What is Elrond?
Elrond is a blockchain protocol that uses sharding to achieve fast transaction speeds. The project defines itself as a new internet technology ecosystem that includes fintech, decentralized finance, and the Internet of Things. It claims that the execution of its smart contract platform is capable of 15,000 transactions per second, with a six-second latency and a transaction cost of $0.001.
Elrond Website
Elrond was founded in late 2017 by Beniamin and Lucian Mincu and Lucian Todea. They strived to solve the issue of blockchain scalability.
Elrond calls itself a blockchain platform for the new internet economy, dApps, and enterprise applications. Its main selling point is its high scalability, claiming to be the first blockchain network to implement state, network, and transaction sharding.
To accomplish this, the network is divided into four shards: three execution shards capable of 5,400 transactions per second each, and one coordination shard, the "Metachain." Elrond's adaptive state sharding architecture shards state, transactions, and the network completely. When the throughput demand is not met, it can scale by adding another shard. It has been tested to run 263,000 times.
The blockchain uses a native token called eGold, or EGLD, to pay network fees, stake, and reward validators. Elrond mainnet was launched in July of 2020.
Currently, Elrond has a limited supply that begins at 20,000,000 EGLD, and the new tokens are minted to reward network validators. The maximum supply can never exceed 31,415,926 EGLD.
