keep the entire blockchain into their state.



3. State sharding represents the most sophisticated part and is described as a mechanism that allows different shards to deal only with a portion of the state without replicating the data between nodes from different shards. A state sharded blockchain can be seen as a network of fully interconnected blockchains.



In order to match the current scalability needs, Elrond introduces a novel state sharding scheme, called Adaptive State Sharding, with a dynamic model that allows the network to adapt to population and demand changes without compromising security, availability and decentralization.



Q: What is SPoS?

A: In general, Proof of Stake (PoS) concept states that a node’s probability to validate block transactions is proportional to how many tokens it is staking.

Secure Proof of Stake consensus mechanism expands on Algorand’s idea of a random selection mechanism for the validators, differentiating itself through the following aspects:



• Elrond proposes an improvement which reduces the latency allowing each node in the shard to determine the members of the consensus group (block proposer and validators) at the beginning of a round. This is possible because the last block's aggregated signature is used as the randomization factor. In contrast to Algorand’s approach, where the random committee selection can take up to 12 sec, in Elrond the time necessary for random selection of the consensus group is considerably reduced (estimated under 100 ms).



• In addition, Elrond refines its consensus mechanism by adding a additional weight factor called rating. The node’s probability to be selected in the consensus group takes into consideration both stake and rating, promoting meritocracy.



• Elrond uses Bellare and Neven multisignature scheme, which eliminates one communication round in the signing algorithm.



Q: How is Elrond different from other blockchains?

A:

• Compared to Ethereum, Elrond eliminates both energy and computational waste from PoW algorithms by implementing a SPoS consensus while using transaction processing parallelism through sharding;



• Compared to Algorand, Elrond doesn’t have a single blockchain, instead it increases transaction’s throughput using sharding. Elrond also improves on Algorand’s idea of random selection by reducing the selection time of the consensus group from max 12 seconds to less than a second, but assumes that the adversaries cannot adapt within a round;



• Compared to Zilliqa, Elrond pushes the limits of sharding by using not only transaction sharding but also state sharding. Elrond completely eliminates the PoW mechanism and uses SPoS for consensus. Both architectures are building their own smart contract engine, but Elrond aims for EVM compliance to to achieve interoperability between blockchains.
..............

Technical


Q: What hardware requirements are needed for running a node:

A: A typical node will probably need consumer-grade equipment and a super full node will probably need a multi-core server with enterprise level storage capabilities. It is expected that a super full node will need to have the capabilities of a typical consumer grade equipment multiplied by the number of shards. For a single node, the network requirements will need to be around 100Mbit/s download/upload link and for a super full node, the above mentioned requirement should be multiplied by the number of shards. We have tested the prototype on a broad range of equipments and operating systems. We have found that it works fine on a typical machine (i3 processor, 8GB RAM, SSD storage).



Q: Is it possible to coordinate which shard nodes get into?

A: No, the shard each node gets allocated to is random. The new nodes (entering the system during an epoch) are kept in a pool and are allocated to shards at the end of the epoch by a pseudorandom algorithm. The shard assignment cannot be predicted ahead of time.



Q: What is the size of a shard?

A: There is a trade off between security and communication overhead. For security we would want the shard to be as large as possible. For communication overhead to be minimised the number should be as low as possible. Preliminary experiments show that 300-400 nodes per shard would be a good tradeoff.



Q: Is there inter-shard communication?

A: Yes. The processing of cross shard transactions require inter-shard communication.



Q: Will the nodes know if they are in the same shard?

A: Yes, the nodes will know who the other nodes in the shard are.



Q: Do shards have to trust other shards?

A: There is a notarization chain which is always checked for cross shard operations. Some operations can also be verified, like if the cross shard message came from the correct group, and the group has run a pBFT on the message, etc



Q: Your scalability is in the number of transactions or in the number of nodes in network?

A: Both. Adding new nodes to the system should not hinder it but help increase throughput [TPS]. Generally speaking, the scalability we are discussing about is based on several criteria. The system must work well when there are few users and nodes, but more importantly when the system has many users and nodes. Network scaling capability can be measured in this case in time it takes from when a transaction is issued until it is committed to the blockchain, which should not increase with network size or users (it increases TPS instead, which allows keeping the waiting time in certain limits). Another criteria that affects scalability is storage size. When you have high TPS, especially when it comes to sharding, the system must be able to manage the associated data volume (a ledger that grows linearly with TPS) and here we are talking about orders of different magnitude compared to Blockchains like Bitcoin. For this, our solution is Adaptive State Sharding and not just Transaction Sharding (which would have solved the good TPS problem comparable to systems like VISA, but we would still have the storage problem). In addition to this, we also implement a pruning solution to further improve scalability on storage. Another point worth mentioning is energy waste. When the number of nodes in the network increases, one has to consider the operating energy cost, and also the cost of being able to participate in the system (the value of the node itself) - which is lower for us since we are not using POW but SPoS (we leave the whole system upgrade race behind and as long as you are not malicious you re-claim your stake).

Mining/Staking



Q: How are you rewarding block validators?

A: Our fee structure is still in the research phase but we should have some initial conclusions published soon. The basic challenge is that we are trying to find a feasible way of bootstrapping the network by having a compelling economic incentive for node validators, while maintaining a competitive fee structure. More information on this will be published after our initial research has reached a conclusion. Until then we can share this information: In order to bootstrap the network and maintain a competitive fees structure, we are considering using a gradually decreasing inflation threshold to incentivize a specific (minimum) node participation rate. This will slowly transition to a self-sustained fee structure, ensuring an efficient and secure network. Based on initial calculations, this threshold will never exceed 2.5% per annum.



Q: When are verifiers/validators rated? And how?

A: The leader will introduce a special transaction in the proposed block in which his account will have the rating increased by a small fraction (e.g. by 2 units). If the block gets signed by at least ? validators + 1 then the leader will have its rating increased. The validators will have their ratings increased at the end of the epoch by the following rule: the validators who signed a block that was successfully added to the blockchain will have their rating increased (e.g. by 1 unit). The leader caught cheating on a block (+the validators who signed that block) will be slashed in the following rounds. The slashing occurs if some nodes will emit special transactions with proofs to signal malicious leader and validators and those transactions get included in a block. The nodes that detected the malicious leader will get rewarded and have their rating increased. Any node caught emitting false signaling transactions will have their rating decreased. If rating falls below a certain value, stake slashing will occur.



Q: Is there an estimate of the cost of redistributing a subset of nodes across shards every epoch?

A: The cost of redistributing a subset of nodes between shards consists in the network usage and processing power to bootstrap those nodes. The liveness of the network is estimated that will remain unaffected. We are looking into further optimizations to minimize that cost.



Q: How is cross shard communication handled? Who validates the communication?

A: The communication between shards is made through dedicated channels between the consensus groups. The transaction is dispatched to the sender shard and after it’s being validated and included in a block, a receipt is broadcast along with the transaction to the receiver shard through the dedicated channel. The receipt is signed by the validators group from sender shard and the consensus group in the receiver’s shard can verify the receipt information independently.

Security

Q: Can a shard be attacked?

A: Given enough time and resources, any system can be attacked. One possible way to attack a shard would be to have more than ? malicious nodes into the shard, but this is highly unlikely due to the random assignment of nodes to shards, and the assumptions that no more than ¼ of nodes in the network are malicious.



Q: Are attacks from quantum computing possible?

A: Most of the cryptographic schemes in blockchains today (ethereum, bitcoin, etc) are susceptible to attacks from quantum computers. There have been some advances in cryptography for post-quantum computing and we are investigating this field.



Q: Does dividing the network into smaller shards make it susceptible to Sybil attacks?

A: All nodes are backed by their stake which does not change with the size of shards.



Q: Is it possible to obtain a majority in one shard by pure luck?

A: The probability to get more than ? in a shard is very low < 10^-6 and can be computed by a hypergeometric distribution.



Q: What happens if a group of validators commit an invalid block into a shard’s ledger and it’s the last block of the epoch making the epoch e+1 have an invalid block as that epoch’s genesis block?

A: As mentioned in previous answer, the invalid block will not be accepted by the shard honest nodes, so even if there is a delay in the epoch, one shard having more rounds to reach the end of an epoch with a valid block, this is prefered as opposed to reaching the end of the epoch with an invalid block.



The extra rounds will be deducted from the next epoch, so that delays do not add up. The shuffling of nodes is not affected as the moving nodes are always buffered for one epoch into a waiting list for the shard, together with the new joining nodes.



We are also considering for the last block in the epoch to run a consensus on all the eligible nodes in the shard.



Q: How do you handle the nothing at stake problem?

A: Elrond addresses the nothing at stake problem through a blockchain that aims to evolve without forks. The forking is avoided by the selection process inside SPoS ( Secure Proof of Stake), our consensus method detailed in Chapter V, Section 2 in the whitepaper. To overcome nothing at stake and other security problems, SPoS uses two important mechanisms: a) 2 separate selection lists (waiting and eligible) b) 2 selection parameters rating and stake. Our architecture does not encourage a block proposing competition that might produces forks, instead on every round, the group members that are proposing and signing the block are well known. On top of that, after each round the group members may perform a stake slashing for bad behavior using the feedback function based on the ratingModifier. During the development phase, as these features will confirm the mathematical theories and the efficiency of the solution, we will post further results, resistance tests and improvements.



Q: Are you considering replacing the elliptic curves algorithm with the supersingular one ?

A: Yes, we are examining the current developments in the quantum computing field, knowing that the cryptographic algorithms currently used (not just in Elrond) are not “quantum resistant”. It’s not just D-Wave is working on quantum computers, but also giants like Intel and Google are researching this field. We are also taking a close look at the publications from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) regarding the standardization of signature and encryption algorithms, including isogeny-based schemes (e.g. supersingular elliptic curve isogenies), aimed at adapting elliptic-curve cryptography to the post-quantum era.



Q: About the cross-shard communication, referring to the state sharding here. Assuming a naive mapping of addresses ending in 1 going to shard_1, etc. Let’s say you have a smart contract at 0x…1, if I want to make a transaction to that, but my account address is 0x…2, how does shard_1 “call” on shard_2 to check my balance for example ? I guess my transaction, since it’s going to shard_1 isn’t a problem, but what about calls or messages done within the contract?

A: The states of accounts are managed by the shard they are allocated to, so as you mentioned, if your account is managed by shard_2, then it’s state is known only to shard 2.



There are two parts here, one would be the cross shard communication needed for validation and execution of transactions, the other part is cross shard state requests which currently are not needed by the protocol, but might be useful in smart contracts.



To explain the first part, I would have to go through how normal payment transaction processing is done.



Execution of transaction (minus in the balance of sender) is done first in sender’s shard, as sender’s shard has all means to validate the transaction, afterwards if validated it is included in sender’s shard block and then the header of the block holding this transaction is sent to be notarized by the metachain. After metachain receives all block headers from shards in a specific round, it creates a notarization block with the hashes of all these blocks and aggregated inclusion proofs for all transactions that have been included so far (including the cross shard transaction in question). This metachain block is sent to all shards, including the receiver shard for the transaction in question.



The receiver’s shard has a list of all cross shard transactions as well (as dispatching of transactions is done to both receiver and sender’s shard), so it can try and verify with the inclusion proof from metachain block if it’s cross shard transactions with itself as a receiver shard have been included. All cross shard transactions that passed the inclusion test, can be executed on the receiver side as well and included in a block. No validation is required as validation was already done in sender’s shard by a consensus group.



For smart contracts it is similar. When you execute a transaction from your account to a smart contract in shard 1, the transaction is validated in your shard_2, as it is the sender’s shard, then the balance for your account is updated. Since smart contract is in shard_1, the execution is done only in the second part, after the transaction has a proof of inclusion in metachain block. The receivers shard does not need to revalidate the transaction, as it has already been validated by a consensus in shard_2, and otherwise it could not have been notarized in the metachain. The receivers shard executes the transaction for the receiver, so balance is updated on the receiver side (plus) and smart contract which has the internal state managed by shard 1 (receiver shard) can be executed.



For other cross shard state requests we can serve them on communication channels (topics in libp2p) with merkle proofs. This can be further optimized but right now it is not the focus. We will come back to this and refine after the first versions of the testnet.



Q: I understand that the SC-functionality is maybe a bit off, but I’ll ask anyway, It might be that the call to the SC doesn’t affect my balance, or are we talking about more BTC-like script types of smart contracts than EVM-ones?

A: There’s a fee in every transaction calling a smart contract so it will affect the caller’s balance. The types of supported smart contracts are EVM like.



Q: And if the execution of the contract depends on something in the receivers shard, the contract is asynchronous waiting for communication from the receiver shard?

A: There are two types of SC (smart contract) we are considering : a) smart contracts with no internal state, providing only functionality and b) smart contracts having internal state that changes between calls.



For type a) smart contracts, we can duplicate these in all shards, so each time there is a call to one of these smart contracts, we can execute the caller’s shard local copy of this SC.



For type b) SCs it is a bit more complex.



Simplified solution: We can enforce that type b) SCs are residing in the same shard with its dependencies at the moment of Smart contract deployment. For this we would need to have a clear direct dependency list stated in the smart contract, but this is actually simple, as each language has a way to “import”/“require”/“use”, etc. external libraries. Afterwards a recursive check of dependencies can be done to decide which shard this SC needs to be allocated to.



It may happen that all dependencies are in a single shard, so then it is easy, the SC will be added to the same shard. Another situation would be that the SC has dependencies in different shards, then a reorganization of SCs is needed so that all dependencies are moved to the same shard. The reorganization of SCs will be done taking into consideration the SC load of each shard (this statistics can be accumulated by each SC call with almost zero overhead) in order to keep the shards balanced. This means that the execution of a SC will always affect a single shard.



