How to Elrond Network Is Pushing The Limits Of Blockchain Technology To Achieve Scalability???
One of the platforms pushing the envelope in the underlying technology is Elrond, a high-value transfer network that relies on secure proof-of-stake consensus and a bleeding-edge integration of sharding with a public blockchain.
Sharding is an ambitious take on scaling public blockchains at the convergence of decades-old technology for horizontal database partitioning and decentralized networks. Elrond has made some significant headway producing a working sharding implementation, and already has a testnet live with an early version of their platform.
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 (sPoS) algorithm.
The key insight with sharding is that you can partition the network into smaller networks to enable parallel transaction processing. Once you can do that, a new performance paradigm opens up. There are 3 levels of sharding, each posing a more difficult challenge that needs to be solved: transaction sharding (level 1), network sharding (level 2), and state sharding (level 3). After more than one and a half years of work, Elrond has validated the technical model proposed in its technical paper, and has come with a practical solution to the most difficult of the problems that can radically increase performance.
The adaptivity of our sharding model means that unlike other networks, in Elrond, as more nodes join, the network can expand and contract in real-time. In other words, as more nodes join the network to reap validator rewards, new shards are formed based on a clever binary tree model, and scalability increases even further.
The second key innovation in Elrond is its secure proof-of-stake algorithm. Elrond has attempted to depart from the energy-intensive and unsustainable proof-of-work and come up with a solution compatible with a globally scalable architecture. Thus, we employ proof-of-stake to significantly improve energy efficiency and prevent Sybil attacks, random sampling of the consensus group to make it very secure, unpredictable and use of a PBFT consensus variation for breakneck execution speed.
The implication of these improvements is hard to overstate, and businesses are starting to pay attention because, for them, they make all the difference.
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.
Adding on this, Elrond aims to integrate Chainlink to amplify the utility and functionality of its smart contracts by enabling them to interact with real-world data feeds securely. 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 de facto choice of digital contracts.
The blockchain space is still very young. There are roughly 50 million people in the space, and indeed, most projects focus on them at the expense of ignoring the elephant in the room — 4.2 billion people on the internet. At Elrond, we understand that it’s only by escaping this small niche group, and finding a compelling way to bring new people in, that we can see the next wave of meaningful blockchain adoption.
So while we are starting with a focus on developers, we intend to move one step beyond that, abstracting away complexity and bringing the most useful blockchain features to the end-users.
In our experience, developers look for 3 things: performant infrastructure, flexible tools, and perhaps most importantly, an audience. We have built the most advanced state sharded proof-of-stake architecture at this point, have also built a Meta VM based on K Framework to support 3 VMs at the same time, and will now focus on offering a concentrated audience through a dApp store. Once we can offer an audience, developers will receive an offer they simply cannot refuse.
Elrond has reached some significant milestones during June. First, we released a public testnet boasting >10k TPS with 5 shards and 5 seconds latency — this itself is a breakthrough for the whole blockchain space. Second, we have made the code open source for peer review and community feedback. Third, we have closed a $1.9M private round with some strategic investors like Binance Labs (Binance’s investment arm), Electric Capital, Neo Global Capital, Maven 11, and Woodstock Capital.
Right now we are preparing for an exciting community competition called “Battle of Nodes,” where community members can start running validator nodes, attempt to penetrate and stress test the network, and receive rewards while doing so. Additionally, we have released the first version of the Elrond explorer, the Elrond wallet, and are preparing to release a first dApp game built on Elrond.
Given that the testnet is launched, we have begun a concentrated business development marathon focused on South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Dubai. After so many empty promises, you can really see the light in people’s eyes when they discover all this performance is available on Elrond right now.
Elrond is focused very much on providing a fully scalable blockchain able to real world use cases. By joining we will be working with leading world-known enterprises part of the Trusted IoT Alliance as core enterprise participants and are driving proofs-of-concept and testbed initiatives for IoT.
The main value proposition is that within this alliance we will be offering the Elrond platform to be used in hackathons that are meant to solve real-world problems for these large enterprises.