High-speed enterprise blockchain Elrond has extended its reach in India, with the announcement that fast-growing crypto exchange WazirX will list ERD. The Mumbai-based platform has onboarded 600,000 users since launching in 2018, with Binance acquiring the platform for an undisclosed sum late last year. It now serves customers in over 80 markets.
With a population of 1.35 billion, India seems likely to be a key blockchain battleground in the years to come, as the likes of Binance and Elrond seek to broaden the appeal of cryptocurrency and web3 technologies. The listing on WazirX will help to ensure that Elrond's native token is widely available ahead of the network's forthcoming main net launch.
A Top Trading Token
In a Medium blog post, Elrond CEO Beniamin Mincu noted that "WazirX users will be able to buy, own and trade ERD on the exchange immediately, with deposits and withdrawals to be made available after our imminent main net launch." Mincu also praised the platform's automated matching engine for P2P trading and fiat on- and off-ramps for the local INR currency.
ERD quickly became the top traded token on WazirX, in part due to a trading competition run by the exchange. At present, ERD has a circulating supply of around 13.5 billion coins, with a total supply of 20 billion sets to be reached in under a decade. Much of the trading activity already occurs on Binance. Within the Elrond ecosystem, the native token can be used for staking, governance, transactions, smart contracts, and validator rewards.
Marketed as a low-cost, internet-scale blockchain for real-world applications, Elrond relies on a novel Adaptive State Sharding mechanism and secure Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithm to process upwards of 10,000 transactions per second at full tilt. It utilizes the Elrond Virtual Machine (EVM), a dedicated smart contract execution engine.
Created specifically to solve major issues faced by existing blockchain technologies, the Layer 1 blockchain solution raised $5 million in funding in 2019. Last month, as part of its bootstrapping process, Elrond's incentivized testnet event dubbed "Battle of Nodes: Onchained" attracted 1,700 nodes in less than a week, with several simulated attacks performed against the network. Such was the level of participation; the competition's prize pool was increased to $60,000. The date for the main net launch, meanwhile, is set to be announced on July 4.
The Binance Connection
Binance and Elrond are connected by more than a mutual interest in WazirX, of course, given that Elrond launched via a Binance IEO. Soon after, Samsung added support for Elrond's native token to its blockchain ecosystem, giving Smartphone users easy access to both the token and future dApps built on the Elrond network. Earlier this year,
The blockchain project, a labor of love for entrepreneurs, researchers, and developers, seeks to reinvent public blockchain infrastructure to make it more resilient, efficient, transparent, scalable, and interoperable. The project also aims to eliminate energy and computational waste from PoW algorithms via its Secure PoS consensus and unique sharding technology. Sharding is an emerging solution for blockchain scaling, considered one of the most promising in the industry. In essence, it involves the splitting of blockchains into multiple shards – or pieces – using a binary tree.
Following its mainnet launch, Elrond will pivot towards building and promoting its dApp store, developing defi initiatives, and addressing blockchain interoperability. To date, many dApps have been built for Ethereum, where scalability remains a limitation.
With Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently noting that the much-mooted Ethereum upgrade will have to lean on existing scaling methods for at least the next few years, Elrond's mainnet comes at a good time. If the blockchain can fulfill its ambition and deliver on its promises, India will be just the beginning.
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