After some initial research on @ElrondNetwork it's time for a WHAT, WHY, HOW, WHO thread 🧵
WHAT is Elrond: Elrond is a smart contract enabled, layer-1 blockchain platform designed for high throughput and fast execution speeds. It's core consensus mechanism is based on Proof-of-Stake (PoS).
WHY does Elrond exist: Most blockchains exist to serve a specific purpose. This often involves tradeoffs on certain dimensions. For instance, Bitcoin is provably scarce & decentralized; however it is constrained by not having programmable contracts on the base settlement layer
Meanwhile, Ethereum has a smart-contract powered programming layer; however, it still struggles to scale throughput on its base layer-1 to this day. Simply put, Elrond is attempting to provide the extensibility of a smart contract protocol with the scarcity of BTC.
HOW does Elrond do this: At the execution level, Elrond relies heavily on 'adaptive state sharding' to enable high performance of: 15,000 TPS, 6s block finality time and $0.001 average tx cost. (I will do a future thread on the details of state sharding vs other sharding types)
At the consensus level, Elrond leverages a PoS variation called 'Secure PoS'. The innovation here is in how validator nodes are selected for consensus out of a shard in a secure and provably random way. (This will also get its own thread) https://docs.elrond.com/technology/secure-proof-of-stake/
In order to have the same digital scarcity as $BTC, Elrond has implemented an economic model that will cap the total supply of $EGOLD at 31.4M max This is due to a slick mechanism that substitutes inflation with fees as the way of incentivizing validators image: @wesleybkress
Another aspect of Elrond's tech that I found compelling, was the Elrond WAASM VM Basically, since Elrond's VM executes WebAssembly, it can execute smart contracts written in ANY programming language & is highly performant This greatly reduces the barrier to entry for developers
WHO is behind Elrond: The core team consists of proven founders & operators in the Web3 space including @beniaminmincu, @lucianmincu, and @luciantodea They've also managed to attract a strong team of advisors ranging from tech, startups & academia.
Since Elrond is a layer-1, I'd be remiss not to allude to the many projects that have already integrated with and/or are building on top of the network. I will be documenting my exploration of the Elrond ecosystem over the next week.
I've barely begun to scratch the surface of my research on Elrond, and this thread is only meant to serve as an appetizer for what is to come. Follow me for upcoming threads and subscribe to my daily newsletter @web3pills for more updates: https://web3pills.substack.com/
If you are interested in diving deeper on Elrond, start by following these accounts for more alpha 👇 @WesleyBKress @DrElrond123 @BlazzordNFT @the_economystic @thecyple @ElrondWarriors @WellKnownMatty @theserenation @CryptoTechs @Mibayy13 @Thibaultcouss1