Electra Community Progress Update #1
It has been extremely busy for us over the past few weeks, but never before have we been as excited as we are now. Over the past couple of weeks, interest in Electra has been growing exponentially. Our social media channels have exploded : The Electra Telegram group has grown to 3,154 members from our initial group of 200 just two weeks ago, our numbers on Discord have seen similar growth, and we have gained over 3,000 followers on Twitter over the past three days alone. The Electra family is growing rapidly, and we are evolving into a larger community of people, each sharing a common vision to deliver an incredibly fast, low-fee, and energy-efficient digital currency operated solely by our community members.
To kick off this series of Electra Community updates, we thought it would be the ideal time to begin walking through some of the foundations of Electra. We are a group that is full of passion, and we hope that you will share with us in our mission, our vision, and our principles.
What is Electra?
Electra is a new generation of digital currency. It is the world’s leading NIST5 algorithm-based blockchain, which brings the greatest speed, energy efficiency, and security to the industry. [1]
Energy Efficiency
Traditional cryptocurrencies require huge amounts of energy to maintain. There are some estimates that the amount of energy being used by miners to verify transactions on the Bitcoin network alone, is equivalent to the energy used by all of Morocco over the course of an entire year. [2]
Electra uses the NIST5 hashing algorithm, a new algorithm that has been proven to be a sustainable option for blockchain-based systems and proves to be much more environmentally sound. NIST5 requires a significantly less amount of energy to run [3], without compromising on the security of network members. Furthermore, Electra does not have an extended Proof of Work (PoW) phase. Electra’s blockchain network is predominantly Proof of Stake (PoS) which results in few miners and allows for a greatly reduced carbon footprint.
Fast Transactions
Electra transactions are lightning fast. The fiat banking system can take several days to process payments for merchants & customers. Bitcoin took us a step further by greatly reducing this but has proven to be unfeasible as a payment system for every day transactions, due to it’s long processing times of over 30 minutes and high transaction fees. Electra takes us even further as transactions are accepted by merchants within seconds, whilst confirmations are completed behind the scenes, in only a few minutes.
Community Owned & Operated
Electra is a community owned and operated organisation. There is no centralised authority influencing the direction of Electra, which means that our direction is dictated by the community and all work is carried out by a strong family of volunteers.
What We’ve Accomplished So Far
Over the past few weeks we have been focusing our efforts on rapidly expanding our infrastructure, processes and teams to support our growth and allow us to commit to our principles of transparency and community. We have successfully completed our rebranding and we have increased our team of developers, designers, technical support professionals and business development consultants. In addition to these principles of transparency and community, we take our deadlines seriously. As promised, we published our redesigned website on December 31st, 2017, which also included our entire roadmap for 2018 that is available to the public.
What We Are Working On
Our priorities throughout January will continue to include setting up the necessary foundations to support our growth and we’re particularly looking at our organisational structure to ensure we implement a scalable, flat, and agile model that will enable us to deliver on our commitments. We will also be releasing our Whitepaper in the coming weeks and our development priorities will be focused on releasing our new set of wallets due in Q1 and Q2 of 2018.
References
[1,4] http://www.wired.co.uk/article/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-mining-really-use
[2] https://cryptodelver.com/algorithm/nist5
[3] http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2012/NIST.IR.7896.pdf