This solution looks a bit like “yanking”, the difference is that the trigger for this is a SC deployment, which is many times less frequent than a SC call, so the overhead of moving SC state can be considerably decreased.



We can decide as well to do some periodic checks (would be embedded in the protocol) for shard SC execution load and decide to move groups of dependent SCs between shards in order to balance each shard workload.



We are still investigating further optimizations in the deployment and execution process of SCs in a sharded architecture.



If the SC execution needs information from a different shard, which is not coming from another SC execution, then it indeed needs to wait for the response before it is finalized.



Q: 1. curious about node specification in obtaining high tps - you did the tests with heterogeneous nodes? By this I mean having nodes distributed all over the world with different latencies or more like super fast computers with good internet connection and from same region? 2. What is behind sPoS, I mean there are different implementations of PoS in the industry? What is so special about elrond’s to call it sPoS? 3. What is elrond bringing compared to other platforms claiming to achieve even higher tps like quarckchain, solana and many other claimers? They also claim to use evm as most of the projects do. 4. Is there any other innovation or pain point elrond is tackling? Thanks!

A: We did our tests with nodes in AWS in 5 different datacenters, distributed all over the world. We are using T2.medium, average dual core 4GB RAM, so medium specifications.



There are different flavours of PoS, all having the constant of “stake locking”. Delegated PoS has some risks like: bribery attacks and semi-centralization. Our selection function of the consensus group takes into consideration both stake and rating and to further increase the security, the consensus group is randomly sampled every epoch.



We are combining our Secure Proof of Stake algorithm with Adaptive State Sharding. Some of the high performance platforms still do PoW. Most other platforms only do static sharding, while we will dynamically change the number of shards based on the number of nodes and network usage.



The most important innovations we are coming with are the scalability that comes from a Dynamically Adaptive Sharding mechanism, Smart Contracts on a State Sharded Architecture and currently under investigation, privacy aspects...........

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Q: What do you think of the zero revenue model for projects such as BCs. Does the nature of having no foreseeable future revenue model make you nervous about the development of Elrond in 5, 7, or 10 years time?

A: If we take bitcoin as an example, I think things have evolved quite well for them. Despite what you would think now, given all the attacks it experienced, the many obstacles they overcame, bitcoin has gone quite far. Moving one step beyond that, I think ethereum offers an even more instructive example. Once our network is working, its market cap should reach a sufficiently large point that the reserve extends development for at least 5-10 years. At that point, development and governance will likely be very decentralized, funded by the community, and decided by the community.



Q: I know that Elrond wants to rate a block proposer by recalculating at the end of each round, adding another layer of security by promoting meritocracy. Can you provide more information about how meritocracy is going to be calculated, implemented and how is going to affect the random selection mechanism ?

A: Yes, we want to give slightly more chances to be selected as block proposer to the well behaved nodes. Increases in the rating of honest nodes is happening with a smaller step than the penalization in case of detected malicious behavior, think of this as being hard to gain trust but easy to lose it. Note that the rating has limited influence on a node’s chances to be selected, so no matter how high your rating goes, the chances will be capped. You can think of the selection mechanism as a roulette, where each of the nodes in the shard has a slice, larger or smaller depending on it’s stake and rating. When you spin the roulette you would have higher chances if your slice is larger.



Q: What do you think will have to happen in the crypto space in order to get the magical term of 'wider adoption/usage’?

A: There are many theories here, but adoption can only happen through different apps that solve various problems. I think this will come gradually, as we invent new ways of using what we have currently created. The overarching long term need emerging is a new layer in the internet infrastructure, enabling privacy, censorship-resistence and sovereign digital ownership. As privacy on current web apps is being lost, censorship is applied, and people get manipulated, I expect people to start experimenting heavily with different blockchain applications like the brave browser, these new digital assets nobody can take from them, and other applications giving them again control to their data.



Q: Why did you decide to fund the project through ICO rather than traditional venture capital? What advantages did you see in pursuing this route?

A: Being a blockchain platform with its own native token it makes a lot of sense to raise the funds through an ICO. On the other hand, we see the ICO also as an Initial Community Aquisition effort and we believe the support of the community and of the developers is very important to build a decentralized network. Also take into the consideration that the Proof of stake consensus requires the nodes to stake the Elrond token so the trading and liquidity of the token is important to be reached as soon as possible before and/or immediatly for bootstrapping the network.



Q: Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake recently announced, Sharding to be implemented into the Ethereum blockchain somewhere in 2020. On your roadmap it states that you will launch your mainnet in 2019. Are you on track on delivering your sharding solution sooner than Ethereum?

A: Regarding your second question, this is indeed the case. Our whole point is to move fast with our development and be one the first architectures to offer truly scalable state sharding solution. As things are moving right now, we are advancing at a healthy pace. One of our main advantages is that we have a small, determined and nimble team, able to adapt and move fast.



Q: For the team at Elrond, what would success look like in 3 years for this project?

A: Success in 3 years would mean having 100 dapps working on Elrond, having a geographically distributed developer community of 2000 people contributing, having 50k nodes running a sufficiently decentralized digital governance structure, having Elrond integrated with main payment processors allowing for both online and offline usage of tokens. Either this, or one working application with 1 million users/day.



Q: How many transactions per second does your prototype reach? Is it far of the 10,000 TPS you are aiming for?

A: With respect to transactions per second, the main idea with our architecture is that it enables linear scalability. I.e. scalability which grows with the number of shards(and nodes) in the network. This means that our 10k TPS is not a limit but rather an internal goal or threshold after which scalability will be considered a solved problem. That said, we intend to go much higher than 10k, but want to move on a step by step basis. To come back to your prototype question, our first prototype version had exceeded 1k TPS with 10 shards and 250 nodes, which was approximately in the expected range. Still, we have since moved forward and changed lots of things in our implementation and are moving forward toward releasing the first version of our testnet. This should hopefully happen in about 1,5 months(tentative) or a bit sooner. Results for this should look considerably better(3-5x increase in speed). We will offer some more updates on this as we advance.



Q: While sharding has proven to be a scaling solution to centralized databases, how do you intend to implement a safe sharding solution to your decentralized project?

A: To answer your first question, the sharding solution we chose is based on several points which are supposed to increase the security. First is random sampling, so the nodes forming each shard are randomly assigned to shards. You cannot influence the shard you will be assigned to. Also once a node is assigned to a shard, it will not stay there forever, as we do again a random shuffling at the end of each epoch. This helps us securing the network/shards against colluding nodes. Second point is choosing a sufficiently large number of nodes per shard. This is always a trade off between the security of a shard and the communication overhead in order to propagate the information to all nodes. The assumptions we use are for a typical byzantine model, so from our preliminary tests and analysis, 400 nodes per shard should give us a high confidence against takeover attacks (probability is <10^-7)



Q: How’s does the utility of your token essential to your ecosystem

A: Basically all activity within our network, this includes transactions, running smart contracts, providing services such as staking, or running a node will be fuelled by ERDs.



Q: what is confirmation timed diff between same shard tx and intershard tx ? how do you manage to balance wallet address space with regards to each epoch ?

A: On your first question, the confirmation time for a cross shard TX compared to a intra shard TX is larger by at most a delta d=k*r, where r is the round time and k a constant that will be refined later. This k is expected to be somewhere between 1 and 10.



Per your second question, “how do you manage to balance wallet address space with regards to each epoch”. As you can see in the tree structure, each new shard that is added, splits an original shard address space into 2 equal spaces, half remains with the original shard, and the other half goes to the newly created shard. As the tree grows you can see that you never have more than one level difference between each of the leaves (shards). The address space is balanced out when all shards are on the same level in the tree.



Q: Your scalibility is in the number of transactions or in the number of nodes in network?

A: Both. Adding new nodes to the system should not hinder it but help increase throughput [TPS]. Generally speaking, the scalability we are discussing about is based on several criteria. The system must work well when there are few users and nodes, but more importantly when the system has many users and nodes. Network scaling capability can be measured in this case in time it takes from when a transaction is issued until it is committed to the blockchain, which should not increase with network size or users (it increases TPS instead, which allows keeping the waiting time in certain limits). Another criteria that affects scalability is storage size. When you have high TPS, especially when it comes to sharding, the system must be able to manage the associated data volume (a ledger that grows linearly with TPS) and here we are talking about orders of different magnitude compared to Blockchains like Bitcoin. For this, our solution is Adaptive State Sharding and not just Transaction Sharding (which would have solved the good TPS problem comparable to systems like VISA, but we would still have the storage problem). In addition to this, we also implement a pruning solution to further improve scalability on storage. Another point worth mentioning is energy waste. When the number of nodes in the network increases, one has to consider the operating energy cost, and also the cost of being able to participate in the system (the value of the node itself) - which is lower for us since we are not using POW but SPoS (we leave the whole system upgrade race behind and as long as you are not malicious you reclaim your stake).



Q: Reading through the WP and trying to get my head around how you handle the nothing at stake problem

A: Elrond addresses the nothing at stake problem through a blockchain that aims to evolve without forks. The forking is avoided by the selection process inside SPoS( Secure Proof of Stake), our consensus method detailed in Chapter V, Section 2 in the whitepaper. To overcome nothing at stake and other security problems, SPoS uses two important mechanisms: a) 2 separate selection lists (waiting and eligible) b) 2 selection parameters rating and stake. Our architecture does not encourage a block proposing competition that might produce forks, instead on every round, the group members that are proposing and signing the block are well known. On top of that, after each round the group members may perform a stake slashing for bad behavior using the feedback function based on the ratingModifier. During the development phase, as these features will confirm the mathematical theories and the efficiency of the solution, we will post further results, resistance tests and improvements.

....................
Q: Hi admin, could you please explain state sharding

A: Sharding is a scaling technique inspired by traditional concepts of database optimization. Also known as horizontal partitioning, sharding divides the data into several pieces placed on different environments to be processed.



In a blockchain context, breaking the network into shards would result in more transactions being processed, verified and validated simultaneously. Each sharding level introduces a certain degree of parallelism, as a result, it becomes possible to process more transactions as the network grows. Implementing any sharding type on a blockchain architecture is extremely difficult.



We can identify 3 sharding types (levels):



Network Sharding represents the process of grouping the nodes into shards.
Transaction Sharding takes the complexity to the next level and deals with the distribution of transactions across different shards, but all the nodes keep the entire blockchain into their state.
State sharding represents the most sophisticated part and is described as a mechanism that allows different shards to deal only with a portion of the state without replicating the data between nodes from different shards. A state sharded blockchain can be seen as a network of fully interconnected blockchains.
Adaptive State Sharding – Elrond’s approach – in order to match the current scalability needs, Elrond introduces a novel state sharding scheme with a dynamic model that allows the network to adapt to population and demand changes without compromising security, availability and decentralization.



For a more comprehensive description please read our whitepaper.



Q: Sort of what would differentiate Elrond from a crowded space that you think would make it a success.

A: We’ve spent a lot of time doing research on the current state of the art - theoretical models and existing implementations, while constantly trying to find relevant improvements. The research phase concluded with a scientific whitepaper that presents in an honest manner a complete set of features, unlike most other solutions. There are very few architectures that theoretically aim to achieve a genuine state sharding and the complexity behind this is yet unsolved from a practical point of view. We propose a tree structure that allows Elrond to implement an adaptive state sharding that has the potential to skyrocket the throughput. Proof of Stake is in its early stages of adoption and we have a unique solution to implement a Secure Proof of Stake that promotes a secured distributed fairness mechanism. We strongly disagree with the statement that there are other solutions that are almost identical because there is a serious difference between those who want to do something and present business or marketing arguments and those who have an idea on how to do it and present mathematical and scientific arguments. Also, please see the Related Work chapter in the updated version of the Whitepaper (R1. R6 from 2 days ago) where we underline our advantages. Furthermore, we’ll wait until our statements are validated through the implementation and then we will think about the ICO. Thank you for your interest.



Q: hey, why your domain was registered just 1 month ago?

A: Our initial name was Mithril Protocol, and our domain name www.mithrilprotocol.com 1. This can be easily verified. Indeed, we had many things built around this name but one month ago, as our launch was coming closer, we noticed there were 2 other crypto projects with the name Mithril, one of which was rather well known. This was not the case when we initially chose Mithril.



So, we decided not to create confusion, and changed our name as an emergency decision. We had 3 new options, but decided to go with Elrond, due to its fitting intriguing origin and immediate closeness to Mithril( both are well known names from Lord of The Rings, with dear meanings to us ). Hence the recent registration of elrond.network as a domain name.



Q: Where is the team from?

A: Most of the team is based in Romania. In terms of incorporation we were exploring Switzerland but have since decided to move to Malta and we are now incorporated there. Malta has passed a law this year that will enter into force in 1st of November, and that regulates blockchain projects, ICO and cryptocurrencies.



Q: How many members are in your team?

A: Our team is comprised of 18 members, you can see their experience either on their linkedin, or on our website: https://elrond.com/about#team. Most of them are in this chat, if you have specific questions.



Q: Can Elrond be used for real-time transactions?

A: Depends on what you consider real-time. Elrond has small latency ~ 5 seconds, we are also exploring other options for faster transactions (probably only available for low value transfers)



Q: Has the security/performance of Elrond been analyzed to a sufficient degree?

A: Theoretical analysis done, but practical analysis needs to be done after testnet release



Q: Is your consensus mechanism proven at this point?

A: Testing, improvements, subsequent to the launch, should things continue to work in the face of attacks, malicious behaviour etc, that’s when it will be considered proven.



