ELROND: The Future of Blockchain — Made in Transylvania | UPGRADE 100 Exclusive — English Transcript
Original video link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UM6mDfV_zc
First of all, what is the breakthrough Elrond achieved?
We’ve rebuilt the blockchain from scratch to bring a 1000x improvement in throughput execution speed and transaction.
1,000x ?
Yes and this is very, very important because we’ve had blockchains since 10 years ago but the current versions we’ve had are much like the dial-up version of the Internet. So right now with the version we’ve built with Elrond we’ll finally be able to transition from dial-up to broadband and use this type of technology at the scale that has never been done before.
And the second component that we think will be necessary to see a kind of global scale adoption will be a user interface that uses what we’ve built with the underlying architecture and simplifies user experience to such an extent that my mother and grandmother will be able to use this technology. The whole point is that people will not know that they will use blockchain much like they when they use the email right now they don’t know that they use the SMTP protocol. Nobody cares about that the fact is that we’ve built the underlying network that essentially allows this kind of transfer at an internet scale. This is why we call Elrond the internet scale blockchain. And then secondly we understand that no matter how performant the technology is unless we solve the user experience problem we will not be able to achieve anything.
What are the first applications of Elrond?
Elrond is the basis on which we’ll build the maximally efficient and useful version of money and what I mean by this is that we’ll finally have a version of money which can be transferred globally, in an instant, and at a negligible cost and all I’ve said until now can be basically verified. We’ve been building Elrond for the last two years, the code is open source anyone who has the technical know-how can look at the code and see the progress we’ve made and the breakthroughs we’re bringing to market.
How close is blockchain to mainstream adoption like the Internet?
The easiest way to clarify what we’ve built is to look at the early days of the internet. If you look at the Internet, essentially, it’s a network of various protocols. At first the internet was just for geeks and different universities so these people would send some information, but in a very, very difficult form. Only the programmers would be able to use it, but the internet changed dramatically with two important, sorts of breakthroughs: the first one was the browser which opened the Internet to everyone. If you could point and click at that point the Internet finally made sense to you could use it; And secondly we’ve not seen the internet really take off only until we had the transition from dial-up to broadband.
So, with Elrond, we’ve been working for more than two years right now on this radical breakthrough that we’ve brought at the network layer, the backend as you mentioned, and this is now very, very close to the what we call the Genesis launch, so the point where all this becomes live and it will be able to be used globally. But then in addition to this we’ve also worked very, very hard to simplify the user experience and make it in such a way that the whole technology part becomes invisible and the user can focus on his benefits.
In which industries will we see the biggest impact of this new technology ?
I think that the most important applications will be seen in the money and payments area. Just because the blockchain part has been invented with Bitcoin and the second version, second major version, was Ethereum. These were the most important applications and for many years people did not even understand the underlying technology of Bitcoin. Now the problem with Bitcoin and Ethereum, despite their enormous contribution, is that at this point you can process something like five transactions five to seven transactions per second and in Ethereum about fifteen transactions per second. Now, I may be extremely excited about them, but if the whole world can process only seven transactions per second or fifteen that’s a toy, an interesting toy but a toy nonetheless. S o what we’ve done with Elrond is focus on what is needed so that the technology will be able to be used from day one
What’s the immediate benefit of democratizing and accelerating blockchain technology?
Ideally, this is the point where cryptocurrencies or digital currencies will become indistinguishable from the normal currencies, because if you can use them anywhere to buy, to send money and to store your money, much like what you use in the real world with the benefit that this is much easier to be used, it doesn’t lose so much value through inflation and so forth, at that point you’ll probably start thinking about this old money as something that is much more fictional than the cryptocurrencies. So at first obviously on Elrond we have a cryptocurrency called ERD, this is the one with which we powered the whole ecosystem, secondly we will probably have very soon a stable coin so that people can use this technology without having to rely on the fluctuations that are and happen normally in this type of markets. So the moment you have this utility and have a stable coin that is pegged to the Dollar or to the Euro at that point you don’t care about the normal stuff.
Is Elrond strong enough to build a new internet scale blockchain?
I started Elrond at the end of 2017 and we have two co-founders, my brother (Lucian Mincu) and Lucian Todea, both of them entrepreneurs with technical background myself as well I’ve been in the blockchain space for more than five years right now, but even more important we’ve started with nine people that are extremely talented and part of the core team, each of them comes with deep technical background at some of the most important technical companies in the world like Google, Microsoft, NTT, IBM and so forth and also come with PhDs in design and space exploration, AI. In addition to this, we’ve got already funding from some of the most important funds in Silicon Valley, in Asia and Europe and a lot of other funds are already contacting us to prepare for a perhaps a new funding round and so forth, but, in short, we’ve got a team with which we can build rockets and are working day and night to bring this technology to the market
How can we verify the claims and progress of Elrond?
We’ve published a technical paper that outlines the whole architecture. You can basically go through the whole math stuff, the components and see how they fit together. But even more important we’ve released the whole code, which is open source. The code is running right now, is tested with a few hundreds validators from the community, from all over the world that are trying to stress test and network penetrate it hack it and so forth. So first, everyone can judge this for themselves through the paper and then second, everyone can look at the code and see the components that are there and see how it works. So it’s pretty straightforward.
What are the next important milestones ?
The most important milestone is the launch. As I have mentioned we have the launch, the genesis launch it’s called because the whole network has been in a kind of very in-depth stress testing phase, We’ve done some very important security and economics audits right now with a few companies that have done security audits for Apple NASA and DARPA and right at this point we are basically testing the final versions that need to go out in order for us to be able to launch the Genesis. This is the first step and then, with the Genesis, we also want to come out with this surprised user interface that we’ve not discussed about and we can’t wait to see how the community will react.
How can people make money with Elrond?
The important part is they should only risk what they can afford to lose. This is a very, very high potential technology, but it’s still at the inception point. Secondly, if they understand that this is a high potential technology and they have a measured risk then they can start looking at the technology. It’s basically in the open. They can Google Elrond.com, they’ll see all the information there and the most important thing is that if you look at the blockchain space as you looked at the Internet and remember that at some point at the beginning, a lot of people said that the internet would not amount to anything, looking back, it’s sort of very, very surprising. I believe we in the same spot with blockchain. And once it takes off, most people will be extremely surprised, but right now they can experiment with different stuff.
Google it! I think every smart man that has a net worth, which is significant, should probably have one two or three percent from the net worth, to get exposure to the crypto space. Elrond is already listed on the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, which is called Binance.
Are there any dangers or risks associated with this technology?
The danger is there but it’s important to get some small exposure, at least to learn a bit and then discover more. And this is how you essentially take away the irrational fears that you sort of have, but moving one step further, I think there’s a lot of good that has come through technology. And this is the overarching theme. We might get stressed out from time to time because sometimes things don’t work out as we expect, but this has happened throughout history many, many times. At the end of the day, a lot of energy and effort is being put to make things work in the right way and we’ll try to do to the best of our abilities to do the same with Elrond.
What’s your vision for the future?
The vision, that’s the reasoning for all this work is that ultimately we want to give anyone, anywhere, easy access to this digital economy. If people have access to a kind of banking in their pockets at that point the world will change dramatically for the better.
- Original work done by: Randy ArantaLika
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