The Building Blocks for Onboarding the Next Billion People

The journey is long and the road is unpredictable. But the destination is always worth it. Welcome to the Elrond story.

As we’ve reached 2 years since the Elrond Mainnet Genesis, we know that every day has had its impact on the path we have taken so far. We have come a long way since our beginnings, but we still share that same drive to build something that will last for generations.

To look forward, we must first look back. We must remember our roots and where we come from. Join us in reviewing some of the most essential building blocks of the ongoing Elrond journey.

The first year: Genesis and beyond

From the very beginning, Elrond set out to solve the limitations and challenges current blockchain iterations were facing, while taking no shortcuts. Our vision was to build a blockchain that reaches internet-scale performance and radically simplifies UX.

The Elrond Mainnet was launched on the 30th of July, 2020, kicking off a new era in the blockchain space, with the first truly state-sharded architecture to come live. During our first year, the potential of our architecture attracted a super passionate community of validators, builders, and users that now total 3200 validator nodes and 1.75 million accounts.

The first year has also marked the start of our network bootstrapping process comprising several staking phases, the introduction of a new economic model, and the go-live of the core protocol functionalities, such as smart contracts that rely on the fastest & most powerful WASM VM, meta transactions, smart accounts, and native tokens.

One of the great catalysts for adoption was the launch of our flagship mobile app, Maiar, which is now counting over 1 million users. By wrapping the high complexity behind blockchain tech and bottling it into a simple and intuitive UI, Maiar made the Elrond tech easily accessible to anyone, using just a smartphone.

The second year: The building blocks for onboarding the next billion people

With the building blocks for the new internet economy having been laid down during the first year, the focus then shifted towards developing the growth engines to supercharge the entire ecosystem.

On top of setting a powerful example of how the Elrond architecture can be leveraged for the creation of new and disruptive products, these engines can also act as lego blocks enabling future innovation.

Every component’s release brought about new possibilities and new adoption, contributing to the overall expansion of the ecosystem with each iteration.

From the growth-driving force that is the Maiar DEX, together with its one-of-a-kind complementary products Metastaking and Metabonding, to the ultimate catalyst for projects building with internet-scale technology, the Maiar Launchpad, they are all core pillars of the new era of autonomous banking.

Through our strategic moves into the Web3 payments sector, ignited by the Utrust & Twispay acquisitions, we have expanded our portfolio with an e-money license, a Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) license, and the ability to issue debit cards, all valid throughout the entire European Economic Area, to pave the way for the next phase in the evolution of payments.

To further expand the cross-chain interoperability, we have introduced the Ad-Astra Portal, a token bridge that enables the free flow of assets from other chains to the Elrond Network. The first bridge available on Ad Astra was Ethereum, with other EVM-compatible blockchains being stress-tested internally and soon to be released.

The Elrond NFT Ecosystem is still young but since its inception it has seen tremendous growth. In less than a year we have seen thousands of collections and many community-built platforms come to life, laying the foundation for what will surely be one of the most exciting NFT spaces out there.

What comes next?

The Elrond journey has just started and there are still a lot of unexplored territories ahead. There are several projects that we have been working on lately. Ranging from an Elrond NFT Marketplace to a new Maiar DEX economic model, our new products will bring along new use cases. Some of them will address new scaling methods and advanced privacy-preserving computation, but all of them are meant to enrich the ever-growing Elrond ecosystem.

By far the most remarkable moment pulling all these forces together, along with our community and partners, is the very first Elrond Conference, taking place in Paris, in November.

While more details will follow in the upcoming weeks, this will be the moment you’ll vividly see the future. It’s here. And we, together, are building it.