Elrond’s AMA on Pramod’s Global Crypto Community 29th July 2019

Elrond Network did an amazing official public AMA on Pramod’s Global Crypto Community [ https://t.me/flipORhodlChat]

Here are the summary of the AMA:

Pramod
Please welcome @beniaminmincu and @AdrianDobrita from ELROND TEAM. Please introduce yourselves for our community

Beniamin Mincu
Hey guys. Really great to be here
Here’s a few thoughts on myself. I stumbled into bitcoin sometime in 2013 and joined the NEM core team in 2014 to lead product, marketing, and community, helping take the project from a Bitcointalk post to a global billion dollar product. I have co-founded Metachain Capital to invest in ambitious founders solving critical blockchain problems and also started ICO Market Data with my brother to streamline investment expertise.

As it became clear that scalability was perhaps the most pressing problem in the blockchain space, I saw no one was really solving it properly and had a clear intuition on how a really compelling solution would look, but needed to test it against the brightest technical minds I knew and see what I was missing. So, together with my brother we gathered some of our smartest technical friends, and had several in-depth discussions about this. The discussions continued for about a 1.5 months, when it became clear we had a really significant breakthrough. This is how Elrond began, and the point when we started working on formalizing the first fully state sharded proof of stake architecture.

Adrian Dobrita
Hello everyone, glad to be here! I am currently the Head of Engineering at Elrond, focusing both on research and development. I am a software engineer with more than 10 years experience. In the past I’ve worked for companies such as Intel, ST-Ericsson, Ausy, Continental, etc, developing industry-grade software in areas such as mobile and automotive but I’ve also been part of several startups as back-end developer. I’m looking forward to the discussions today.

Beniamin Mincu
We have been for one week in Korea and will return there in about one week. Given that we have the technology ready and testnet can process >10kTPS, we are now in a marathon to bring Elrond to Korea, Japan, Singapore, Dubai, Vietnam, India and other countries. Indeed, we have many strategic partners in India and are very much looking forward to visiting soon.

=====AMA STARTED=====

Q : As you are operating in a highly competitive sector of the market how do you plan to get ahead of your competitors?

Beniamin Mincu
Elrond is currently processing far more than Harmony or any other architecture at this point. You can see the detailed comparisson here: https://docs.elrond.com/detalied-comparative-analysis/elrond-vs.-harmony

Q :What is the biggest challenge you have faced in the crypto space? How will you pick ICO’s on your blockchain?

Beniamin Mincu
Nothing hindered us. We wanted to list when Elrond is ready for wide market penetration and has the strongest edge in terms of technical architecture.

Q :How are Elrond going to get more people to build on-chain dapps?

Beniamin Mincu
Our code is open source and we will have many tool to help developers onboard and start building several dapps.

Q :With blockchain being such a young industry, partnerships are an integral component of any project’s journey. Which types of partnerships have Elrond already attained and what are the plans on this front moving forward ?

Beniamin Mincu
We have several partnerships with Nash, Chainlink, Runtime Verification, Smart Bill, Typing DNA, and DSLR, many more will follow. We are considering many other options for partnerships. Feel free to ping us directly if you have some clear feedback there. We will announce more partnerships once things are done but this is an ongoing process.

The partnership with Nash sets Elrond on a friendly ground with them. We will explore integration and think the whole blockchain space is at the very inception, so there is enough space for both Elrond and Nash build valuable businesses that serve millions of users world wide.

Q :Hi guys! Your transactions speed will be a new huge step for blockchain world. What can you tell us about transaction fees(price/priority)?

Beniamin Mincu
Yes, we are very excited with the progress we have made on performance. The transaction fees are a priority for us right now and we intend to have a very competitive edge on that as well. Hopefully Elrond is have 1/10 of tx fees you see on current blockchains so that the improvement will be significant enough.

Q :What is SPoS and how it is better than PoS?

Beniamin Mincu
Please take a look at the detailed explanation here: https://docs.elrond.com/learn/secure-proof-of-stake

Q : Don’t you think PoS also can be attacked via some staking pools where people can lease coins and main party can use them for running node/validating transactions? What are your views on Proof of Authority (POA) consensus algorithm?

Beniamin Mincu
SPOS is not susceptible to the mentioned attack vector.

Q :Elrond stand for high-throughput public blockchain providing security, efficiency, scalability. But similar things are targetted by other Projects like binance launchpad project Harmony which also aimed at highly efficient scalable blockchain with other features.

So my question is why we need Elrond and how it is better!

