High performance blockchain project Elrond is launching its mainnet today, July 30, along with a new DeFi app, staking and a raft of new features. Its ERD token has been on fire this month in the lead-up to the long awaited launch.
The launch follows successful testnet results with more than 1,500 nodes in 29 countries, and 50 shards, running at extremely high speeds with a peak of more than 260,000 transactions per second. Elrond aims to achieve global scalability for money moving markets.
New tokenomics and DeFi app
The launch alters the token economic model by drastically reducing the token supply from 20 billion to 20 million. Over the next 10 years, the issuance rate will gradually decrease from around 10% in the first year, until no more tokens are issued.
An estimated 40,000 users have already signed up for the waiting list for the new mobile and web app called “Maiar” that will be integrated into DeFi protocols with a wallet, staking and lending features.
Users can sign up with just a mobile phone number and it offers progressive security features such as nominating “guardians” to manage multi-signature wallets.
What is Elrond anyway?
Elrond is a high-bandwidth, high security, and low latency blockchain network which is touted as an alternative to the existing global economic infrastructure. It claims to be the first project to employ adaptive state sharding and secure proof-of-stake (SPoS) technologies to achieve both speed and security.
It is built upon regular sharding technology, or horizontal scaling, to encompass three types of sharding — network/communication, transaction/processing, and state/storage — in what it calls “adaptive state” to achieve extremely high throughput.
ERD price reaction
Elrond’s native token, ERD, has skyrocketed this month as the mainnet launch nears. Since the beginning of July, ERD has surged a whopping 350% to hit an all-time high on Monday of $0.029. ERD currently has a market capitalization of $340 million.
Once the token supply is cut by a factor of 1,000, prices may continue to gain momentum, especially when staking incentives are rolled out. Major exchanges such as Bitfinex have already pledged support for staking services, and Crypto.com is already offering 6% interest on short-term deposits.