Last week I did a video review of Elastos and I received really awesome feedback from people. It seems everyone appreciate the simplistic approach I took in covering it, and because of that I figured I would share my write up/initial research.
Lets get started with the project history
Elastos began as the brainchild of co-founder Rong Chen all the way back in 2000 when he left Microsoft in the United States, to return to China. Although the platform initially had no blockchain ties, Rong still envisioned a platform in which its apps and services didn’t directly connect to the Internet. It wasn’t until June 2017, that Jihan Wu, the CEO of Bitmain, became an angel investor, and the project began to really take the shape of the blockchain-powered platform it is today.
Elastos states it is the safe and reliable internet of the future. Built utilizing the blockchain, decentralized applications are detached from the internet while also permitting full scalability to billions of users. Elastos enables the generation of wealth through ownership and exchange of your data and digital assets.
Rong, the founder of Elastos was a former senior software engineer at Microsoft. He worked at Microsoft from 1992 to 2000, after working on operating system with Microsoft he moved back to china to run his own company. He wanted to build the elastos operating system from the ground up. The project went through some iterations but ultimately Rong saw blockchain as a way to create what he was dreaming up for Elastos, and that brought us to today. So the project has been about 18 years in the making.
ICO
Elastos never had an ICO, instead they held a private sale in August 2017 in China with a price of 1BTC/1500ELA and a public sale open to the whole world apart from China (including USA) from Jan 18 through Jan 24 2018, with a price of 1BTC/800ELA. In the private sale 4000 BTC were raised in exchange for 6 million ELA and in the public sale another 2500 BTC in exchange for 2 million ELA. 5 million ELA were sold to Angel Investors amongst which are prominent names like Jihan Wu, Da Hongfei and Huobi. The current circulating supply is 5.2 million and the total supply is 33.6 million
Technology
Elastos’ main chain officially launched in December, 2017. The project has a 4% inflation year to year. Every time an ELA block is mined, the reward is distributed equally among the miners and stakers. Elastos consists of four pillars that enable network separation and platform flexibility. Those pillars are the Blockchain, the Runtime, the Carrier, and the Software Development Kit (SDK).
The Blockchain
Elastos is currently a PoW coin but will be moving to a hybrid PoW-Delegated proof of stake protocol in December of 2018. The Elastos Blockchain separates app functionality between the main chain and side-chains for each application. The main chain takes care of basic transactions and transfer payments while each sidechain executes the dapps’ smart contracts.
The sidechains have a few other advantages as well. As a user, you can customize your consensus mechanism on each sidechain and also distribute sidechain tokens. On top of that, users can transfer those tokens across sidechains to the main chain. Sidechains will serve a many different purposes, and will also allow people to monetize on their digital asset and value they contribute. People can tokenize content they’ve created or ensure property rights through the Elastos blockchain, making it possible for anyone to directly get rewarded for their property, skills, and assets. Elastos says it wants to resolve some of the major issue we see with current blockchain tech, that being: scalability, ownership, bugs, throughput speeds, costs, flexibility, and security.
Next up is Elastos Runtime
The runtime system of Elastos is designed to support the execution of the applications created on the platform. Elastos wants to become an entirely new internet, not an application. The Elastos network will become a web of dapps. Instead of going to a website, you go to an app via the Elastos platform. Dapps on Elastos are forced to never connect directly with the internet. Instead, they only interact with the Elastos runtime, which serves as the Elastos middle layer. This process ensures a far more secure use of the internet because nothing is connecting directly to the internet. The Elastos runtime runs on any mobile device or PC, making the Elastos smartweb accessible for anyone, on any device.
Elastos Carrier
The Elastos Carrier is the project’s decentralized peer-to-peer network. Similar to other decentralized Internet projects, you’re able to rent out your computational power and storage capabilities to other users. Because of its peer-to-peer nature, the Elastos carrier is protected from the two most common internet attacks today, DDOS and ManInTheMiddle (MITM) attacks.
Elastos SDK
SDKs are software development kits created to make it a whole lot easier for developers to create applications on a given operating system. Android has an SDK, as do iOS, Windows, and a whole range of OS’s. The Elastos SDK connects applications to the Smart Web, which is especially beneficial for non-Elastos apps. Using the SDK, these applications can receive their ID and access the Smart Web without having to use the Elastos virtual machine.
Other important points to mention, Elastos offers integration capabilities with a host of platforms and allows for programming using a wide variety of languages including Java, HTML, C, and C++.
In their whitepaper I found a little ELI5 for what elastos is compared to bitcoin and eth:
Bitcoin: A trustworthy Ledger
Ethereum: A Trustworthy Ledger + Smart Contracts
Elastos: A Trustworthy Ledger + Smart Contracts + Monetized dapps and Digital Assets.
Present
Currently Elastos sits at 84 on LiveCoinWatch with a marketcap value of $122,678,807. If you’re interested in buying elastos you can only get it on Houbi and BCEX. They are on their own blockchain and they have a web wallet that can be used to store your ELA off an exchange.