Beniamin Mincu
Please see the difference between Elrond and Harmony here: https://docs.elrond.com/detalied-comparative-analysis/elrond-vs.-harmony

Q : Zilliqa also implemented sharding in their PBFT consensus model. So What is the main difference between Zilliqa Sharding model and Elrond Sharding Model?

Beniamin Mincu
Please see Elrond and zilliqa difference here: https://docs.elrond.com/detalied-comparative-analysis/elrond-vs.-zilliqa

Q : What is the difference between POS Mechanism approached by Elrond Team and PosW by Quarkchain. As both projects have fundamentals based on Sharding technologies.

What makes u better by not going with PosW and instead going for Pos ?? Would like to hear both the Pros and Cons

Adrian Dobrita
We believe that the energy inefficiency of PoW no longer makes sense if you want to scale globally, and PoS comes with an interesting alternate solution for sybil resistance. This enables you, if you have a good scaling solution like state sharding, to finally get the TPS that blockchains need in order to be relevant if we speak of blockchain enabled IOT devices etc. In regards to comparison with Quarkchain, I think their solution is one of the few in the space that makes sense, although I do not agree with some of the choices. For example PoW slows you down a lot, and if you have the choice of PoS I don’t really see the benefit. For the sharding solution, I honestly think that duplicating accounts in every single shard in order to optimize the cross shard operations is not really state sharding, as you are instead increasing the state when you don’t need to, this also affects the cross shard operation model. Our sharding solution ensures that one account is managed in a single shard, no other duplicates are made in other shards, so the maintained state is minimum. As for the SPoS, which is our own version of PoS, we believe that with the security layers we’ve added, like random node shuffling at the end of the epoch, random sampling of nodes for the consensus group, the rating for choosing validators, working with a BFT like consensus all allow us to have a fast and secure block generation mechanism, that meets the demands in terms of TPS that the industry has today.

Q :What is Elrond future development plan?

Beniamin Mincu
Please take a look here for a detailed version: https://docs.elrond.com/#roadmap-and-current-status

Q :What is your total addressable market (TAM) and what do you estimate is the max share your network will take?

Beniamin Mincu
Addressable market: there are 4.2B people on the internet and most of them will use blockchain long term without even knowing. Elrond will aim to be the first blockchain to escape the current niche of 50M people we have in the blockchain space and bring the most useful blockchain features to end users without having them to learn rocket science like they need today.

Q : How will you stand out with all the big projects out there years ahead of you like etherum, iota, komodo, Neo! Too many good projects out there doing infrastructure

Beniamin Mincu
None of those projects are ahead of us. In fact they all have serious performance limitations, which is precisely why Elrond is very much needed. They all have started before us, but we want Elrond to be one of the last movers in the space with the relevant innovation to change the paradigm and move forward.

Q : Will Elrond partner with other focus and more establish start up on very specific use cases like Gaming, Health Case or Open Finance?

Beniamin Mincu
Yes, we are exploring discussions with several companies and startups about this. Will announce when we have something done on this.

Q : Your roadmap included efforts of partnership expansion into both Asia and the USA. Did the ongoing bear market and regulatory uncertainty, especially in the USA, present any difficult challenges or positive opportunities?

Beniamin Mincu
USA is a very difficult market due to legal challenges. There is indeed an opportunity because of the bear market: situation is very difficult and results in survival of the fittest. The fact that Elrond is starting from this point, puts things in a very positive light once the market moves to a more optimistic direction.

Q :We know that Elrond reached 65785 TPS on Testnet. Is only speed enough for your great project? How do you plan to put a spotlight on Elrond?

Adrian Dobrita
That speed of 65k TPS was just with 20 shards, and the generation of transactions to stress test the network was not even near the maximum, so imagine what we can do with more shards. But of course, it is not all about TPS, although it was a nice and fulfilling moment to see that we can actually manage that load. We are of course targeting also fast execution of smart contracts which I believe in future will be more interesting as it will allow for the developers to actually build applications that can actually be used by lots of users at the same time. We are also working on solutions to bring audience to SC developers, but more on that will be announced at a later date. Currently the marketing team is also working on promoting Elrond through lots of campaigns, the social mining platform is also helping a lot in this area. For the project to be relevant we are in discussion with multiple companies (crypto and non crypto) for partnerships and helping them building their solutions on Elrond.

Q :Could you tell us more about your partnerships and collaborations? Why are they so important and will we see more strategic partnerships soon?

Beniamin Mincu
It’s pretty simple. We have the technology that is processing >10k TPS, now we really need businesses and startups that start using the technology. That is the most important focus right beside continuing the push on the technical side.

