Elrond (ERD) is the cryptocurrency of the blockchain project of the same name that aims to create a new architecture designed to significantly improve transaction execution speed.
The Elrond blockchain platform aims to be highly scalable, fast and secure, enabling the creation of a new Internet economy with distributed apps.
This is achieved by introducing two new features, namely an Adaptive State Sharding mechanism and a Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm with a fast, efficient and secure consensus mechanism (Secure Proof of Stake).
Elrond’s approach to increasing throughput with sharding, called Adaptive State Sharding, combines all three types of sharding (State, Transactions and Network) into a solution that improves communication within the shards and increases performance through parallel processing.
Secure Proof of Stake maintains a high level of security through random sampling of the consensus group, and random shuffling of nodes into other shards.
The goal is to achieve an average of 10,000 transactions per second, with 5-second latency and negligible cost, so that it can become the backbone of a globally accessible, borderless, permissionless Internet-based economy.
The interest in the Elrond’s cryptocurrency
The project is still under development, so much so that the ERD token is still based on Binance Chain, yet it is already enjoying a period of particular interest.
ERD made its debut on the financial markets in July 2019, with a value of about 6 thousandths of a US dollar. However, the price then fell below 2 thousandths in November of the same year, while during the collapse of the financial markets in mid-March 2020 it fell even below 0.7 thousandths.
It slowly climbed to over 3 thousandths in mid-June and then took off to a peak of 29 thousandths on July 27th, which is a tenfold increase in value in about a month and a half.
Since then, it has stabilized around 24 thousandths of a dollar.
The mainnet has just been launched, and ERD tokens are migrating from Binance Chain to the project’s native blockchain. This event, already announced some time ago, has made the value of the token skyrocket, especially because the tests have provided very positive results: over 1,500 nodes in 29 countries, and 50 shards, running at extremely high speeds with a peak of over 260,000 transactions per second.
In addition, a new DeFi app, called Maiar, which allows staking and lending, as well as a series of new features, has been launched.
The launch of the mainnet also changes the economic model of the token, reducing the offering from 20 billion to 20 million.
