Elrond Network - Becoming a regulated ICO

[hta]

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

[ltha]

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

[ngthnhien]

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

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

[hta]

#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

[hta]

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

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

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

[hta]

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.

[hta]

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

[coinfunda]

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/

[hta]

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

[ngthnhien]

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

[ngthnhien]

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/

[ngthnhien]

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

[hta]

Elrond GIF campaign

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

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

[cattuong01vn]

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/

[hta]

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

[ltha]

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/

 

[ltha]

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

 

[hta]

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

[hta]

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).

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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.