Elrond’s Advisers — Scaling up

Beniamin Mincu
Elrond Network
Published in
3 min readJul 1, 2018

A meticulously conceived and well executed strategy is perhaps necessary though not sufficient to ensure progress. Having a vision is important; executing on that vision is even more important. But strong foundations are more than mere strategies. Strong foundations come with a robust texture that can help navigate the ups and downs inherent in the life cycle of a startup.

What this means for Elrond, is that we have focused on gathering a strong founding team, surrounded by experienced professionals covering everything from business, computer science, economics and legal aspects. Our previous post included professionals that could offer entrepreneurial and legal input. Now, focus shifts towards blockchain technology and economics. In light of this, we are proud to welcome these great people to our advisory team: Alex Tabarrok, Fabio C. Canesin, Ethan Fast and Raul Jordan.

Alex Tabarrok — holds the Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center and is a professor of economics at George Mason University where he also received his PhD from. He is a research fellow with the Mercatus Center. Alex is the co-founder of Marginal Revolution University: An Online Platform for Learning Economics. He is the author of numerous academic papers in the fields of law and economics, criminology, regulatory policy, voting theory and other areas in political economy. He is co-author of Modern Principles of Economics, a widely used introductory textbook and co-author of the Marginal Revolution economics blog along with Tyler Cowen.

Fabio C. Canesin — is the Co-founder of City of Zion, a global, independent group of open source developers, designers and translators formed to support the NEO core and ecosystem. Fabio is also the Co-founder of NEX, a platform for complex decentralized cryptographic trade and payment service creation. He holds a MSc in computational mechanics and variational multi-scale modeling, and is a researcher engineer in the petroleum industry. He is also Co-founder and CTO of Lemonaid Learning Analytics, a tech startup in Brazil.

Ethan Fast — CS PhD from Stanford, he is one of the Co-Founders of City of Zion and Neon Exchange, and the creator of NEO’s most used wallet — the Neon Wallet. He is an entrepreneur and research scientist with a background in Human Computer Interaction, AI, and blockchain. He has led more than 10 projects to publication in top venues such as CHI, UIST, EMNLP, and AAAI, where they have won multiple awards. In May 2011, Ethan founded a Y Combinator funded startup, Proxino.

Raul Jordan — is an Ethereum core developer. He is Co-Leading Prysmatic Labs, the first Sharding Implementation for the Ethereum Protocol. Raul is a partner at zk Capital, a research-focused blockchain investment fund and he is also the co-founder of Kynplex, the first ever network in the life sciences that brings together hubs of scientific innovation online. Raul received the Thiel Fellowship in 2016 after which he decided to drop out of Harvard and focus on his newly created network of scientific innovation that is accessible outside of academia.

Blockchain technology is still in its early stage where the main focus should be on making the core infrastructure work. Thus Elrond attempts to fill this critical gap by providing a truly secure, efficient and scalable solution as a global public utility.

Lastly, our next milestone will focus on Elrond’s prototype release. In a few days we will offer insights into our first working prototype, new user experience and potential core performance embedded with the initial versions of sharding and consensus.

We are early, but good progress is being made. So, expect more, expect better.

As always, to learn more about Elrond or to discuss technical aspects of the project, feel free to connect to us through our official channels:

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