Q: Will there be a bounty program about your ICO?

A: We are exploring multiple strategies to enhance community engagement.

Q: Can you share Elrond’s roadmap for 2019?

A: Stage 1 – Q1 2019 (Inception):



Private Testnet launch with sPoS and Sharding
Elrond Games
Maiar Launch
VM Integration
Business Integration
API + SDK
Stage 2 – Q1 2019 (Fundamentals):



Public Testnet launch
Funding round
Stress testing – capture the bug
Security audit
Hackathon + use-cases discovery
Palintir – Elrond privacy
Elrond dapp store
Elrond Wallet – UX + Alias + Multisig + Timelock
Stage 3 – Q2 2019 (Launch):



MainNet Launch
Token swap and staking
Functional payment gateway
Mobile wallets
Hardware wallet integration
Secure P2P messaging
Stage 4 – Q3-Q4 2019 (Expansion):



MainNet Consolidation
Real world integration
Ecosystem fund
Digital card integration
Elrond DEX in wallet client
Elrond Stable coin economy
Digital identity
Q: What is the main application of your project ? (e.g. cloud computing, file storage, marketplace and anti-counterfeiting, etc)

A: At the core, Elrond offers a platform that brings a 1000x improvement in throughput and speed, leverages its token to become robust store of value due to powerful incentives, and enables developers to leverage its underlying performance. Going beyond this, we add a simple and intuitive user interface, abstracting away the complexity and giving the user  a compelling user experience to a native wallet, connected to payment processors, digital identity app, and a dapp store. Thus, Elrond brings the benefits of blockchain technology to the average user, by dramatically simplifying the user experience while still providing the benefits.



Q: What is the target industry of your project?

A: Because Elrond brings a considerable improvement in infrastructure, we believe that new dapps will become significantly more competitive once built on our technology. Our focus is on 2 main areas. The first one is adding benefits to the user, through wallet integrated in a browser, payment processor integration, digital identity app, and dapp store.

For the second main point, we are exploring the use of Elrond for various Smart Grid applications. To this end, we have a working partnership with Distributed System Research Laboratory, part of the Technical University in Cluj-Napoca, CS Department, where we explore the use of Elrond architecture for decentralized management of demand response program in smart energy grids for some of the largest Energy providers in Europe.



Q: What status is the Project in right now?

A: We have released a new whitepaper update, we have open sourced our prototype node and wallet, and are currently preparing for the private Testnet launch scheduled for March 2019. Please check this in-depth roadmap for a clear overview: https://medium.com/elrondnetwork/vision-roadmap-milestones-bde4542a3047



Q: Why is a native token necessary for Elrond?

A: All activity within our network, including critical security incentives, transactions, running smart contracts, node running and staking, will be fuelled by ERDs. To put it simple, our platform cannot exist without such a native token.

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Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Social Mining: http://bit.ly/elrond-socialmining
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

We thought that with the help of cryptocurrency, we can live in an "island" that is separated from reality and away from the regulating eyes of the government until the industry encountered the bite of so many scams and hacks which eventually changed the mindset of the many. We then realized the wisdom of the saying: "No man is an island." Now, many people are open to regulations as long as the main intention is to protect the investors and not to hinder the growth of the industry. I am hoping that Elrond Network can be showing us the better and balance approached on these many concerns.  

1/ Short summary on the fantastic progress made by @ElrondNetwork  this week ⚡️

Last weeks have seemed like months in effort & results.
We've got a team of superheroes pushing hard to make Elrond a reality.
Community took a cool photo of the team after the testnet launch.



2/ Huge progress on the testnet; many new improvements, fixes and optimizations

Exceeded 12.5k TPS with only 5 shards and 126 nodes; lots of improvements in stability

Adaptive state sharding & Secure proof of stake come with radical improvements in performance


3/ Huge milestone with the Elrond VM - we've finally run the first smart contract in solidity through IELE!

First integration part of the VM is almost done, will probably be up and running over the weekend


4/ Significant improvements to the blockchain explorer

Started with a bear minimum we needed, but kept pushing until we reached the current version

Don't want to brag too much, but this looks sexier than 99% explorers in the space, and it just launched (link: http://testnet.elrond.com) testnet.elrond.com



5/ Huge effort put to have the first version of wallet done, so community can play & send transactions

Mentioned yesterday: backend + frontend have been done, but UX has been taking a bit longer

Currently: UX = ~50% done

Excited to share the version publicly once done


6/ Great progress on the communication side as well

a - Elrond testnet medium: (link: https://medium.com/elrondnetwork/elrond-zero-to-one-testnet-update-41a1b7cfd4b0)

b - Elrond in top EU startups: (link: https://www.eu-startups.com/2019/05/10-romanian-startups-to-look-out-for-in-2019-and-beyond/)

c - CryptoLark interview - (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tU7-0pdBcI&feature=youtu.be)

d - OhHeyMatty AMA - Elrond AMA - Blockchain For Programmable Money Unstoppable Applications (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4KmAgCmjPg&feature=youtu.be)


7/ New collaborations coming out with meaningful partners

First in a new series to be announced is the one with TypingDNA - (link: https://medium.com/elrondnetwork/elrond-initiates-cooperation-with-typingdna-a-leading-provider-of-typing-biometrics-solutions-78813eeb42a6)

Great to start this closer collaboration with them


8/ Oh, and there's another thing - take a guess what this is...

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Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Social Mining: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

@ElrondNetwork Wallet is here

https://twitter.com/LucianMincu/status/1138545311855599616?s=20

Some final tests and we're good to go!
Countdown starts now!

---

Website:   https://elrond.com/
Twitter:    https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Telegram: https://t.me/ElrondNetwork

@ElrondNetwork  testnet “zero to one” is live

-> link: https://testnet.elrond.com

Current stats after 10000 rounds shows around 60,000,000 txs processed with around 10-20% network load on 5 shards (+metachain) setup and nodes deployed on 6 data centers over two continents

More detailed info stats and setup details coming soon. #sharding #elrond #testnet

In case you have missed the event, you can check it out here 👉  :  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChjxEI3Ed7E

---

Website:   https://elrond.com/
Twitter:    https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Telegram: https://t.me/ElrondNetwork

Elrond Initiates Cooperation With TypingDNA — a leading provider of typing biometrics solutions


St. JULIANS, MALTA and NEW YORK, USA — 6th June, 2019 — Elrond, the technology company developing a scalable and more efficient blockchain platform, is proud to announce a cooperation with TypingDNA, an innovative provider of typing biometrics solutions.

TypingDNA is a behavioral biometrics company, protecting online users based on how they type on their keyboards. The company’s products are successfully used by financial institutions as well as clients from other industries such as security companies and identity access management (IAM) providers.

Elrond and TypingDNA, aim to jointly explore the integration of TypingDNA biometrics solutions into the Elrond platform and future products in order to improve security and remove the friction plaguing many blockchain platforms right now. Furthermore, Elrond and TypingDNA are also expressing their interest in exploring other, but not limited to, potential use cases, related to blockchain technologies, identity, security and privacy.

Declarations:
“We aim to partner with innovative providers and offer our versatile solution to players across various industries. The latest advancements accomplished in the blockchain technology development requires a diversified and innovative approach to secure users. The partnership with Elrond highlights the need for frictionless user experience and avant-garde security benchmarks”, said Raul Popa, CEO of TypingDNA.
“Elrond is leading the wave of highly-scalable, efficient blockchain architectures, and the partnership with TypingDNA, through biometrics technology, like proprietary typing pattern recognition and anomaly detection, can bring significant value to the Elrond ecosystem, removing friction and, at the same time, increasing the security and trust Elrond provides to its users and businesses.” says Beniamin Mincu, CEO of Elrond.
About Elrond

Elrond is a new blockchain architecture, designed from scratch to bring a 1000-fold cumulative improvement in throughput, executions speed and transaction cost. To achieve this Elrond introduces a novel Adaptive State Sharding mechanism, enabling linear scalability, and Proof of Stake (PoS), a novel and more efficient consensus mechanism proposed as an alternative to the intensive energy and computational use in Proof of Work consensus mechanisms.

About TypingDNA

TypingDNA (a Techstars-backed company) is a behavioral biometrics SaaS company that authenticates users based on how they type on their keyboards. The company’s AI-based technology makes it easier to prevent fraudulent activity such as identity theft through typing biometrics authentication. Organizations around the world use the company’s innovative typing biometrics technology to improve online security through passive and frictionless authentication.

Try a quick online demo typingdna.com/#demo

---

Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Social Mining: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

Elrond Initiates Cooperation With SmartBill — a leading software-as-a-service provider for invoicing, inventory management and accounting


St. Julian's, Malta and Bucharest & Sibiu, RO — 6h June, 2019 — Elrond, the technology company developing a scalable and more efficient blockchain platform, is proud to announce a cooperation agreement with SmartBill — a leading software-as-a-service provider for invoicing, inventory management and accounting.

SmartBill is an established FinTech company providing SaaS-based services to small, and medium-sized businesses for invoicing, accounting and inventory management. Its invoicing and accounting SaaS platform is counting more than 60 000 clients, 2 Million invoices issued each month with a total value exceeding $350 Million each month.

Elrond and SmartBill, aim to jointly explore the potential integration of the two platforms to provide to their users and clients blockchain based features, like trust, transparency or traceability.

Furthermore, Elrond and Smartbill are also expressing their interest in exploring other, but not limited to, potential use cases, related to blockchain technologies like inventory and supply chain tracking capabilities, and alternative payment solutions.

Declarations:
“We are very enthusiastic and driven by the desire to offer the most intuitive invoicing and accounting products to our clients.” says Radu Hasan, CEO of Smartbill. “We truly believe we can take things to a whole new level and offer new features and options that were not possible until blockchain technology was born. We believe through this partnership with Elrond we can achieve that.”
“Elrond brings a radical improvement to the blockchain space, adding the much needed performance for real world usage. We believe small and mid-sized businesses will soon be able to integrate Elrond’s technology and reap the benefits of increased transparency, minimized costs and built-in trust between different parties and companies. We are happy to have Smartbill as partners.” says Beniamin Mincu, CEO of Elrond.
About Elrond

Elrond is a new blockchain architecture, designed from scratch to bring a 1000-fold cumulative improvement in throughput, execution speed and transaction cost. To achieve this Elrond introduces a novel Adaptive State Sharding mechanism, enabling linear scalability, and Proof of Stake (PoS), a novel and more efficient consensus mechanism proposed as an alternative to the intensive energy and computational use in Proof of Work consensus mechanisms.

About SmartBill

Founded in 2007, SmartBill is an established FinTech company that offers billing solutions and SaaS-based services. It also provides small and medium-sized businesses with invoicing and inventory management software. It offers Smart Bill Cloud, an online billing program which can be accessed from anywhere, from any internet-connected device.

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Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

Elrond AMA - Blockchain For Programmable Money Unstoppable Applications

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4KmAgCmjPg&feature=youtu.be

T-30 min to AMA with OhHeyMatty - AMA with CEO Beniamin Mincu from Elrond Blockchain. The user-friendly blockchain for deploying programmable money and unstoppable applications.

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Website: https://elrond.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/ElrondNetwork

ELROND: We’ve just been featured in @Forbes . Read about the impact of sharding in enterprise blockchain adoption:


" Elrond has a live testnet for a model known as 'state sharding', combined with a secure PoS consensus "

https://www.forbes.com/sites/yoavvilner/2019/06/11/what-could-sharding-mean-for-enterprise-blockchain-adoption/#730c44832c75

---

Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

https://testnet.elrond.com/#/wallet/

The wallet feature is now enabled on the Elrond testnet. This option is available for everyone, and we encourage you to create a wallet, send and receive transactions to experience first hand the seamless interaction with the Elrond blockchain.

More updates and features will follow.

https://t.me/ElrondNetworkAnn

---

Website: https://elrond.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/ElrondNetwork
https://t.me/ElrondNetworkAnn

Protocol stats of the last week.

Optimization and stabilization merges this week. Implemented restart of node from storage, it does in an instant. Plus, the first smart contract is running on our private testnet, formally verified, K-framework, IELE. @ElrondNetwork #blockchain

https://twitter.com/SasuRobert/status/1139946952001544197?s=20

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Website: https://elrond.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/ElrondNetwork
Tele Ann: https://t.me/ElrondNetworkAnn

SFBW18: Scalability: Decentralized or High Performance?

San Francisco Blockchain Week

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOO7oYjnA7g&list=LLf6lU4pkV1trCD0p69bfaSw&index=4

Panelists: Bonnie Cheung (500 Startups), Beniamin Mincu (Elrond Network), Jack O'Holleran (SKALE Labs), Anatoly Yakovenko (Solana), Kevin Wang (Nervos)

San Francisco Blockchain Week: https://sfblockchainweek.io/

---

Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

Elrond Blockchain Technical Project Review (2019)
by: OhHeyMatty


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztvAS-tH-Mc&feature=youtu.be

Long awaited Elrond Blockchain Technical Review

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Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

Elrond — Research Report
by: dbcrypto - https://www.dbcrypto.io

In this report we will unpack the Elrond startup. You may not have heard of Elrond, as this project has spent several years focusing purely on building their technology. The team did not open any fundraising efforts until they had a working prototype — something we don’t see often.

Elrond are building a new public blockchain to address scalability, throughput and cost whilst maintaining sufficient security and decentralization. As is the case with many projects building new blockchains along with novel consensus techniques, it is easy to get lost in the detail of Elrond’s whitepaper.

With that in mind, this post will try to keep everything high-level and easy to understand.

