My review about Elrond ! MY BEST PROJECT 2019

[MOËT 32]

What is Elrond Network?

Elrond steps up the scalability and interoperability game and proposes two new major assets to the blockchain. The scope is to create 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). In an ecosystem that strives for interconnectivity, their solution for smart contracts offers an EVM compliant engine to ensure interoperability by design, thus ensuring that Elrond Network will be relevant in an ever growing blockchains environment.

Elrond is a complete rethinking of public blockchain architecture, especially designed to bring a major overall improvement by being scalable, efficient, and secure while maintaining a sufficiently decentralized setting. To achieve this the team introduce a novel Adaptive State Sharding mechanism, enabling scalability as more nodes join the network by parallizing transaction processing. On a consensus level Elrond proposes 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, Elrond is designed so that it is EVM and Ewasm compliant, supporting multiple smart contract languages and formal verification.

 

Product Readiness

Elrond’s team present focus is on delivering a fully working prototype for the early stage of the network, and to test the functionality of the consensus model and how well transactions are handled on the network. Their entire scope right now is to deliver the technical part, as in the prototype and prove that their model works, which is according to their roadmap going to be delivered through 2018, all the way to early 2019. They scheduled the prototype release for Q2 and a fully featured Testnet for Q4 in 2018.

 

Update: As to date Elrond has achieved significant progress in developing their product, with the release of their prototype code to the public and approaching the launch of the first iteration of Elrond’s testnet. The scope of the public prototype was to prove the hypothesis that the network is capable of achieving state sharding, and to validate the model of doing cross-shard transactions, while also adding a nice touch to it with a friendly UI containing a wallet, benchmarks, and an explorer.

 

Update #2: With the latest iteration of their network that has been completely rewritten in the GO code language, the team has been able to reach 3,750+ TPS in a single shard, which is a significant improvement since their prototype. This shows that the team is committed to their roadmap, delivering constant progress even before raising funds and investors know beforehand what they are investing into. To be eligible for an early access of the testnet you can fill the following form. V1.0 of the Testnet is up and running successfully, and Elrond’s early Blockchain also has a slick UX which will be available to the public in the next few months.

 

Space in the Market & Competitive Landscape

 

Elrond tackles a very competitive and saturated marked of blockchain infrastructure projects like EOS, Zilliqa, PChain, and Quarkchain. All these competitors try to tackle the scalability issues and provide solutions that ensures a high TPS throughput while maintain relevant security levels. They are also going on another beaten path of the cross-chain interoperability, which is also tackled by many other projects such as Polkadot and PChain. It remains to be seen if the team will deliver a viable product that will take over the competition and integrate the network among the relevant blockchain infrastructure projects.

 

Competitors’ valuations:

 

1. 
    
   
2. Ethereum, valued $50B.
    
   
3. EOS, valued $10B.
    
   
4. Zilliqa, valued $650M.
    
   
5. Hashgraph, raising $300M.
    
   
6. Thunder, valued $100M.
    
   
7. Kadena, raised $12M.
    
   
8. Algorand, raised $4M
   

Size of Potential Market

 

Elrond is looking to be a major player in a so called “big league” of blockchain development which is the high throughput, sharding, and cross-chain interoperability sector. The need for a high throughput and low cost of data storage is at an all-time high. The project that will solve these issues and provide an open and easily interoperable chain will be one that will see massive adoption, therefore there is room for multiple possibilities.

 

Innovation & Intellectual Property

 

As of now the technology cannot be tracked and patents cannot be identified, due to the project’s early state. Their GitHub is also not public, and we could not determine the level of innovation behind their development.

Update: The stance the team takes is towards an open source product which enables faster levels of adoption and stands behind the principle of decentralization, thus they have made their code for the prototype available on their Github page, and they are planning to further release their code base along with the testnet. For now, the various parts and layers of the Elrond Network technology are governed by the Apache 2.0 standard.