Q :Many blockchain projects and companies focus on making very complex systems and say they will revolutionize the whole blockchain technology. What makes Elrond different?

Beniamin Mincu
It all depends on execution. Ideas are good, but they are useless if not coupled to great execution. The difference between Elrond and other projects is that we have focused on execution above everything. This will pay off significantly in the long run.

Q :What is Tech stack that Elrond using to built?

Beniamin Mincu
Elrond is built in GO. All code is open source: https://github.com/elrondnetwork

Q : I want to run some nodes. I have a 400mbit internet connection and 1 Million ERD so far. I want to run the nodes on one pc, which cpu I need, how many cores, ram, hdd space?

Beniamin Mincu
Awesome. Please take a look at the detalis here: https://docs.elrond.com/start-a-validator-node/how-to-become-a-validator

You can see how you can become a validator and also join the riot channel for discussion right now.

Adrian Dobrita
There are different setups one could have when running multiple validators, the minimum for one validator would be a consumer grade dual core cpu with with 4Gb ram, 200GB HDD, of 100Mbps bandwidth. If you have multiple validators, but nbValidators<nbShards, multiply these values by the number of validators you want , but if you have more validators than the number of shards, then you would need the resources mentioned above * number of shards

Q :“Elrond Game of Stakes” your Upcoming Game. Tell us more Please. Will I get Staking Reward for playing game? or any thing else?

Beniamin Mincu
Battle of nodes actually.
You run a node, try to take the network down, and get rewards for being present and contributing to the network. It will be very exciting.

Q :The node creation is already quite easy with the guide provided by Elrond. Is it going to be more user friendly in the future for user who doesn’t have any IT knowledge?

Beniamin Mincu
Yes, we keep improving things very fast. Please let us know if you have specific feedback.

Q :What do you predict Elrond ´s largest challenges will be in the future? How do you plan to address them?

Beniamin Mincu
Huge focus is on business development and dev adoption. If we succeed in solving this, Elrond will have a huge impact on the blockchain space.

Q :Why did you choose your Max-Blocksize: ~800KB and not 1MB like Bitcoin? What are the advantages and challenges?

Adrian Dobrita
Actually we will probably allow for the max blocksize to be over 1MB, the reason for the limit was that libp2p does not allow the transfer packages larger than 1MB and we didn’t yet get to implement a break of packages into smaller unit and broadcast, but this will come. This will allow us also to boost the propagation of these large packages. There are also some solutions which involve erasure codes, which looks really interesting also from a performance point of view, and most definitely we will get to implement these in ELrond as well

Beniamin Mincu
Blocksize is not very important in Elrond right now. Since we have state sharding we are focusing on horizontal scaling instead of vertical scaling. Once we can process transactions in paralell you have a tremendous paradigm shift.

Q :What is your Fiscal Policy? Instamines, premines, buying, spending, icing, discounting, and/or burning any tokens?

Beniamin Mincu
We will soon share more about that. The most important next step will be about validator rewards. Once we are done with that will will share the full economics paper for further discussion and review.

Q :Why did you choose to build your VM infrastructure on top of the K Framework?

Beniamin Mincu
To give max flexibility to developers and support several VMs at the same time. Essentially Elrond has the first Meta VM in the space.

Q :How does Elrond plan to fund its development moving forward?

Beniamin Mincu
Elrond has enough funds to continue building for a long time. Now our focus is business adoption. Getting the conversations started and finding the right partners to building and use our technology.

===END OF AMA===

Beniamin Mincu
Thanks a lot for you support @psquare_pramodm. Appreciate the discussion and very much looking forward to visit India soon

Pramod
Thank you everyone for overwhelming response. Thank you Ben and Adrian for patiently answering our questions.
Plz come to INDIA soon. we will be waiting

Beniamin Mincu
Elrond needs to plant some deep roots there as well.

Adrian Dobrita
Thanks guys, there were some really good questions here in this ama!

Pramod
we achieved 1M tps today. No crypto project has been able to do that. Thanks for your time!!! (Talk per second? :P)

Beniamin Mincu
Thanks a lot guys! haha 1m TPS, was that sharded or on a simple blockchain?

Adrian Dobrita
:)) good one

Admin’s closing statement
Today’s ELROND AMA is concluded and has been a great success.
we rarely see such response from participants from anywhere else.
We almost achieved million TPS, first in crypto.
But as the response was tremendous, it was very unexpected and we were not prepared for it.
But it turned out great.

Thanks for great response guys!!!