Elastos and Neo are two projects you hear going hand in hand as of lately – So i’d like to clear up a misconception that I myself actually fell victim to. For whatever reason people think Elastos is built on NEO platform. Which is not true. Elastos has its own blockchain and is NOT a NEP5 token. Da Hongfei of NEO and Jihan Wu of Bitmain are both early investors and advisors to Elastos. This is a big deal because they’re all very powerful men. Jihan Wu and was ranked one of the ten most influential figures in the blockchain world by Coindesk in 2017. Jihan pitched the idea of developing ASIC chips for Bitcoin mining back in 2013, that's how Bitmain was created. And Bitmain has committed to redirecting hashing power from Bitcoin mining to Elastos, the date for this isn’t set - but it’s in the works.. Elastos also works together with NEO and Ontology on KYC standards and digital asset identity protocols.
Partnerships
On May 25, the Elastos team presented their partnerships with Weatherblock. Weatherblock is blockchain-based startup that is creating a platform for peer-to-peer exchange for weather data. Weatherblock plans to integrate into the Elastos ecosystem. Then, on May 26, Elastos announced 2 new collaborations. First, it announced a partnership with BIT.GAME, a startup that’s creating an exchange platform for blockchain-based games. This cooperation will also strengthen a previous partnership with Hashworld, a blockchain game that allows users to learn about blockchain tech while also being able to earn real cryptocurrencies, and with Reactor, an independent game guild fighting against game piracy. There are more partnerships such as the one with the Chinese automotive industry giant SAIC and Zapya, a filesharing app with more than 500 million registered users. Check the Elastos medium blog for more information on that.
Purpose of the coin
The ELA coin will be used for a multitude of functions of the platform, which is a positive thing as it creates a natural demand for the coin. ELA will be used to pay for Elastos-based domain names for (d)apps, usernames, Elastos storage services, and issuing tokenized content (music, books, videos). This is going to allow content creators of all kinds to truly own what it is that they’re creating. Not to mention it creates a secondary market for people who have purchased these assets and can now sell them within the elastos ecosystem.
Like a lot of platforms out there Elastos holders will also get to participate in airdrops when new projects build on the elastos platform.
Once merge mining is active, Elastos will have more than 50% of the total BTC hashpower from the beginning of the public mining, 30% of block rewards will go to the elastos foundation and 70% to the miners - but only for the first 2 years.The block rewards currently are ~5ELA, there is a transaction in every block with ~5 newly generated ELA. Currently the Elastos foundation controls all 25 ELA mining nodes and all the block rewards are used for ecosystem development. The Elastos main chain is using the same consensus algorithm as BTC and therefore has comparable transaction throughput. However the blocktime for Elastos is only 2 minutes and the block size currently set to 8mb. Transaction fees currently are 0.005 ELA
For those who don’t know what merge mining is: Merged mining is the process of allowing two different crypto currencies based on the same algorithm to be mined simultaneously. This allows low hash powered crypto currencies to increase the hashing power behind their network by bootstrapping onto more popular cryptocurrencies, in this case, bitcoin.
Upcoming
The implementation of DPoS. There aren’t a ton of details or a date yet for this but it is on the horizon. And also the added hashing power from Bitmain. There are talks of that coming in December.
Pros
- The project is open source, this makes the development of dapps and other additions to the ecosystem easier to bring about.
- Really strong partnerships and backing in the space, obviously as mentioned before - Da Hongfei and Jihan Wu.
- The system creates financial opportunities for both creators and consumers, thus incentivizing more people to use Elastos. Being able to tokenize digital assets is a huge plus for me. This also falls under the prevention of plagiarism or theft. Being able to prove ownership and track the sale of something will allow for authentication.
Cons
- Really vastproject with a lot of goals. They have a strong team helping them but it’s one of those enormous blockchain 3.0 projects that’s sort of promising to reinvent the wheel.
- Right now the Elastos team is in control of all the mining nodes making the project quite centralized.
- Although Rong feels that Elastos doesn’t have any direct competitors, I would have to say any that cardano would be a major competitor for me because it’s touting the same blockchain 3.0 promise. Rong’s thought process is that the majority of these 3.0 projects are trying to use the blockchain to run their entire project, where Rong says elastos is only trying to manage the trust of the blockchain. Meaning he only wants to use blockchain tech for operations which require consensus. Rong says Elastos is trying to improve the current architecture of operations systems and the internet itself.
- Like most projects whose team is filled with a bunch of intellects there is always a concern that the process of creating the project can take longer than it should because academics move slower.
My final con would be the fact that the exchanges its on are not available to the United States, and that’s a big con for the majority of my viewers.
Final Thoughts
Elastos is not just the new internet, but an entire smart economy. Focusing on digital assets, monetizing computing power, incentivized trading of digital assets all combined with the highest level of security and the removal of the middleman. Elastos’s main priorities are speed, security and minimal cost for all users involved. Elastos promises a lot and, hopefully with their strong team, backing, and partnerships they can pull if off. This is definitely a project to keep your eye on though.
$ELA - Elastos Donation Address
ETYoSqvY5zusq7BKV44VQWjZX5XF4amUcc
Video
Elastos Links
Website: https://www.elastos.org/en/
White Paper:https://www.elastos.org/en/whitepaper/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Elastos_org
Roadmap: https://www.elastos.org/en/roadmap/
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Elastos/
Sources
ICO Bench
Use The Bitcoin
Invest In Blockchain
Coin Central
Github
ELA News
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My cold wallet
Sign up with Coinbase
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Thanks so much for all of your hard work and dedication. I found out about Elastos from your video and I'm grateful I did. I'm very excited about the project and it's vision. Glad to see you're on steemit. Onward and upward!
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