As mentioned, Elrond are a blockchain project. We have heard many times about the drawbacks and intrinsic limitations that Bitcoin, Ethereum and others have, in lacklustre transactions-per-second (TPS) numbers and high latency. Elrond are another blockchain project designed to address these core issues with currently popular blockchains.

The two key innovations of this project are the ‘Adaptive State Sharding’ approach and ‘Secure Proof of Stake’ (SPoS) consensus mechanism.

You can read more about Elrond at their website: elrond.com
.........................................................

READ FULL: https://medium.com/@dbcryptoteam/elrond-research-report-eb885cd80d8e

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Website: https://elrond.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/ElrondNetwork
Tele Ann: https://t.me/ElrondNetworkAnn

TechBullion Exclusive Interview with Beniamin Mincu, CEO of Elrond

Read More https://www.techbullion.com/tech-bullion-exclusive-interview-with-beniamin-mincu-ceo-of-elrond/


Elrond is a “user-friendly blockchain for deploying programmable money and unstoppable applications”. The CEO Beniamin Mincu will be discussing Elrond with us in this interview.

Please tell us about yourself.

I’m the CEO of Elrond (www.elrond.com) and our team pushes the boundaries of cutting-edge blockchain technology.

Prior to Elrond, I led business and marketing for NEM (Crypto: XEM) and took it from a Bitcointalk post to a global billion-dollar product. After NEM, I co-founded Metachain Capital where I invested in more than 25 blockchain startups that yielded over 1,000-fold returns.

After that, I founded and led ICO Market Data, a venture that streamlines investment expertise.

In 2017, together with my brother we co-founded Elrond, bringing together an exceptional team to create an open, permissionless, interplanetary financial system. This is how Elrond began.

Here’s a summary and social profiles.

    Elrond Network: Co-Founder and CEO (2017 to Present)
    ICO Market Data: Co-Founder and CEO (2017)
    Metachain Capital: Co-Founder and CEO (2016 to 2017)
    NEM: Business and Marketing Lead (2014 to 2015)

Website: www.beniaminmincu.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beniaminmincu

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beniaminmincu 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/beniaminmincu.


Read More https://www.techbullion.com/tech-bullion-exclusive-interview-with-beniamin-mincu-ceo-of-elrond/

Elrond — Research Report
by: https://www.dbcrypto.io
https://medium.com/@dbcryptoteam/elrond-research-report-eb885cd80d8e

In summary

The team at Elrond began their research in Q4 2017, with the first iteration of their whitepaper released in May 2018.

We want to again make mention of the fact that this team did not open any funding rounds until they had a working prototype.

There is a wealth of technical information available on their website to deeply explain the technology and the methodology behind it.

This is a team focused on building a robust and highly-capable solution, taking into consideration what is lacking and what is needed for public blockchains to succeed and achieve large scale adoption.

Their blockchain will be fast, secure and efficient by design.

Overall, we like the technology that Elrond are bringing to the table. We have seen promising blockchain projects be successful in the past, and as such this is an intensely competitive area with many startups seeking the lion’s share of this space.

With the technology in motion, the next challenge is usage and adoption.


website: https://elrond.com/
twitter:  https://twitter.com/ElrondNetwork

Elrond Network Review: part 1 :  
(by Midgard Research)



PROBLEM & SOLUTION

Elrond is creating a highly Scalable Public Blockchain with Adaptive State Sharding and Secure Proof of Stake

Let’s debunk what is Elrond and how it aims to get adoption.

In general, there are several ways in which blockchain and cryptocurrency developers are trying to improve transaction speed in the blockchain, and sharding is one such method. Sharding is a scaling technique inspired by traditional concepts of database optimization. Sharding divides the data into several pieces placed on different environments to be processed.

In general, the more validators and shards, the more transactions the network can process. Elrond introduces a novel state sharding scheme, called Adaptive State Sharding, with a dynamic model that allows the network to adapt to population and demand changes without compromising security, availability and decentralization.

Such architecture enables linear scalability, meaning that scalability of the network is designed to grow with the number of shards(and nodes) in the network.

The obvious questions are: What are all these features about? How one can use Elrond?  

Elrond team has an answer to these questions, unlike a lot of other projects that propose outstanding (on paper) “public-good” alike solutions, that will eventually die missing use cases.

Out of multiple theoretical use cases, we would like to choose three that will be applied to practice right after the mainnet launch.

Decentralized exchanges: DEX is the most obvious use case for high throughput blockchain since it needs to be faster and more secure than centralized competitors.

Payments: Elrond has the Netopia payments partnership, Netopia has around 400M in annual turnover and 6000+ merchants. Just imagine, the number of transactions that payment processor like Netopia needs to handle every day, even every hour.

Team also recently mentioned that they are in talks regarding the partnership with a second payment processor from Switzerland.

Peer to Peer Smart grids solution: Elrond working with Distributed System Research Laboratory on this.

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MVP

Elrond team has already showcased its prototype and opened their GitHub in November (the prototype was actually finished in July 2018), but because of serious limitations of Java team has made a decision to re-write everything from scratch in GO for the testnet. Testnet is yet to be open to the public, the team states that they have achieved a 30x performance improvement. As per words of Elrond`s team, their goal is to make such user interface that the average user will be able to set up a node in a few clicks. What we want to highlight here is that the whole development was self-funded by the team for more than one and a half years.  They literally did not open any funding rounds until they had concept validated and tested.

mvp here: =>  https://i.imgur.com/uIW5Bbn.gif

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PEER ANALYSIS

The market for new scalable and secure blockchain infrastructures is saturated with different solutions but Elrond`s team is prepared to compete in the race. Let`s take a closer on what Elrond brings to the table and how their solution differs from others.

Zilliqa (MarketCap ~ $180M) is a public blockchain platform that implemented sharding and achieved a throughput of 2828 transactions per second in its test net.

Key differences:

    + Zilliqa still uses PoW in order to prevent Sybil attacks, while Elrond uses PoS, a much more energy efficient way to prevent Sybil attacks.
    + Zilliqa stores all the Smart Contracts in a single shard, while Elrond will distribute Smart Contracts among all shards in order to be able to parallelize Smart Contract execution.
    + Zilliqa tries to solve scalability by addressing half of the problem, and that is by doing network and transaction sharding – so they bring some of the solution and they can process about 2500 TPS (2828 TPS with 3600 nodes). They do not solve the hardest of the problem which is state sharding.
Algorand (Total Funding Amount $66M) – Algorand’s first-of-its-kind, permissionless, pure proof-of-stake protocol supports the scale, open participation, and transaction finality required to build systems for billions of users.

Key differences:

    + In Elrond the selection is based on a randomness source that is easy to verify, but made available only at the beginning of the round to all members. (takes ~4 seconds)
In Algorand selection can take much longer (up to 12 seconds) due to how VRFs work (you might end up with multiple leaders, or none at all, depending on the threshold set)
    + Scalability is higher in Elrond as throughput can increase with the number of shards. In Algorand it can only decrease with usage, as it will first reach storage and communication limitations.
Ethereum Serenity (2.0)  (MarketCap ~ $17,5B) – Serenity -The Vision of Ethereum 2.0

Key differences:

    + In Serenity forks are likely to happen in the shard chains, while in the beacon chain the blocks are finalized with a high probability (for finality there is still a dependency on the PoW blocks referenced by the beacon blocks)
Elrond uses a pBFT like consensus. The pBFT is done on a randomly sampled consensus group smaller than the size of the shard.
    + Serenity is still using the PoW chain, where the registration smart contract resides, meaning that even though it implements also PoS chains, as a whole it is still wasting energy for the time being. Elrond is fully PoS so energy efficient.
    + Some parts of Serenity sharding model are similar with Elrond’s proposal. In Elrond there is one shard maintaining the notarization of block hashes from all shards, which looks similar to what the cross-links are doing. In Serenity right now there is no clear incentive to run a beacon node, also beacon nodes have much higher requirements so it might be possible that running a beacon node may not be very attractive for users.
Multivac (raised $18,6M) – a high-throughput and flexible blockchain platform based on trusted sharding computing.

Key differences:

    + Multivac employs a UTXO model, while Elrond uses an account model, this could be the biggest difference. The first method is called the UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) Model and the second one is the Account/Balance Model. The UTXO model is employed by Bitcoin, and Ethereum uses the Account/Balance Model.
    + Multivac’s design is required to broadcast all shard headers to all shards, whereas Elrond has the metachain shard aggregating this information and broadcasting only the aggregation, which leads to less communication.
    + For consensus group sampling Multivac employs VRFs, which would lead to slower consensus, because forming the groups will be harder.

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ROADMAP

Elrond Network, as a blockchain project, began in October 2017 with the early hypothesis validation. Since that time the team has done a lot:

-Developed prototypes of the node, wallet, core structure of the blockchain;

–Expanded its community by participating in meetups, conferences and entered into partnerships with merchants to accept Elrond token through payments;

-Updated technical whitepaper and released an open-source prototype.

ALREADY REACHED MILESTONES


The roadmap for 2019 is divided into 4 phases:

-Inception
-Fundamentals
-Launch
-Expansion

The roadmap on the 2019 year is designed pretty well. It starts from the Private Testnet launch with sPoS and Sharding and finishes with MainNet consolidation with a real-world integration. During this time the project will develop its products: mobile wallet, dApp store, API+SDK and much more. More detailed roadmap:


............................................

Elrond Network Review: part 2
(by Midgard Research)





TEAM & ADVISORS

Beniamin Mincu (CEO) was a core team member in NEM (MarketCap ~$650,000,000) for 1.5 years. He is in the industry since 2014 invested and supported near 30 blockchain projects including Zilliqa, Matrix, ICON, etc.

Lucian Todea (COO) has enough experience working with more than 17 years in Soft32.com (Lucian is a Founder and CEO),  an online software platform that facilitates the distribution and sales of apps for Windows, Mac, and Mobile. He is a technology executive with significant operational, business development, general management, leadership, and international experience.

Lucian Mincu (CIO) has solid experience as an infrastructure engineer. He is a  co-founder at Metachain Capital (a digital asset investment fund focused on supporting some of the most ambitious teams and ingenious technologies in the blockchain space) and ICO Market Data (platform featuring the ICO tools). He has more than 8 years of experience,  spanning from developing end-to-end startup products to designing and implementing highly technical yet comprehensive infrastructure and network solutions for large enterprise clients.

Felix Crisan  (HEAD OF RESEARCH) – Felix has been in the cryptocurrency space since 2012, he is a Bitcoin Lightning contributor. Felix co-founded BTKO, Romania’s first Bitcoin exchange platform. Felix is currently the Co-founder and CTO of Netopia where he implemented market-leading solutions for online and mobile payments.


The team consists of 18 persons with enough experience to develop and deliver the product. The previous workplaces of the team include such companies: NEM, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Google and much more. Overall, we have a good mix of Ph.D.`s and Ph.D. students from Lucian Blaga University with blockchain pioneers. Our experience tells that it is the best format since the team is strong in both research and industry biz dev fields.

The Advisory board consists of 7 highly-experienced specialists both in development and business fields.  It’s worth to mention that Elrond has Fabio C. Canesin and Ethan Fast, from well-known Nash (NEX) project, as technical advisors.

Also, worth noticing notable figures such as Raul Jordan who is Co-Leading Prysmatic Labs, the first Sharding implementation for the Ethereum Protocol and Grigore Rosu who invented K framework a universal framework for language-independent machine executable semantics.


PARTNERSHIPS

Elrond Network has already announced a notable partnership with Nash (NEX). Elrond and Nash aim to jointly explore the potential integration of Elrond blockchain platform and Elrond tokens (ERD) into the Nash payment platform. It will allow Nash users to trade and acquire ERD tokens across different platforms. Additionally. Elrond and Nash aim to join efforts to further develop and research interoperability as one of the main connecting bridges for the ecosystem.

Elrond Network partnered with Netopia Payments, the biggest electronic payment processor in Romania. The main purpose of this partnership is to jointly explore the potential of integration Elrond’s blockchain and ERD tokens into the Netopia payment system. It will allow 6,000+ merchants who are using the Netopia solutions to be able to accept ERD cryptocurrency without any development or operational costs on their part.

Elrond Network is cooperating with Distributed Systems Research Laboratory for R&D in practical applicability of blockchain technology in the energy field and other use case scenarios.

The team promises to announce more solid partnerships in the nearest time.

TOKENOMICS AND TOKEN SALE

Total amount of tokens: 20,000,000,000 ERD
Tokens for sale: 8,000,000,000 ERD (40%)
Total hardcap: $4,750,000

Private-seed round bonus in tokens: 30%
Amount of tokens for Private-seed round: 3,000,000,000 ERD (15%)
Private-seed round tokens have a release schedule of 10% at TGE, the rest of the amount will be vested by 3 equal tranches of 30% in 3,6 and 9 months after TGE

Private-seed round hardcap: $1,500,000
Amount of tokens for Public sale round: 5,000,000,000 ERD (25%)
Public sale round hardcap: $3,250,000

As per CryptoCallibur

There is no much info about the public sale metrics available due to the process of obtaining a license that will enable the company to issue the Elrond token, list on exchanges, and publicly raise funds through an ICO. But according to the stated above information, we can conclude that the tokenomics will be reasonable. The hardcap for the project is low and vesting structure for private-seed participants includes anti-dump mechanism.

