eGold: A Powerful Digital Currency Positioned for Global Adoption

The native Elrond eGold token is live, opening a new growth phase for the Elrond economy. It is a natural step toward enabling native Elrond services such as staking and delegation, and native DeFi options.

Just as there are huge implications in precise words and phrases because combined they reveal subtle and profound new meanings, so there are huge implications in precise, fine-tuned economic parameters because together they can evoke strong economic attraction forces, which can effectively reshape the global economy.

So here’s an overview of the most important eGold premises:

1. The eGold currency is designed for simplicity and global adoption

Complexity is the most important obstacle for real world adoption -- try explaining Bitcoin or Ethereum to normal people and you immediately see what I mean. In order to reach the next billion people, we’ve completely rethought the Elrond currency, capturing its essence into a universally appealing and powerful metaphor.

2. The eGold currency is designed as a digital reserve standard and robust store of value

A new economics model has been defined to position eGold as the core network token, fundamental to all of Elrond’s internal usage. This token is designed to optimize parameters that lend themselves to creating a robust store of value, similar to gold, but with mechanics and functionality that go well beyond those of gold.

By enabling a new set of tickers with an e as a prefix, like eGLD, we make things simple and intuitive to understand, but perhaps even better, enable a flexible and coherent derivation path based on the E prefix, compatible with listing an unlimited set of new currencies on top of the eGold reserve.

Embedded in this design is the premise that Elrond is compatible with both local government currencies and other crypto currencies, which will eventually be able to leverage Elrond’s high bandwidth network, to offer global value transfer to their local communities. In fact, we intend to onboard many new tokens, such as stable coins, synthetic assets, and local fiat currencies.

3. Built-in scarcity to reinforce value and demand

There are only 20Mil initial eGold at Genesis relative to 8 Bil people. This means there is a very limited supply of only 0.0025 eGold per person. This sets an arms race game of accumulation in motion, since owning a few thousand eGold now is like owning a few thousand Bitcoin in 2010.

4. Strong staking incentive for validator adoption paired with a max supply limit

There are strong staking incentives for validators to secure the Elrond network. At first, these staking incentives come from new supply issued yearly, but as adoption kicks in, inflation is substituted with transaction fees to cover the staking rewards. Furthermore, in contrast to most other blockchain networks where the new issuance is infinite and uncapped, in Elrond this sum is capped to a theoretical supply limit of 31,415,926 eGold which can be reached over 10 years.

5. Adoption reduces this theoretical inflation and increases scarcity

One of the most powerful features of the Elrond economic model is that each transaction fee paid reduces the theoretical limit by substituting inflation with fees, thus making eGold more scarce, ensuring that the 31.4M max supply limit will never be reached.

6. A sustainable adoption model growing the entire eGold economy and reinforcing deflation

Elrond offers arguably one of the strongest adoption models in the blockchain space, thanks to the network being able to immediately transition to a fully deflationary model via any adoption scenario. Indeed, the zero inflation threshold visible in the image below shows that since below 10% of the network capability is needed to cross the threshold, with enough adoption Elrond can exceed this threshold and create a significant amount of value for all the network participants.

Properties of money

There are two types of currencies that have been used recently around the world: representative currencies, where each coin or note can be directly exchanged for a specified amount of a commodity; and fiat currencies, issued by a government, not backed by any commodity, but rather operating by a shared faith between individuals and governments, that the currency will continue to be accepted, and used as means of exchange or payment.

Any currency around the world is counted as a store of value, if it can reliably maintain its relative value over time without depreciating. In addition to being a good store of value, any robust currency must also satisfy certain characteristics related to utility, scarcity, divisibility, transportability, durability, and counterfeitability.

eGold is a new type of digital currency with unique properties that lend themselves to creating a robust digital store of value.

Utility

A currency must have utility in order to be effective. Individuals must be able to reliably trade units of the currency for goods and services. This is a primary reason why currencies developed in the first place: so that participants in a market could avoid having to barter directly for goods. Utility also requires that currencies be easily moved from one location to another. Burdensome precious metals and commodities don't easily meet this stipulation.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of the eGold currency is that it is the native token powering one of the most advanced blockchain architectures, processing more than 15.000 transactions per second at launch, with a capacity able to exceed hundreds of thousands per second. Thus, being digital, eGold is a superior means of exchanging and transferring value, lending itself to fast, worldwide, and cost effective money transfers.

