Onboarding the next billion people. Toward a multi-trillion dolar market.

Blockchain technology is at an inflexion point. On the cusp of unlocking a massive generational opportunity. Perhaps the biggest since the invention of the internet.

Article written by Beniamin Mincu, CEO & Founder Elrond Network

The next 3-5 years will see the most rapid financial transformation – from traditional 40 years old slow deprecated financial technology, to state of the art blockchain technology enabling transactions at the speed and scale of the internet.

Elrond exists with the overarching goal of (a) creating the backbone for a high bandwidth, transparent financial system, and (b) extending universal access to anyone, anywhere.

This will be a multi-trillion dollar market, and will, ultimately, have a significant GDP multiplier effect on the world economy. Increasing the speed and bandwidth at which the global economy works, enabling the last 1.7 billion people to connect, and providing new value creation tools on top, could actually enable the entire economy to grow with a factor of 10, or even 100.

A New Solution Space

A blockchain designed to operate at internet-scale speeds and costs, opens a fundamentally new solution space for the internet of money. The internet of money is simply a complete rethinking of financial services, using the internet as a global distribution channel and blockchain technology as a global settlement layer, to redefine the experience around money, assets, titles of ownership or anything of value, making them instantly transferrable, globally accessible, adding significant granularity, and doing so at a negligible cost.

Critical to making this transformation a reality are several important components that we’ve put special focus on at Elrond.

1. A new money. A high bandwidth, low latency, globally transferable programmable money, built to progressively work as a unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value. A hard money that solves all the previous use cases by virtue of being programmable, but goes one step further, being especially designed to preserve the ultimate human resource: time. A money that does not rob you of your time, but is designed to help you take it back.
2. A new experience, for anyone, anywhere. An intuitive application, dramatically simplifying experience and onboarding the next billion people to this new financial system. Imagine you could have all financial services in one application, universally accessible to anyone, anywhere, with a mere mobile phone. That would open a new phase for the global economy with new modes of value creation, instant value transfers, and universal access.
3. Everything tokenized. With a live internet-scale blockchain, a hard digital money circulating, and an intuitive application able to onboard the next billion, we will be truly ready to tokenize all assets, unlocking a new level of fluidity and granularity. Stocks, bonds, local fiat currencies, global digital currencies, and all titles of ownership, will be encoded and secured via blockchains. Being able to instantly create and exchange all these, with one tap in an intuitive mobile app, will fulfill our vision, creating a significantly more productive, high bandwidth financial system, universally accessible for all humanity. Both on a planetary and interplanetary scale.

This might be the most creative non-zero-sum game about to significantly impact our global economy.

To be clear, I believe Bitcoin will continue to exist, and will likely be a multi trillion dollar asset. Ethereum will continue to exist, and will also reach a multi trillion dollar status. Both deserve serious credit for their contributions. But taking things one step further, I believe Elrond will be the wave that will lift all boats, taking this massive opportunity from a niche group of people, and extending it to everyone in the world.

What Bitcoin was to the Cypherpunks, and Ethereum to developers, Elrond will be to the simple internet user. With only 50-100 million people in the blockchain space, Elrond will open the flood gates to create a new market.

Blockchains are early today, but will undoubtedly reshape our economy tomorrow.

Ready For Takeoff

Elrond is a platform built for internet scale. It is live and ready now. Capable of processing 15.000 transactions per second at $0.001 per transaction, and able to scale to hundreds of thousands with demand.

eGold is the programmable money powering the entire Elrond ecosystem. It is scarce, secure, easily and globally transferable, designed for global adoption, and capable of efficiently preserving our time.

Maiar is the intuitive application that will simplify and unveil the opportunities of decentralized finance to the entire world. We will start with the first billion, but will not stop anytime soon. The world needs a new high bandwidth financial system and universal access to it. And we are here to help create it.

The last few months have brought massive progress:

We have committed more than 1,4 million lines of code, made 120 releases, and bootstrapped our mainnet on a network of 2,169 validators from all over the world.

Only 150 days after the mainnet launch, we have more than 90,000 active accounts, 1,3 million transactions processed, and 57% of our supply is locked for staking.

Our ecosystem includes 115 businesses and startups that are working on integrating and building on Elrond.

All progress has been reflected in a rapidly growing interest to be part of and contribute to the Elrond ecosystem, via our native currency eGold (EGLD). This has resulted in the approximate Elrond ecosystem valuation growing from roughly $10 million to almost $700 million.

Above all, Elrond stands out for being a project with a soul. One which has united forces of an incredibly vibrant community of 190,000 people, spanning 18 languages and and almost 30 countries.

Our technology and dev tools are ready. Our partners are racing to build interesting and creative products. Our community is pouring their lives into spreading the exciting news about Elrond. What has been set in motion is remarkable.

With Maiar being launched on January 31st, our growth is about to reach a new level.