Elrond token, ERD, is a utility token that will be used as:
-a unit of payment and settlement between participants in the Elrond Network
-a unit of staking to validate transactions by masternodes

VERDICT: 8.5 out of 10
We definitely bet on Elrond to be one of the most interesting projects this season. The team despite not consisting of c-level executives from international corporations, has something that is much more important: “blockchain industry expertise”. These people are real, they work every day together in the office and they are doing it for a bigger amount of time than some of the already tradable projects that have not delivered anything despite raising millions. Elrond did not open any funding rounds until they had concept validated and tested which one and a half year of self-funded development. This has been said, we are excited for the future updates of Elrond, our rating will be reviewed closer to the mainnet launch and public sale.

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Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

Protocol stats of the last week. Optimization and stabilization merges this week. Implemented restart of node from storage, it does in an instant. Plus, the first smart contract is running on our private testnet, formally verified, K-framework, IELE. @ElrondNetwork  #blockchain

https://twitter.com/SasuRobert/status/1139946952001544197?s=20

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Website: https://elrond.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/ElrondNetwork
Tele Ann: https://t.me/ElrondNetworkAnn

What Could "Sharding" Mean For Enterprise Blockchain Adoption?

We’ve just been featured in @Forbes . Read about the impact of sharding in enterprise blockchain adoption:

“Sharding is complicated, but it provides the type of throughput capacity improvement that enables public blockchains to rival networks like VISA. Some of its challenges, though, include single-shard takeovers, cross-shard communication and data validity."

Elrond has a live testnet for a model known as 'state sharding', combined with a secure PoS consensus.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/yoavvilner/2019/06/11/what-could-sharding-mean-for-enterprise-blockchain-adoption/#27cdbf2c7592

---

Elrond Community: https://community.elrond.com
Official website: www.elrond.com

“How can we do what we do better?” @ElrondNetwork weekend topic .

https://twitter.com/LucianMincu/status/1139961421943529472?s=20

1/ Beniamin Mincu @beniaminmincu - Founder & CEO @elrondnetwork
https://twitter.com/beniaminmincu

2/ Dan Voicu @iamdanvoicu - constructive ambiguity @elrondnetwork
https://twitter.com/iamdanvoicu

3/ Daniel Serb @serb_daniel - Blockchain will change the world, Doing Marketing and PR @ElrondNetwork
https://twitter.com/serb_daniel

4/ Sebastian Marian @Oxsy_Sibiu
https://twitter.com/Oxsy_Sibiu

5/ Iulian Pascalau @iulian_pascalau
https://twitter.com/iulian_pascalau

6/ Lucian Todea @luciantodea - Technology entrepreneur and angel investor. Ironman. Born to run. Co-Founder and COO // Elrond Network.
https://twitter.com/luciantodea

7/ Adrian Dobrita @AdrianDobrita
https://twitter.com/AdrianDobrita

8/Radu Chis @radu_chis
https://twitter.com/radu_chis

9/Constantin Tovisi @titel
https://twitter.com/titel

---

website: www.elrond.com
Telegram: https://t.me/ElrondNetwork

Introducing Elrond: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbfp31keh9Q





Elrond is a complete rethinking of public blockchain infrastructure, specifically designed to be secure, efficient, scalable and interoperable. Elrond’s main contribution rests on two cornerstone building blocks: 1) A genuine Adaptive State Sharding approach: effectively partitioning the chain state into multiple shards, handled in parallel by different participating validators; 2) Secure Proof of Stake consensus mechanism: an improved variation of Proof of Stake (PoS) that ensures long term security and distributed fairness, while eliminating the need for energy intensive PoW algorithms.

Adaptive State Sharding – Elrond proposes a dynamically adaptive sharding mechanism that enables shard computation and reorganizing based on necessity and the number of active network nodes. The reassignment of nodes in the shards at the beginning of each epoch is progressive and nondeterministic, inducing no temporary liveness penalties. Adaptive state sharding comes with additional challenges compared to the static model. One of the key-points resides in how shard-splitting and shard-merging is done to prevent overall latency penalties.


Elrond is based on a highly scalable distributed ledger and as more and more nodes join the network there will be an increase in the overall output of the blockchain. There is a highly efficient team behind the Elrond network. The main idea is to improve the sharding process efficiency by introducing more regular clients into the network which will invariably reduce the overall cost with time.

The AI-based protocol will detect security issues quickly and efficiently. The network also ensures full privacy of its clients at all levels. Elrond is the first public blockchain network based on Secure Proof of Stake consensus mechanism that also ensures a secure and fair distribution of nodes in the system.

---

Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

ZERO TO ONE - MAJOR MILESTONE FOR THE BLOCKCHAIN SPACE

https://twitter.com/beniaminmincu/status/1133744265010581505?s=20



Elrond testnet has been released yesterday, validating that Adaptive state sharding and Secure proof of Stake work at scale

Just take a look at this beauty: elegant, clean and fast: (link: http://testnet.elrond.com) testnet.elrond.com

Elrond is a sharded, layer 1 protocol, designed to add 1000x improvement to current iterations in performance by addressing throughput and speed of execution.

---

Website: https://elrond.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/ElrondNetwork
Tele Ann: https://t.me/ElrondNetworkAnn

Secure Proof of Stake - Making PoS secure and compelling

Elrond has proposed a novel approach to consensus called “Secure Proof of Stake” combining eligibility through stake and rating, random validator selection and an optimal dimension for the consensus group.

The consensus protocol starts by randomly sampling a smaller consensus group out of all eligible validators in the shard (for reduced communication) using a randomness source derived from the previous block’s signature. The randomness source is unpredictable before the signing of the previous block. The sampling is deterministic, meaning that every node can compute the list of validators in the consensus group and the first node to be selected is the block proposer.

The block proposer aggregates transactions into a new block and sends this block to the validators in the consensus group for verification. Each validator will verify the validity of the block, process the transactions and if everything checks out will participate in the pBFT consensus. The voting in the pBFT is done for every validator by sending a signature for a multisignature scheme. If the proposer collects more than 2/3 + 1 signatures from the consensus group members, the block is considered validated, the aggregated signature can be added to the block and the block disseminated in the entire shard. The next consensus group will be randomly sampled using the new signature.

---

Elrond Community: https://community.elrond.com
Official website: www.elrond.com

Elrond Secures $1.9 Million in Private Funding Round [Press Release]

https://medium.com/elrondnetwork/elrond-secures-1-9-million-in-private-funding-round-press-release-9d0cfe87a56c

“We are setting new standards for performance in the blockchain space,” says Beniamin Mincu, CEO of Elrond. “Everything changes for decentralized applications when you have a 3 orders of magnitude improvement in throughput and execution speed.”


June 19th 2019 — Elrond — the sharding-based public blockchain network — has announced the closure of its private round investment, raising $1.9 million from Binance Labs, Electric Capital, NGC Partners, Maven 11, and Authorito Capital. The round also included contributions from angel investors in the UK, India, Israel, Asia, and the European Union.

---

Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

New Elrond Medium Profile

https://i.imgur.com/jwbydPO.png

Check the new medium profile of Elrond!

https://medium.com/elrondnetwork


Pretty awesome! What do you guys think?

---

Website: https://elrond.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/ElrondNetwork
Tele Ann: https://t.me/ElrondNetworkAnn

Congrats elrond network team, just I saw your IEO list information on Binance information page.
I am going to start hold bnb to buy the elrond network tokens. Last time I have missed the different listed on Binance but this time I will not. I am sure you will get success for sure.

Happy to announce that @ElrondNetwork  is live on Delta Direct! All the latest ERD updates will now be directly available on @get_delta !
Make sure to enable notifications for our Direct updates so you never miss out. #DeltaDirect

https://twitter.com/ElrondNetwork/status/1148228430363799552?s=20

---

Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

Let’s talk Elrond together!

https://www.pscp.tv/ElrondNetwork/1YqxojjNRlzJv

1/ Our main focus is EXECUTION.
2/ Elrond = groundbreaking technology = value creation.
3/ Live DEMO with 20 shards 👉  60945 TPS


4/ First dApp built on @ElrondNetwork - Introducing CryptoBubbles


5/ First wave of community rewards

---

Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

Build together — Get rewarded

https://medium.com/elrondnetwork/build-together-get-rewarded-c9aa196593b5


From the time Elrond has been announced as the next project doing an IEO through the Binance Launchpad, we have been hard at work connecting with communities around the globe, making our technology open source and advancing relentlessly on all fronts. In this extremely busy period all our efforts have been focused on the launchpad so we have decided to pause activity on the community platform.

    - Now, our strategy is lining up and we are pleased to announce the re-opening of our community platform.

Community platform 101

The Elrond community platform is a great meritocratic tool through which community members around the globe have an opportunity to accelerate Elrond ecosystem growth and be rewarded for it. We are extremely happy to have reached this point together and we want to make sure we continue on this path.

All activities on the community platform are meant to help us with three complementary goals:

    to raise awareness about the Elrond technology
    to educate people about the Elrond ecosystem
    to speed up development with the help of our community

If you are new to the Elrond community, now is your time to join us by registering on our community platform, connect your social media accounts, share articles and news or start helping our developer team by connecting your GitHub account. Your rewards and reputation will be proportional to your efforts.

Social Mining is a concept that helps engage new users, by using all types of social platforms, such as GitHub, Telegram, Twitter, Discord, LinkedIn and many more and leveraging game theory to incentives and create an organic community of skilled long term holders.


Rewards and reset

From the very beginning of the Elrond project, we have been privileged to have people helping us on all fronts. Rewarding those who contribute is key to our identity so we are pleased to announce that 260 community members are part of the first wave of rewards from the community platform. This is only the beginning and we are aware that there is so much more to do, thus working together will benefit everyone.

If you have been part of our journey and have contributed on the community platform please make sure (once you are notified by email) to:

    go through the KYC process on the community platform
    submit your BEP2 address in the google form which will be attached to the email

Keep in mind that the claiming period deadline is the 19th of July, and from now on every month there will be a reset and reward — so buckle up — things will intensify and the competition will be more fierce.

What’s next?

    there will be monthly rewards
    more inclusive campaigns
    more competition

---

Website: https://elrond.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/ElrondNetwork
Tele Ann: https://t.me/ElrondNetworkAnn

Elrond Initiates Cooperation With Holo — A Scalable, Agent-Centric Distributed Computing Platform



June, 2019 — Elrond — the sharding-based public blockchain network is proud to announce a cooperation agreement with Holo, a scalable, agent-centric distributed computing platform utilizing Holochain to run distributed apps with data integrity.
Holo enables a distributed web with user autonomy built directly into its architecture and protocols. Data is about remembering our lived and shared experiences. Distributing the storage and processing of that data can change how we coordinate and interact. With digital integration under user control, Holochain liberates our online lives from corporate control over our choices and information.
Elrond and Holo, aim to jointly explore the potential integration of the two technologies to provide mutual benefits to developers and dApps within each ecosystem. Furthermore, Elrond and Holo are also expressing their interest in exploring other, but not limited to, potential use cases, related to blockchain technologies like providing fast and secure finality to payment applications requiring it.

“We are very impressed with the ingenuity and quality of the Elrond team. We look forward to exploring opportunities to partner through technology, use cases and other opportunities”. David Atkinson, Commercial Director, Holo.
“Elrond is leading the way of public blockchain performance by bringing a radical improvement in throughput capacity and transaction finality. Like Elrond, Holo is creating new tools which complement blockchains and enable new ways of building and running distributed applications. We are happy to partner with the Holo team, and explore synergies between our platforms.” Beniamin Mincu, Co-founder & CEO, Elrond.

About Elrond:
Elrond is a new blockchain architecture, designed from scratch to bring a 1000-fold cumulative improvement in throughput and execution speed. To achieve this, Elrond introduces two key innovations: a novel Adaptive State Sharding mechanism, and a Secure Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm, enabling linear scalability with a fast, efficient, and secure consensus mechanism. Thus, Elrond can process upwards of 10,000 transactions per second (TPS), with 5-second latency, and negligible cost, attempting to become the backbone of a permissionless, borderless, globally accessible internet economy.
Elrond is built by a team of experienced entrepreneurs along with 13 engineers and researchers with significant blockchain backgrounds and technical experience at Microsoft, Google, Intel, and NTT DATA. The team includes two PhDs in CS & AI, multiple math, CS, and AI Olympiad champions, and a former member of the NEM core team. For more information, visit: https://elrond.com

About Holo and Holochain:
Holochain enables a group of people to run an application with whatever rules they want. The users themselves pick the rules. Want to play by different rules? You can. And anyone else who opts to play by those rules as well can join you. Holochain doesn’t set the rules. Holochain just provides the pattern of enforcement. Using that pattern, the devices of app users perform the actual enforcement of those rules, as well as the storage and serving of content. This is how an application community can experience both freedom and security. This is very different from today’s web, where there is almost always a webserver or a corporation in the middle of every interaction. With Holochain, no one, not even the creators of Holochain, need to be relied upon in order for people to collaboratively run an application. Yet the pattern is able to be used by anyone. It is actually quite simple. And that simplicity is what makes it so powerful.
Holochain is a community of passionate humans building a distributed generalized compute platform. As an open source project, Holochain is built by the collaborative work of many people in ways both large and small. However, in its current nascent phase, most of the support comes from Holo, a company building out the first large-scale use of Holochain: a network for distributed hosting of Holochain applications. For more information, visit: https://holochain.org/

https://medium.com/elrondnetwork/elrond-initiates-cooperation-with-holo-a-scalable-agent-centric-distributed-computing-platform-913ced2299c3

---

Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

@ElrondNetwork  Beside the @binance

Listing and successfully making the Binance Launchpad as one big milestone for Elrond ecosystem, we’ll try to wrap up a tech weekly summary. Read thread below 👇
Elrond #BUIDLs   https://twitter.com/LucianMincu/status/1147831709112635392?s=20


+ Besides the SC and the dev community growth, first 4 issues have been opened on our public (link: http://github.com/elrondnetwork/elrond-go)  repository. Another really important milestone marked this week, accelerating the elrond dev growth.