Scarcity

The key to the maintenance of a currency's value is its supply. A money supply that is too large could cause prices of goods to spike, resulting in economic collapse.

In Elrond the supply starts at 20,000,000, and exhibits a predictable temporary increase in supply to incentivize network security via staking rewards. The defined maximum supply cannot exceed 31,415,926 over a span of 10 years. However, this theoretical cap will actually decrease with each transaction processed and fees generated. Thus, the stronger the adoption, the smaller the eGold’s supply will become.

Divisibility

Successful currencies are divisible into smaller incremental units. In order for a single currency system to function as a medium of exchange across all types of goods and values within an economy, it must have the flexibility associated with this divisibility. The currency must be sufficiently divisible so as to accurately reflect the value of every good or service available throughout the economy.

Elrond has a much larger degree of divisibility than most fiat currencies around the world. One eGold is divisible to 18 decimal points. If Elrond continues to increase in price over time, the large divisibility of Elrond ensures that with tiny fractions of a single Elrond, people can still take part in everyday transactions.

Transportability

Currencies must be easily transferred between participants in an economy in order to be useful. In fiat currency terms, this means that units of currency must be transferable within a particular country's economy as well as between nations via exchange.

In contrast to fiat currencies, where the process of transferring money can take days and have significant fees, as long as there is internet, eGold can be transferred anywhere in the world, in an instant, and at a 100x less cost than current available options. Thanks to being listed on the largest exchanges, eGold can be easily exchanged to almost any currency.

Durability

Durability is a major issue for fiat currencies in their physical form. A dollar bill, while sturdy, can still be torn, burned, or otherwise rendered unusable.

Just as a currency must be durable, it must also be difficult to counterfeit in order to remain effective. If not, malicious parties could easily disrupt the currency system by flooding it with fake bills, thereby negatively impacting the currency's value.

Digital forms of payment are not susceptible to these physical harms in the same way. For this reason, eGold has tremendous value. It cannot be destroyed in the same way that a dollar bill can be, although it can be lost. If a user loses his or her cryptographic key, the eGold in the corresponding wallet may be effectively unusable on a permanent basis. However, the eGold itself will not be destroyed and will continue to exist in records on the blockchain.

Counterfeitability

Thanks to the robust built-in security of its decentralized blockchain system, eGold is incredibly difficult to counterfeit. Doing so would essentially require confusing a non-trivial part of the network participants and would require an increasingly large and prohibitive cost. The single way one would be able to create a counterfeit eGold, would be by executing what is known as a double spend attack.

This refers to a situation in which a user "spends" or transfers the same eGold in two or more separate settings, effectively creating a duplicate record. While this is not a problem with a fiat currency note—it is impossible to spend the same dollar bill in two or more separate transactions—it is theoretically possible with digital currencies. What makes a double spend unlikely in Elrond, is the increasing and prohibitive cost of resources needed to perform it.

Below is a snapshot of the eGold supply model:

A snowball about to transform into an avalanche

Elrond network, Maiar and eGold are each immensely valuable separately, but when put together, they are like the pieces that formed the steam engine for the first time.

Given the fixed supply of eGold, combined with the global distribution and intuitive simplicity of Maiar, every new user joining the application will be directly reflected in the value of eGold. So the question becomes, how will eGold look with 1 Million people using Maiar? How about 10 million or 100 Million people?

Ten years ago, Bitcoin was a worthy attempt to create a digital currency, which ultimately fell short in two specific ways: limited transaction bandwidth, and terrible user experience. We have designed eGold to be a robust programmable store of value, built on top of the most high bandwidth blockchain architecture in the world, made globally accessible through a simple and powerful Maiar user interface. This is native digital money taken to its natural conclusion.

Today is the start of an exciting 30 day marathon #eGoldMarathon.

Get your eGold before it spreads everywhere.