Elrond, a leading sharding-based public blockchain network, has announced the closure of its private round investment, raising $1.9 million from Binance Labs, Electric Capital, NGC Partners, Maven 11, and Authorito Capital. The round also included contributions from angel investors in the UK, India, Israel, China, and across the European Union.
“We are setting new standards for performance in the blockchain space,” says Beniamin Mincu, CEO of Elrond. “Everything changes for decentralized applications when you have a 3 orders of magnitude improvement in throughput and execution speed.”
Focusing on an innovative network scaling technology called sharding, Elrond is a leader in the next-generation of high-throughput smart contracts platforms blossoming in the blockchain ecosystem. Sharding is a well-known concept for horizontal partitioning of databases, and several firms, including Elrond, are pushing the boundaries of applying sharding to public blockchains as a means to increase their throughput capacity. Elrond has developed a bleeding-edge form of state sharding, known as “Adaptive State Sharding,” which enables the network to rival centralized cloud networks without sacrificing the security and decentralization advantages of blockchains.
Founded in late 2017, Elrond produced a prototype of their concept in July 2018, including their sharding format and new consensus design which achieved more than 1,000 transactions per second (TPS) in simulations of real-world conditions. Subsequently, Elrond released their inaugural testnet in May 2019, exceeding 12k TPS, and including implementations of several new technologies like Schnorr signatures, BLS signatures, secure proof-of-stake, and state sharding.
“Elrond’s outstanding contributions rest on two foundational building blocks: Adaptive State Sharding and Secure Proof of Stake consensus, enabling fast and secure decentralized networks.” said Ella Zhang, the Head of Binance Labs, “The team has a clear go-to-market strategy to achieve mass-adoption by shipping the infrastructure for fast, intuitive and engaging dApps. We’re excited to be working together to push blockchain technology towards mass-adoption.”
Moving forward, Elrond will focus on building tools which enable developers to easily build on top of its highly scalable blockchain, and enable users to easily discover and use these next generation dApps.
“We’re very excited for the positive results achieved with our testnet, and can’t wait to see them put to good use in real world applications around the world. We have seen particularly strong interest from developers in emerging markets, who are eager to build applications and offer financial services to their local markets.” says Mincu.
About Elrond
Elrond is a leading public blockchain development company that deploys a series of innovative technologies to enable public blockchains to scale to levels that rival their centralized counterparts. The platform abstracts away the underlying complexity of public blockchains, making building and using applications on the network a familiar experience to users, developers, enterprises, financial firms, and more.
Elrond is built by a team of experienced entrepreneurs along with 13 engineers and researchers with significant technical experience at Microsoft, Google, Intel, NTT DATA, 2 PhDs in CS & AI, multiple math, CS and AI olympiad champions, and blockchain backgrounds, including being previously part of the NEM core team.