+ Prometheus being implemented on elrond-go, and here’s what you’ll be able to do with it:
-> you can monitor nodes based on various Go metrics (number of go routines, stack usage, garbage collector stats and so on)

---

Website: https://elrond.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/ElrondNetwork
Tele Ann: https://t.me/ElrondNetworkAnn

#Binance's 2nd Anniversary -   BNB and Launchpad Project Promotions!
2019/07/13 0:00 AM to 2019/07/20 0:00 AM (UTC).

Trade ERD to share a 25,000,000 ERD prize pool!

This first promotion will start with a total of 30,000 $BNB, together with 25,000,000 $ERD tokens to give away!

https://www.binance.com/en/support/articles/360030909651

---

Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

Time for rewards! :  260 members will receive 4,500,000 ERD

https://twitter.com/LucianMincu/status/1149647749815521281?s=20

+ 260 members will receive 4,500,000 ERD

 This is our way of thanking you for your relentless effort

Our relentless community has been working to get Elrond where it is now, and in return we increase the community rewards by 3x.

---

Website: https://elrond.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/ElrondNetwork
Tele Ann: https://t.me/ElrondNetworkAnn

Elrond is the ETH of Europe. They are solving all the inefficiency of Zillica. With the sharing, mining and staking and most importantly the mainnet that is launching soon, this should be a project that all investors should put a close monitoring with.

@ElrondNetwork open source      ;)


The digital economy consists of two key parts: programmable money and unstoppable apps, @ElrondNetwork
 can do both because unlike previous blockchain iterations, it does not have to trade-off performance, for security and decentralization

The future belongs to those who buidl it

---

Website: https://elrond.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/ElrondNetwork
Tele Ann: https://t.me/ElrondNetworkAnn

[/quote]  in the Elrond project I saw that they were a very great team and worked hard to always develop the Elrond project, maybe Elrond would be able to be listed on a large exchange.

Elrond Initiates Cooperation With Runtime Verification — A Research and Development Company Specializing in Formal Methods



14th of July, 2019 — Elrond — the sharding-based public blockchain network is proud to announce a cooperation agreement with Runtime Verification for research and development in core areas of formal verification methods.
Elrond is using the K Framework, developed by Grigore Rosu while at NASA and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, as the backbone for all of its smart contract languages. Grigore has continued development of K Framework with his team at Runtime Verification which specializes in formal methods. Building on this, Elrond has developed an in-house GO backend to integrate the IELE VM, which is designed by the Runtime Verification team, and constructed entirely on the K Framework. Elrond is also working to integrate KEVM and WASM in a similar fashion. Having the VMs built using the K Framework gives Elrond access to powerful formal verification tools.
The Elrond research and development team will work closely with Runtime Verification to further develop the K framework and its capability to generate correct-by-construction Virtual Machines for the blockchain. Through the research and development initiative between Elrond and Runtime Verification we aim to take smart contracts to the next level, and to make the GO backend developed by Elrond for the K framework, open source and available to the wide public.
Other Runtime Verification contributors or supporters include Ethereum, Algorand, IOHK, Casper, Maker DAO, Gnosis, Toyota and others.




About Elrond

Elrond is a new blockchain architecture, designed from scratch to bring a 1000-fold cumulative improvement in throughput and execution speed. To achieve this, Elrond introduces two key innovations: a novel Adaptive State Sharding mechanism, and a Secure Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm, enabling linear scalability with a fast, efficient, and secure consensus mechanism. Thus, Elrond can process upwards of 10,000 transactions per second (TPS), with 5-second latency, and negligible cost, attempting to become the backbone of a permissionless, borderless, globally accessible internet economy.
Elrond is built by a team of experienced entrepreneurs along with 13 engineers and researchers with significant blockchain backgrounds and technical experience at Microsoft, Google, Intel, and NTT DATA. The team includes two PhDs in CS & AI, multiple math, CS, and AI Olympiad champions, and a former member of the NEM core team.


About Runtime Verification
Founded by Professor Grigore Rosu, Runtime Verification provides cutting-edge technology to design safe and secure systems and languages based on mathematically-grounded principles. Its technology not only detects the rarest, trickiest and most costly bugs lurking in existing codebases or specifications, but also stimulates the design and development of better programming and specification languages, where such costly bugs cannot exist by design or can be detected cheaply.

---

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

This was that coin recently launched in the Binance exchange launchpad right?

But unfortunately they will not make sure in the price and circulation goes to big ends.

What is Social Mining

Elrond has no bounty, no airdrop, but Elrond has a Social Mining program.


What is Social Mining?

Social Mining is a concept that helps engage new users, by using all types of social platforms, such as GitHub, Telegram, Twitter, Discord, LinkedIn and many more and leveraging game theory to incentives and create an organic community of skilled long term holders.


How to get started?

To get started you will have to first register with a new account at https://community.elrond.com/

Setting up your account


Your all set up and ready to earn some tokens! To get you started you can follow the on-board tutorial and connect some of your social media accounts to the platform.  To help you get started you can connect your Telegram or twitter on the home page.

Connect your accounts and get verified


To start to become a community member of a crypto currency ecosystem you will have to select a role from the profile section on the platform. To get started click on the profile icon on the top right corner next to the notification bell.
If you have a Reddit or twitter account you can connect those two in the profile section, its important that you select a profile image. If you already have a telegram account we would recommend that you use the same images as the one you have on telegram.

Adding a wallet


Make sure that you add a wallet to which you own the private key to. Do not try to attempt to add a wallet that you do not own.
First you will need to verify that you own the key to the wallet and secondly all rewards will sent to the wallet that you have entered into the system.

KYC/AML Verification
Go through the KYC process on the community platform
You don’t need to complete the KYC process unless you are one of the 260 winners



ELROND's Community platform 101:

The Elrond community platform is a great meritocratic tool through which community members around the globe have an opportunity to accelerate Elrond ecosystem growth and be rewarded for it. We are extremely happy to have reached this point together and we want to make sure we continue on this path.
All activities on the community platform are meant to help us with three complementary goals:
     + to raise awareness about the Elrond technology
     + to educate people about the Elrond ecosystem
     + to speed up development with the help of our community

If you are new to the Elrond community, now is your time to join us by registering on our community platform, connect your social media accounts, share articles and news or start helping our developer team by connecting your GitHub account. Your rewards and reputation will be proportional to your efforts.

---

Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

Guaranteed about the price, I think no project can guarantee.
The project needs time to develop, but such a start has been very good, I think we should at least save an eye under ERD.

Is this project has the telegram channel to communicate....? 

Yes, of course
https://t.me/ElrondNetwork
https://t.me/elrondTRADER

You can request testnet ERDs via our testnet faucet




+ link: http://testnet.elrond.com/#/wallet

Here’s how it works:

    Create your wallet 🔑

    Press request token 💰

    Enjoy the surprise 🤓

+ Video: https://twitter.com/ElrondNetwork/status/1151039690662973440

---

Website: https://elrond.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/ElrondNetwork
Tele Ann: https://t.me/ElrondNetworkAnn

NEW campaigns: Elrond- explainer : video_camera: video campaign

https://twitter.com/iamdanvoicu/status/1151192836227960833?s=20


Since we opened the community platform we had many campaigns that were both fun and very informative. We want to continue on the same path and provide our community the opportunity to come up with new interesting ways to present Elrond, and to #ERDucate others.

For this campaign we would like to see submissions of Elrond explainer videos. Top videos will be rewarded mainly on accuracy, creativity and overall positive feel about Elrond.

Remember an explainer video should be simple, straight to the point, visually pleasant and rather short. If your grandmother would ask what is Elrond - this is the kind of stuff you’d send her 🙂

Guidelines:
Length - min 1:30 - max 4:00
Use voice or subtitles
Graphics
Soundtracks

Answer these questions in the video
What is Elrond?
What possible problems might it solve?
What are the Elrond tech benefits?
What use cases does it fit?

MUST contain the 3 key components
     [1] Adaptive State Sharding,
     [2] Secure Proof of Stake,
     [3] Meta VM


Resources

One Pager https://elrond.com/files/Elrond_Onepager_EN.jpg
Elrond GitBook docs.elrond.com
Elrond Website https://www.elrond.com technology page + FAQs
Previous campaign resources http://bit.ly/elrond-resources-campaign7

Rewards
    :[rank 1] - 4.0 rep + 4000 points
    :[rank 2] - 3.0 rep + 4000 points
    :[rank 3] - 2.0 rep + 2000 points
    :[4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 -10] 1.0 rep +1000 points

Once you finish it - upload it on the community platform and tweet it with the tag #ERDucation

---

Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

Elrond Network Review:
https://www.endofthechain.com/elrond-network-review/
Writer: Samuel McCulloch



The vision of Elrond is to build a decentralized network that is both linearly scalable and requires minimal energy and computational requirements. It’s only now that networks such as Elrond are being designed for this purpose. As money and value transfer transitions to DLT networks, scalability and performance will be the key features for large scale clients. Elrond meets these demands with adaptive state sharding and Secure Proof of Stake (SPOS) consensus method.

---

Website: https://elrond.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/ElrondNetwork
Tele Ann: https://t.me/ElrondNetworkAnn

ElrondNetwork announces its integration of Chainlink oracles into their blockchain!





18th July, 2019 — Elrond — the leading sharding-based public blockchain network is proud to announce its integration of Chainlink, the leading oracle service provider.

The Chainlink network provides reliable tamper-proof inputs and outputs for complex smart contracts on any blockchain. Chainlink’s decentralized oracle network offers the same security guarantees as smart contracts themselves. By allowing multiple Chainlinks to evaluate the same data before it becomes a trigger, Chainlink eliminates any one point of failure, and maintains the overall value of a smart contract that is highly secure, reliable, and trustworthy.

Elrond is the first blockchain architecture to integrate smart contracts on a state sharded architecture through an asynchronous and secure scheme. This means any user can call any smart contract, independent of which shard the smart contract and the users account resides. Furthermore, there is no need for atomic locking, yanking or close synchronisation between different shards.

Adding on this, Elrond aims to integrate Chainlink in order to amplify the utility and functionality of its smart contracts by enabling them to securely interact with real-world data feeds. By providing developers with more flexible and sophisticated tools to build on, we aim to take smart contracts to the next level, and transform them into the defacto choice of digital contracts.

Beniamin Mincu — “Through Elrond we have built a highly scalable, secure and efficient blockchain architecture which brings a 1000x improvement in throughput and execution speed. In addition to this, we have also built a new Meta VM providing both security and flexibility to our smart contract developers. By integrating Chainlink, we extend this vision, enabling developers to access real-world data securely and efficiently.”

About Elrond:
Elrond is a new blockchain architecture, designed from scratch to bring a 1000-fold cumulative improvement in throughput and execution speed. To achieve this, Elrond introduces two key innovations: a novel Adaptive State Sharding mechanism, and a Secure Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm, enabling linear scalability with a fast, efficient, and secure consensus mechanism. Thus, Elrond can process upwards of 10,000 transactions per second (TPS), with 5-second latency, and negligible cost, attempting to become the backbone of a permissionless, borderless, globally accessible internet economy.


Elrond can process and respond with low latency even if there are thousands of applications running on the protocol. Through state-of-the-art optimization techniques, the load is balanced on the shards, and multiple SCs are running on parallel. Further improving horizontal scalability.

Elrond is built by a team of experienced entrepreneurs along with 13 engineers and researchers with significant blockchain backgrounds and technical experience at Microsoft, Google, Intel, and NTT DATA. The team includes two PhDs in CS & AI, multiple math, CS, and AI Olympiad champions, and a former member of the NEM core team. For more information, visit: https://elrond.com

About Chainlink:
Chainlink enables smart contracts to reach their full potential. Smart contracts need to interface with the data feeds, events and widely accepted payment methods that centralized digital agreements already rely on to provide value. By providing the building blocks needed by complex smart contracts in the form of critical inputs and key outputs, Chainlink enables the next generation of smart contracts, which will step beyond tokenization, to become the dominant form of digital agreement.

Learn more by visiting the Chainlink website, Twitter or Telegram. If you’re a developer, visit the developer documentation or join the technical discussion on Discord.

---

Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

I was trying to invest on Elrond token when the token was listed on binance launchpad but unfortunately I got the lottery and I did not win at that moment.
I'm really sad voted but after I am seeing this active thread I want to know is there any AirDrop campaign, bounty campaign or something to make work bucks from you guys?
If available please do let me know.

 community.elrond.com

Dear friends, you join here, if you are in the top 260 active people, you will be rewarded, monthly program.

ELRON - whitepaper only a onepager.

For those who did not have time to read the full whitepaper - ERD have prepared a onepager!

---

https://elrond.com - A scalable value transfer protocol for the digital economy

---

Picoloresearch: Technical Code review Elrond

Download: https://picoloresearch.com/67/elrond-erd/attachment

Updated with Technical Code Review

Elrond is creating a novel architecture through adaptive state sharding technology and Secure Proof of Stake (SPoS) consensus. This transfer protocol will enable a scalable ecosystem embedded with interconnectivity while maintaining the decentralisation, security and fairness features of a public blockchain. Preliminary test results have reflected an average throughput of 1000x increase as compared to existing solutions that are currently in the market.

---

Website: https://elrond.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/ElrondNetwork
Tele Ann: https://t.me/ElrondNetworkAnn

Does the airdrop of elrond done already? I want to participate with you airdrop but there are many things needed to be filled up. Anyway, it is not important since we are talking here is the project development. That is nice to see how elrond grows. And I am happy that binance will make this a profitable coin. Hopefully, the price will rise up 10x its current price soon. More power elrond team!

