Elrond (ELR)

What is Elrond

Abstract - The advent of secure public blockchains through Bitcoin and later Ethereum, has brought forth a notable degree of interest and capital influx, providing the premise for a global wave of permissionless innovation. Despite lofty promises, creating a decentralized, secure and scalable public blockchain has proved to be a strenuous task. Elrond - a novel architecture which goes beyond state of the art by introducing a genuine state sharding scheme for practical scalability, eliminating energy and computational waste while ensuring distributed fairness through a Secure Proof of Stake (SPoS) consensus. Having a strong focus on security, Elrond’s network is built to ensure resistance to known security problems like Sybil attack, Rogue-key attack, Nothing at Stake attack and others. In an ecosystem that strives for interconnectivity, our solution for smart contracts offers an EVM compliant engine to ensure interoperability by design. Preliminary simulations reflect that Elrond exceeds Visa’s average throughput and achieves an improvement of three orders of magnitude or 1000x compared to the existing viable approaches, while drastically reducing the costs of bootstrapping and storage to ensure long term sustainability.Defining the challengesSeveral challenges must be addressed properly in the process of creating an innovative public blockchain solution designed to scale:

• Full decentralization - Eliminating the need for any trusted third party, hence removing any single point of failure;
• Robust security - Allowing secure transactions and preventing any attacks based on known attack vectors;
• High scalability - Enabling the network to achieve a performance at least equal to the centralized counterpart, as measured in TPS;
• Efficiency - Performing all network services with minimal energy and computational requirements;
• Bootstrapping and storage enhancement - Ensuring a competitive cost for data storage and synchronization;
• Cross-chain interoperability - Enforced by design, permitting unlimited communication between external services.

Starting from the above challenges, we’ve created Elrond as a complete rethinking of public blockchain infrastructure, specifically designed to be secure, efficient, scalable and interoperable. Elrond’s main contribution rests on two cornerstone building blocks:

• A genuine State Sharding approach: effectively partitioning the blockchain and account state into multiple shards, handled in parallel by different participating validators;
• Secure Proof of Stake consensus mechanism: an improved variation of Proof of Stake (PoS) that ensures long term security and distributed fairness, while eliminating the need for energy intensive PoW algorithms.