Elrond is a developer-friendly blockchain protocol that aims to improve the DeFi industry and the Internet of Things. It was launched in July 2020 and founded by brothers Beniamin and Lucian Mincu, and Lucian Todea in 2017. Elrond aims to integrate blockchain technology into the global economy and make it faster and more secure.
The Elrond network achieves faster and cheaper transactions with the help of its smart contracts execution platform, Secure Proof of Stake consensus mechanism, and sharding. It reportedly performs 15,000 transactions per second with a $0.001 transaction cost and six-second latency. The Elrond Virtual Machine, Arwen VM, is based on WebAssembly (WASM) that is memory-safe and platform-independent and supports multiple languages, including C++ and TypeSCript.
Arwen VM focuses on security, stability, and performance. Elrond’s approach to sharding is titled Adaptive State Sharding and consists of three sharding types: state, transaction, and network, which improves shards’ communication and performance. Lastly, Secure Proof of Stake is an improved version of Proof of Stake that reduces the time of random selection of the consensus group. The selection is also additionally determined by the node’s stake and rating which is done by syncing independent network elements. The EGLD token is used as a governance token, for staking and rewards.
In April 2022, Elrond announced that Skynet eGLD Capital, an investment fund created to manage the development of the Elrond ecosystem, has begun to accept in-kind subscriptions in EGLD. At that point, more than $40 million was raised for the network’s development.