There is no airdrop, you can participate in community development, if you get into the top 260 people will be rewarded, but the competition is very high. Today, there are 4173 participants, and about 20% of them are active to compete in the top 260, the competition is fierce. In my opinion, the August award for people ranked 260 token worth 10 USD, the 1st person token is worth about 400 usd.

Elrond - Connecting to the testnet tutorial

Connecting to the testnet: In order to join the network as an observer or as a validator, the required steps are explained below:

Run a node: https://youtu.be/3VAvCcu_y64
Written guide https://docs.elrond.com/start-a-validator-node/start-the-network

On the Elrond network, running a validator/observer node is possible on a consumer grade PC / laptop:
Minimum specs are:
Dual Core CPU
4GB RAM
200 GB HDD space
Broadband Internet connection *
Windows, Linux or MacOS operating systems


Also here’s  working with in terms of staking


This is a shared image of Lucian Todea:  https://www.dropbox.com/s/shywj154gictfm9/Screenshot%202019-03-27%2014.18.19.png?dl=0

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Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

Comparable in throughput as to centralized counterparts.

Elrond architecture goes beyond state of the art and can be seen as an augmentation of the existing models, improving the performance while focusing to achieve a better nash equilibrium state between security, scalability and decentralization.

Blockchain tech holds the key to greatly improving the data and value transfer that takes place between IoT devices, and ElrondNetwork is the blockchain that has the throughput capacity needed to support the massive volume of interactions that takes place between IoT devices.

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Website: https://elrond.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/ElrondNetwork
Tele Ann: https://t.me/ElrondNetworkAnn

In Seoul and interested in PoS protocols and Validators? Come join @ElrondNetwork tomorrow


https://www.eventbrite.com/e/proof-of-stake-protocols-validators-tickets-66289998169

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Date And Time: Wed, July 24, 2019
5:00 PM – 7:30 PM KST

Location: 45-9 Bongeunsa-ro 22-gil, Yeoksam-dong, Gangnam-gu
Seoul 135-080
Korea, Republic of

---

Speakers:

Beniamin Mincu - Founder & CEO of Elrond (https://elrond.com/)

Backed by Binance Labs & latest Binance Launchpad project, Elrond is a new blockchain architecture, designed from scratch to bring a 1000x improvement in throughput and execution speed based two key elements: Adaptive State Sharding and Secure Proof of Stake. Elrond can process >10,000 TPS with 5sec latency and negligible cost, all running in the open source testnet right now.

---

Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

AMA @ElrondNetwork  CEO

Join us on July 26th 🗓  at 3PM⌚️ UTC for an AMA ElrondNetwork CEO, beniaminmincu  in the Binance English Telegram group. There will be a $5,000 Airdrop of $ERD so don't miss out!

Prepare your questions and get involved here (link: https://t.me/binanceexchange) t.me/binanceexchange


About Elrond:
Elrond is a new blockchain architecture, designed from scratch to bring a 1000-fold cumulative improvement in throughput and execution speed. To achieve this, Elrond introduces two key innovations: a novel Adaptive State Sharding mechanism, and a Secure Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm, enabling linear scalability with a fast, efficient, and secure consensus mechanism. Thus, Elrond can process upwards of 10,000 transactions per second (TPS), with 5-second latency, and negligible cost, attempting to become the backbone of a permissionless, borderless, globally accessible internet economy.

---

Website: https://elrond.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/ElrondNetwork
Tele Ann: https://t.me/ElrondNetworkAnn

Another week has passed and ERD team has been working hard.

1. First Live Demo of the Cryptobubbles game with rewards and multiple servers for different regions to reduce latency.
2. Adaptive transaction limit per block based on network performance (speed/latency).
3. Node's heartbeat refactoring for real time network health estimation.
4. Extracted Prometheus monitoring and statistics in a new standalone component.
5. Node terminal dashboard analysis for easier node status check.
6. New and improved integration tests between main components of elrond-go.
7. Improved code coverage on process package (65% -> 81%).
8. Memory usage improvements.
9. General bugfixes and stabilization (executing cross shard smart contracts transactions, processing rewards).

---

Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

Elrond’s AMA on Pramod’s Global Crypto Community 29th July 2019


Elrond Network did an amazing official public AMA on Pramod’s Global Crypto Community [ https://t.me/flipORhodlChat]
Here are the summary of the AMA:

Pramod
Please welcome @beniaminmincu and @AdrianDobrita from ELROND TEAM. Please introduce yourselves for our community

Beniamin Mincu
Hey guys. Really great to be here
Here’s a few thoughts on myself. I stumbled into bitcoin sometime in 2013 and joined the NEM core team in 2014 to lead product, marketing, and community, helping take the project from a Bitcointalk post to a global billion dollar product. I have co-founded Metachain Capital to invest in ambitious founders solving critical blockchain problems and also started ICO Market Data with my brother to streamline investment expertise.

As it became clear that scalability was perhaps the most pressing problem in the blockchain space, I saw no one was really solving it properly and had a clear intuition on how a really compelling solution would look, but needed to test it against the brightest technical minds I knew and see what I was missing. So, together with my brother we gathered some of our smartest technical friends, and had several in-depth discussions about this. The discussions continued for about a 1.5 months, when it became clear we had a really significant breakthrough. This is how Elrond began, and the point when we started working on formalizing the first fully state sharded proof of stake architecture.

Adrian Dobrita
Hello everyone, glad to be here! I am currently the Head of Engineering at Elrond, focusing both on research and development. I am a software engineer with more than 10 years experience. In the past I’ve worked for companies such as Intel, ST-Ericsson, Ausy, Continental, etc, developing industry-grade software in areas such as mobile and automotive but I’ve also been part of several startups as back-end developer. I’m looking forward to the discussions today.

Beniamin Mincu
We have been for one week in Korea and will return there in about one week. Given that we have the technology ready and testnet can process >10kTPS, we are now in a marathon to bring Elrond to Korea, Japan, Singapore, Dubai, Vietnam, India and other countries. Indeed, we have many strategic partners in India and are very much looking forward to visiting soon.

=====AMA STARTED=====

Q : As you are operating in a highly competitive sector of the market how do you plan to get ahead of your competitors?
A: Beniamin Mincu: Elrond is currently processing far more than Harmony or any other architecture at this point. You can see the detailed comparisson here: https://docs.elrond.com/detalied-comparative-analysis/elrond-vs.-harmony

Q :What is the biggest challenge you have faced in the crypto space? How will you pick ICO’s on your blockchain?
A: Beniamin Mincu: Nothing hindered us. We wanted to list when Elrond is ready for wide market penetration and has the strongest edge in terms of technical architecture.

Q :How are Elrond going to get more people to build on-chain dapps?
A: Beniamin Mincu: Our code is open source and we will have many tool to help developers onboard and start building several dapps.

Q :With blockchain being such a young industry, partnerships are an integral component of any project’s journey. Which types of partnerships have Elrond already attained and what are the plans on this front moving forward ?
A: Beniamin Mincu: We have several partnerships with Nash, Chainlink, Runtime Verification, Smart Bill, Typing DNA, and DSLR, many more will follow. We are considering many other options for partnerships. Feel free to ping us directly if you have some clear feedback there. We will announce more partnerships once things are done but this is an ongoing process.
The partnership with Nash sets Elrond on a friendly ground with them. We will explore integration and think the whole blockchain space is at the very inception, so there is enough space for both Elrond and Nash build valuable businesses that serve millions of users world wide.

Q :Hi guys! Your transactions speed will be a new huge step for blockchain world. What can you tell us about transaction fees(price/priority)?
A: Beniamin Mincu: Yes, we are very excited with the progress we have made on performance. The transaction fees are a priority for us right now and we intend to have a very competitive edge on that as well. Hopefully Elrond is have 1/10 of tx fees you see on current blockchains so that the improvement will be significant enough.

Q :What is SPoS and how it is better than PoS?
A: Beniamin Mincu: Please take a look at the detailed explanation here: https://docs.elrond.com/learn/secure-proof-of-stake

Q : Don’t you think PoS also can be attacked via some staking pools where people can lease coins and main party can use them for running node/validating transactions? What are your views on Proof of Authority (POA) consensus algorithm?
A: Beniamin Mincu: SPOS is not susceptible to the mentioned attack vector.

Q :Elrond stand for high-throughput public blockchain providing security, efficiency, scalability. But similar things are targetted by other Projects like binance launchpad project Harmony which also aimed at highly efficient scalable blockchain with other features.
So my question is why we need Elrond and how it is better!
A: Beniamin Mincu: Please see the difference between Elrond and Harmony here: https://docs.elrond.com/detalied-comparative-analysis/elrond-vs.-harmony

Q : Zilliqa also implemented sharding in their PBFT consensus model. So What is the main difference between Zilliqa Sharding model and Elrond Sharding Model?
A: Beniamin Mincu: Please see Elrond and zilliqa difference here: https://docs.elrond.com/detalied-comparative-analysis/elrond-vs.-zilliqa

Q : What is the difference between POS Mechanism approached by Elrond Team and PosW by Quarkchain. As both projects have fundamentals based on Sharding technologies.
What makes u better by not going with PosW and instead going for Pos ?? Would like to hear both the Pros and Cons
A: Adrian Dobrita: We believe that the energy inefficiency of PoW no longer makes sense if you want to scale globally, and PoS comes with an interesting alternate solution for sybil resistance. This enables you, if you have a good scaling solution like state sharding, to finally get the TPS that blockchains need in order to be relevant if we speak of blockchain enabled IOT devices etc. In regards to comparison with Quarkchain, I think their solution is one of the few in the space that makes sense, although I do not agree with some of the choices. For example PoW slows you down a lot, and if you have the choice of PoS I don’t really see the benefit. For the sharding solution, I honestly think that duplicating accounts in every single shard in order to optimize the cross shard operations is not really state sharding, as you are instead increasing the state when you don’t need to, this also affects the cross shard operation model. Our sharding solution ensures that one account is managed in a single shard, no other duplicates are made in other shards, so the maintained state is minimum. As for the SPoS, which is our own version of PoS, we believe that with the security layers we’ve added, like random node shuffling at the end of the epoch, random sampling of nodes for the consensus group, the rating for choosing validators, working with a BFT like consensus all allow us to have a fast and secure block generation mechanism, that meets the demands in terms of TPS that the industry has today.

Q :What is Elrond future development plan?
A: Beniamin Mincu: Please take a look here for a detailed version: https://docs.elrond.com/#roadmap-and-current-status

Q :What is your total addressable market (TAM) and what do you estimate is the max share your network will take?
A: Beniamin Mincu : Addressable market: there are 4.2B people on the internet and most of them will use blockchain long term without even knowing. Elrond will aim to be the first blockchain to escape the current niche of 50M people we have in the blockchain space and bring the most useful blockchain features to end users without having them to learn rocket science like they need today.

Q : How will you stand out with all the big projects out there years ahead of you like etherum, iota, komodo, Neo! Too many good projects out there doing infrastructure
A: Beniamin Mincu : None of those projects are ahead of us. In fact they all have serious performance limitations, which is precisely why Elrond is very much needed. They all have started before us, but we want Elrond to be one of the last movers in the space with the relevant innovation to change the paradigm and move forward.

Q : Will Elrond partner with other focus and more establish start up on very specific use cases like Gaming, Health Case or Open Finance?
A: Beniamin Mincu: Yes, we are exploring discussions with several companies and startups about this. Will announce when we have something done on this.

Q : Your roadmap included efforts of partnership expansion into both Asia and the USA. Did the ongoing bear market and regulatory uncertainty, especially in the USA, present any difficult challenges or positive opportunities?
A: Beniamin Mincu: USA is a very difficult market due to legal challenges. There is indeed an opportunity because of the bear market: situation is very difficult and results in survival of the fittest. The fact that Elrond is starting from this point, puts things in a very positive light once the market moves to a more optimistic direction.

Q :We know that Elrond reached 65785 TPS on Testnet. Is only speed enough for your great project? How do you plan to put a spotlight on Elrond?
A: Adrian Dobrita: That speed of 65k TPS was just with 20 shards, and the generation of transactions to stress test the network was not even near the maximum, so imagine what we can do with more shards. But of course, it is not all about TPS, although it was a nice and fulfilling moment to see that we can actually manage that load. We are of course targeting also fast execution of smart contracts which I believe in future will be more interesting as it will allow for the developers to actually build applications that can actually be used by lots of users at the same time. We are also working on solutions to bring audience to SC developers, but more on that will be announced at a later date. Currently the marketing team is also working on promoting Elrond through lots of campaigns, the social mining platform is also helping a lot in this area. For the project to be relevant we are in discussion with multiple companies (crypto and non crypto) for partnerships and helping them building their solutions on Elrond.

Q :Could you tell us more about your partnerships and collaborations? Why are they so important and will we see more strategic partnerships soon?
A: Beniamin Mincu: It’s pretty simple. We have the technology that is processing >10k TPS, now we really need businesses and startups that start using the technology. That is the most important focus right beside continuing the push on the technical side.

Q :Many blockchain projects and companies focus on making very complex systems and say they will revolutionize the whole blockchain technology. What makes Elrond different?
A: Beniamin Mincu: It all depends on execution. Ideas are good, but they are useless if not coupled to great execution. The difference between Elrond and other projects is that we have focused on execution above everything. This will pay off significantly in the long run.

