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Elrond is the first Romanian blockchain company to make it to the top 50 in terms of global market capitalization. The project developed by a very talented team from Sibiu became known worldwide in the spring and summer of 2020, more precisely between mid-March and early July 2020. At that time, the virtual currency saw a fabulous increase in value of over 5000%.
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Elrond was created by Beniamin Mincu, Lucian Mincu, and Lucian Todea in 2017 in Sibiu, even though the owner company is based in Malta, probably due to lower taxes. In June 2019, the project receives its first rounds of funding, managing to attract over $1.9 million from several private investors and another $3.25 million in exchange for 25% of the total existing coins.
A high-performance blockchain like Bitcoin or Ethereum, Elrond can support up to 15,000 transactions per second and offers extremely fast network speeds. As a comparison, BTC supports 4.6 transactions per second, ETH 15, and DOT 1000. (I won't compare here Elrond to Hive, to me Hive is something different and I can happily be involved with both)
The Elrond network is a public blockchain that was created from the ground up to provide scalability (in the crypto world, scalability refers to the number of transactions that can be supported in real-time) at a high level, interoperability, and high throughput. The goal from the start was to build a decentralized network that could offer at least similar, if not better performance compared to centralized systems, with an additional focus on user privacy.
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So, here are some of the most important features and advantages of the Elrond blockchain that differentiate it from other similar networks:
- Adaptive State Sharding - high scalability
Sharding is a technique whereby data is divided (or broken up, if you like, hence the term "shard") into several smaller pieces and distributed across several areas of the network, each consisting of a number of nodes that process transactions. As such, there is an impressive increase in performance through parallel processing, resulting in a 1000x increase in the number of transactions that can be supported, if we were to compare with older blockchains.
- Secure Proof of Stake - security and efficiency
Elrond comes with a new consensus called Secure Proof of Stake or SPsO, a mechanism that keeps all the computers running the network blockchain in sync. This ensures a much-reduced latency of processes taking place between members of the group participating in the blockchain, but also much better security of the whole system.
- Elrond VM
It is a virtual contract execution artificial intelligence engine that helps users write smart contracts in any programming language they are familiar with.
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Why is Elrond so special?
It may seem to you from reading the list of characteristics above that I speak in a foreign language. Know that you're not alone and even I had to do quite a bit of research to understand exactly what this is all about. So you can't help but wonder "Okay, well, out of the thousands of cryptocurrencies that currently exist on the market, what does Elrond crypto do that is so special?". [Beniamin Mincu](Beniamin Mincu)'s answer to the same question was that the technology used by Elrond is to old blockchains what today's high-speed internet is to dial-up connections of 20 years ago.
In other words, Elrond can offer much higher bandwidth, useful for handling much higher volumes of transactions, but also for more demanding decentralized applications. In addition, Elrond coin has been designed to be very user-friendly and can be used by anyone who wants to, via the company's website and/or their platform, Maiar. All this while the blockchain system was originally intended as one specifically dedicated to dApp developers (those who deal with the backend code of peer-to-peer networks).
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EGLD(Elrond's main coin) is already being used on a lot of networks for trade execution, as validation rewards, or for smart contracts. The blockchain has launched its own Maiar app, which aims to make online payments in a secure manner, thanks to the cryptographic security system used. At the same time, the company's management announced partnerships with a lot of companies and even municipalities in Romania and several other Western countries. (If this article finds enough interest I might write another one about their current partnerships, about the exchange they are running, and about other projects that have been launched already on their blockchain).
I'm not paid or rewarded in any way by Elrond, I'm passionate about this project almost the same way I am about Hive. I am invested financially and emotionally in this project and wanted to let other people know about it.
If you reached the end of this post by reading, Thank You so much! If you don't agree with something I wrote here, please drop a comment down below.
The above screenshot is taken from @heartbeatonhive's Alive Tribe curation post which you can find here! Thank you @bradleyarrow !
Come join me, it's free! If you register on ListNerds using my link, I'll do everything in my power to get you going WITHOUT the mistakes I made in the beginning. Let's earn and grow together faster than ever before!