Welcome to Elrond

At a glance:

  • What: Sharded Smart Contracts execution platform with a PoS consensus mechanism
  • When: Mainnet live, project started in 2018
  • How: Scales via Adaptive State Sharding, consensus via Secure Proof of Stake
  • Highlights:
    • Performance: 15.000 current TPS, 6s block time, $0.001 tx cost, can scale beyond 100k (263k TPS in testnet)
    • Maiar money app with progressive security, social recovery, embedded DeFi
    • Developers: royalties - 30% SC gas returned to authors, full IDE, Rust framework with debugger
    • Validators: 36% APR for running nodes, low system requirements
    • Network setup: 2.169 nodes, with 4 shards (adaptivity allows throughput to increase with demand)

What is Elrond?

Elrond is a distributed transactional computation protocol which relies on a sharded state architecture and a secure Proof of Stake consensus mechanism. While most other blockchain networks require custom hardware and high energy consumption, Elrond runs on average computers.

By employing sharding, a method of parallelizing data & transactions processing, Elrond’s performance will scale up with the number of computers joining the network, reaching more than 100.000 transactions per second while growing increasingly decentralized.

How is Elrond different?

The Elrond network is the first to present a viable solution where all the three aspects of sharding - state, network and transactions - have been implemented at once. Combined with its “Adaptive” component, this novel architecture allows for dynamic network configuration to maintain a high level of security while scaling with demand.

In addition to scaling through sharding, Elrond also approaches the consensus problem with a mechanism called Secure Proof of Stake, which mitigates potential attack vectors when compared to Proof of Work, while also enabling large throughput and fast execution.

By solving some of the hardest consensus and sharding problems in the blockchain space, Elrond is able to provide a very high level of performance on a network made of inexpensive computers, resulting in a very low cost per transaction. In addition to performance and cost, Elrond also stands out through the quality of the developer experience and the resulting boost in usability on the end-user side.

Roadmap and current status

Important achievements:

  • First live blockchain architecture with state sharding
  • Mainnet launched in July 2020
  • 15,000 TPS, 6s latency, $0.001/tx
  • 263k TPS in public testnet
  • IDE with debugger and Rust framework for SCs
  • Validated through multiple audits from Trial of Bits & others

Q4 2020

  • Elrond Bootstrapping Phase 3:
    • Smart Contracts
    • ESDT token
  • Staking: direct & delegation
  • Elrond Governance: Voting system
  • Development Toolkit
  • Maiar launch

Q1 2021

  • Maiar: staking, DeFi
  • Decentralized Exchange
  • DeFi 2.0 module
  • Name Service

Q2 2021

  • Digital identity
  • Interoperability
Architecture Overview →