Q :What is Tech stack that Elrond using to built?
A: Beniamin Mincu : Elrond is built in GO. All code is open source: https://github.com/elrondnetwork

Q : I want to run some nodes. I have a 400mbit internet connection and 1 Million ERD so far. I want to run the nodes on one pc, which cpu I need, how many cores, ram, hdd space?
A: Beniamin Mincu : Awesome. Please take a look at the detalis here: https://docs.elrond.com/start-a-validator-node/how-to-become-a-validator
You can see how you can become a validator and also join the riot channel for discussion right now.
A: Adrian Dobrita: There are different setups one could have when running multiple validators, the minimum for one validator would be a consumer grade dual core cpu with with 4Gb ram, 200GB HDD, of 100Mbps bandwidth. If you have multiple validators, but nbValidators<nbShards, multiply these values by the number of validators you want , but if you have more validators than the number of shards, then you would need the resources mentioned above * number of shards

Q :“Elrond Game of Stakes” your Upcoming Game. Tell us more Please. Will I get Staking Reward for playing game? or any thing else?
A: Beniamin Mincu: Battle of nodes actually. You run a node, try to take the network down, and get rewards for being present and contributing to the network. It will be very exciting.

Q :The node creation is already quite easy with the guide provided by Elrond. Is it going to be more user friendly in the future for user who doesn’t have any IT knowledge?
A: Beniamin Mincu: Yes, we keep improving things very fast. Please let us know if you have specific feedback.

Q :What do you predict Elrond ´s largest challenges will be in the future? How do you plan to address them?
A: Beniamin Mincu : Huge focus is on business development and dev adoption. If we succeed in solving this, Elrond will have a huge impact on the blockchain space.

Q :Why did you choose your Max-Blocksize: ~800KB and not 1MB like Bitcoin? What are the advantages and challenges?
A: Adrian Dobrita: Actually we will probably allow for the max blocksize to be over 1MB, the reason for the limit was that libp2p does not allow the transfer packages larger than 1MB and we didn’t yet get to implement a break of packages into smaller unit and broadcast, but this will come. This will allow us also to boost the propagation of these large packages. There are also some solutions which involve erasure codes, which looks really interesting also from a performance point of view, and most definitely we will get to implement these in ELrond as well
A: Beniamin Mincu : Blocksize is not very important in Elrond right now. Since we have state sharding we are focusing on horizontal scaling instead of vertical scaling. Once we can process transactions in paralell you have a tremendous paradigm shift.

Q :What is your Fiscal Policy? Instamines, premines, buying, spending, icing, discounting, and/or burning any tokens?
A: Beniamin Mincu : We will soon share more about that. The most important next step will be about validator rewards. Once we are done with that will will share the full economics paper for further discussion and review.

Q :Why did you choose to build your VM infrastructure on top of the K Framework?
A: Beniamin Mincu: To give max flexibility to developers and support several VMs at the same time. Essentially Elrond has the first Meta VM in the space.

Q :How does Elrond plan to fund its development moving forward?
A: Beniamin Mincu:  Elrond has enough funds to continue building for a long time. Now our focus is business adoption. Getting the conversations started and finding the right partners to building and use our technology.

===END OF AMA===

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Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

Testnet Validators Registration is OPEN on the Riot Dev Channel (29.07.2019)

https://www.reddit.com/r/elrondnetwork/comments/cjc5ok/testnet_validators_registration_is_open_on_the/


Status: OPEN

The network will start on August 1st, 11:00 UTC.

If you see the status as OPEN, head over to the Riot dev channel (https://riot.im/app/#/room/#elrond:matrix.org) where you have the chance to register your node's identity, and join the next round (when the next elrond testnet version gets released).

Follow my tutorial (an extension to the official guide, not meant as a replacement) and fill in your Riot username, initialNodesSK, initialBalancesSK, and optionally the shard allocation (meta, 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4), in the spreadsheet announced on Riot: https://www.reddit.com/r/elrondnetwork/comments/cg2tmc/frequently_asked_on_telegram_how_can_i_run_a_node/

Don't place any value in the last columns, two are for key length check, and the others to the elrond team.

If I'm not around at the exact moment when registration closes to update the status, please leave a comment for the others to see.

Registration is usually open for a few hours, until the next day at most.

This is the third round, let's make it count!

Important note: you can install the node now, but it has to be reinstalled after the team has prepared the config files with the node identities hardcoded (this is how you get assigned to a shard for now). Make sure you have a copy of the two .pem files at a separate location, ready to be copied in the new version.

---

Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

ElrondNetwork: A scalable value transfer protocol for the digital economy

+ 65k tx/sec
+ minimal latency
+ negligible fees


THE PROBLEM: Censorship resistant protocols are indispensable

A few decades after its invention, the internet has brought compounding improvements in speed and bandwidth of communication, instant access to the world’s knowledge, rapidly increasing rate of innovation, and hence, a growing global economic output.

But with the near omnipresent surveillance tools, increasingly potent behavioral impact of technology, and worrying concentration of power in the hands of a few tech giants, the crucial necessity for a new layer of the internet becomes evident. One preserving the instrumental benefits enabled by technology, yet limiting its potentially restrictive inclination by means of decentralization.

Elrond is at the forefront of this major shift in core internet infrastructure, empowering a higher level of social scalability through sovereign digital ownership, data privacy, unstoppable censorship-resistant applications, novel digital economies and governance models

THE SOLUTION: Innovative technology applied at scale

Elrond is a complete rethinking of public blockchain architecture, especially designed to bring a 1000x overall improvement by being scalable, efficient and secure while maintaining a sufficiently decentralized setting.

To achieve this we introduce a novel Adaptive State Sharding mechanism, enabling linear scalability as more nodes join the network by parallelizing transaction processing.

On a consensus level we propose a novel mechanism called Secure Proof of Stake, introducing a random selection of the consensus group, stake plus rating as a fitness function for sybil attack prevention, and near-instant finality based on pBFT.

To enable decentralized applications we design Elrond to be EVM and Ewasm compliant, supporting multiple smart contract languages and formal verification.

THE FUTURE: Digital economy of tomorrow

What will the future look like? The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Elrond’s developer-friendly design is based on the following fundamentals: trustless network for value transfer, privacy safeguarding, facilitation of new business models (removes the middleman and inefficiencies), along with the development of secure and decentralized applications.

All these elements create a balanced recipe for a decentralized future.

Envision that you are the citizen of a country with no geographical frontiers, maybe digital frontiers. Your digital citizenship gives you some rights and obligations.
You express your voting intentions through a transparent, secure, and decentralized e-voting system. A similar system is in place to track your contributions and taxation. You live in a city, a smart city where you pay for what you use, in an optimized shared-based economy where everything is tokenized and accessible in a transparent, secure and fair way.

Using blockchain technology as a force for unification will accelerate a future of transformation, innovation and ultimately strengthen the standard of transparency across industries. Furthermore it will enable complete access and ownership of it’s users private data.

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Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

Elrond Validator Economics Proposal
— Preliminary draft and likely subject to change —
https://medium.com/elrondnetwork/elrond-validator-economics-proposal-8679da7551ac


We are very excited to share more information on the validator economic rewards, given the great interest we have seen from the Elrond community. You can see this as a first step in a series of conversations we will have while outlining the Elrond economic model. We appreciate your feedback so feel free to reach out!

Constants:
Total starting supply: 20 000 000 000 ERD
Minimum Stake: 500 000 ERD
Consensus Round (seconds): 5
Consensus Epoch (hours): 24
Minimum validators per shard: 500
Consensus group (no. of validators): 63
Hypothetical Maximum No. of Validators nodes assuming 20B ERD stake supply locking: = 20 000 000 000 / 500 000 = 40 000
Hypothetical Maximum No. of shards assuming 20B ERD stake supply locking: = 40 000/500 = 80
Important note: the above hypotheticals are not meant as desired targets but merely explanatory calculations outlining constraints.

Staking rewards model:
Elrond prevents attack vectors in 2 ways: incentivising validators to do a proper job, slashing malicious validators.
Most of the staking rewards are paid via new monetary supply emission. Based on preliminary calculations the overall monetary supply increase during the 1st year will be around 7.5%.
The supply emission algorithm is a function of: the number of shards, number of nodes, supply staked, and the incentive for targeted stake locked. The current model tries to keep the inflation rate between 7% to 8% no matter how much is staked. After the first year, the numbers and inflation rate are expected to be adjusted.
Please see this document for a more: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pY1hboThx773k6CFcWb_5UK0CdbU0LInjHgLj7y6l5k/edit#gid=1245717950

Emission distribution will happen as follows: 90% of all newly issued ERD will go to validators, and 10% will go the the Elrond reserve pool.

Fees model:
We believe that relying on transaction fees too much creates the premises for potentially large and hard to analyse game-theoretic attacks.

Still, to create a strong incentive for validators to act in the best interest of the network we propose this fee model where:
    50% are distributed to validators
    40% are burned
    10% are either (a) donated to the Elrond community fund or (b) also burned

Initial staking Targets
For the bootstrapping period of the network, we have set 2 clear initial targets for number of validators required for the network.






Hardware: Elrond lowers the barrier to entry for validators, as nodes were designed to run on average consumer grade computer hardware. To be precise, you can run an Elrond node on an AWS T2 Medium, with dual-core processor, and 4GB ram.

Bandwidth: The optimal bandwidth required for an Elrond validator node to support full network performance is an average of 100Mbps.

Storage: The optimal storage capacity for a validator node to store 2 epochs of data with 15k transactions/block is 200GB.

Conclusion
Please note all the above is presented as a preliminary validator economics draft. The full economics design rationale will be presented in a paper scheduled to be published in the next period. Any feedback and suggestions are greatly appreciated in the meantime.

---

Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

Read the thread below for the weekly tech update Elrond
https://twitter.com/Oxsy_Sibiu/status/1157317568551690243?s=20


1) Testnet release 1.0.11 on 1st of august
2) Medium economics article
3) Cross-shard smart contract transactions are now indexed and available in Blockchain Explorer
4) Optimization on dispatching and requesting smart contract results5) Heartbeat is now working also for Metachain nodes
6) Deep technical analysis of a complete receipt system
7) Preparations for Metachain state: peers, validators, rating computation based on taken actions (proposing, signing, responding to requests)
8.) Added a special infrastructure component for optimizing integration tests
9) Automated stress testing for smart contracts
10) Bug-hunting: generating extreme edge cases, building malicious nodes, trying to break the security of cross-shard transactions

---

Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

Node runner campaign!


Reasoning!
   1. Become familiar with the Elrond tech
   2. By running a node, you have the entire history of the blockchain on your laptop. You do not need a 3rd party to verify a transaction. You can verify it yourself!
   3. #ERDucate yourself through this process, and get rewarded.

Here is what you have to do
Follow either one of these guides and connect to the Elrond network

Video guide https://youtu.be/3VAvCcu_y64
Written guide https://docs.elrond.com/start-a-validator-node/start-the-network

Once you’ve connected you will have to tweet a short video 7-8 seconds/gif with your telegram username and the node running in background.  Use this text  “I’m now part of the $erd network! #erd #ERDucation #ERDnoderunner”

Upload your tweet on the community platform, and share it with our community

Example: https://twitter.com/robertonisie/status/1157250527236898818

Rewards
All eligible participants will receive 0.6 reputation and 400 points

Deadline: 9th August

*Note, if you’ve installed the Elrond Node in the past, just restart it (don’t run through the whole installation process again)

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Elrond’s official outlets:

Elrond Community Platform: https://community.elrond.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website: www.elrond.com
Elrond Github: https://github.com/ElrondNetwork

Transparency should be a default, with Xangle we guarantee it
https://medium.com/elrondnetwork/transparency-should-be-a-default-with-xangle-we-guarantee-it-c9f323fe4cd9



Elrond believes information is key to protect investors and for the crypto asset market to transition from today’s speculative investment environment to a more rational and legitimate environment. Information is one of the major causes of speculation. By practicing disclosure on Xangle, we are tackling information distortion and ensuring our investors get all the necessary information to make informed decisions.

As part of this partnership, our team went through a strict due diligence process by Xangle to publish a separate Due Diligence Report that will be made available to Xangle’s partnered exchanges. Exchanges will use this institutional grade report to perform continuous evaluation of projects. Currently they are actively working with leading exchanges such as Bithumb, Korbit, GOPAX, and CPDAX, to name a few.

Comprehensive information is also available to retail investors, so you can check out our public information disclosure page HERE (https://xangle.io/project/home/ERD). When you are uncertain about our current token supply or want to know the latest business updates, we recommend you check Xangle as it holds the most accurate information.

About Xangle
Xangle provides accurate, comprehensive, and up to date token information as well as company information of blockchain projects so that crypto investors and exchanges are able to make better investment or listing decisions.

About Elrond
Elrond is a new blockchain architecture, designed from scratch to bring a 1000-fold cumulative improvement in throughput and execution speed. To achieve this, Elrond introduces two key innovations: a novel Adaptive State Sharding mechanism, and a Secure Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm, enabling linear scalability with a fast, efficient, and secure consensus mechanism. Thus, Elrond can process upwards of 10,000 transactions per second (TPS), with 5-second latency, and negligible cost, attempting to become the backbone of a permissionless, borderless, globally accessible internet economy.
Elrond is built by a team of experienced entrepreneurs along with 13 engineers and researchers with significant blockchain backgrounds and technical experience at Microsoft, Google, Intel, and NTT DATA. The team includes two PhDs in CS & AI, multiple math, CS, and AI Olympiad champions, and a former member of the NEM core team.

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Elrond’s official :

Elrond Community https://community.elrond.com
Twitter:                https://twitter.com/elrondnetwork
Official website:    www.elrond.com
Elrond Github:       https://github.com/ElrondNetwork