An increasing portion of the world is becoming aware of the benefits blockchain technology can provide. Simultaneously, this awareness has delivered incredible sums of investor capital at the disposal of developers with visions of blockchain-enabled products. However, the usage rates of products built upon blockchain are still strikingly low. While many developers have kept true to their promise of delivering unique applications of software that leverage public networks to bring transparency and security to the operations of various industries, the usage of their development is hindered by the innate scalability flaws of establishing DLTs.

 

Blockchain technology is still in a nascent stage and its key utility remains on network-wide security. The precedent for achieving such a state has been set by the proof-of-work consensus mechanism, which offers robust security at the expense of scalability. As miners delegate hash power to PoW blockchains, their odds of becoming a block creator increases. As miners compete to become block producers, the system hash rate increases and becomes more secure. However, such networks have been designed for providing security with little to no interest attributed to scalability.

For the hard work of builders to see fruition, it is of paramount importance that the infrastructure they build upon excels at delivering security without compromising scalability. Delivering such an achievement has taken our developers at Elrond over two years of self-funded research and development. Now, with the creation of our own consensus mechanism and novel blockchain core solutions, Elrond team has delivered the blockchain that ensures the hard work of builders is able to support the attention it attracts.

 

The Road to Achieving Scalability

Most blockchains require nodes to possess a computation power that is not accessible to the masses. Thus, most networks receive a limited number of active, decentralized nodes. While increased decentralization and scalability may seem to be at odds with each other, Elrond ties the two through a compound solution.

Anyone with access to even a typical household laptop can become an active node on the Elrond Network. Subsequently, the blockchain can be incredibly decentralized as virtually anyone can play a role in its throughput; Elrond takes advantage of the opportunity provided by having a network in which such a vast number of nodes qualify for throughput processing. By integrating Adaptive State Sharding, the blockchain grows linearly.

In blockchain technology, a shard, in simple terms, is a group of nodes capable of validating transactions. A blockchain that integrates sharding allows network resources, such as available validator nodes, to be used for throughput. Sharding is an established solution to scalability problems but it has been applied with limited success. Elrond is the first project to successfully integrate a sharding mechanism that can adapt to network demands by proactively activating new shards. Adaptive State Sharding creates a network where the number of shards can be increased if network demands increase. Each shard can then process transactions thereby ensuring the network enacts an effective usage of available resources.

 

To ensure the security of a network in which shards can be activated whenever network demand grows, the protocol uses an evolved state of the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. PoS system assumes that, if nodes must have an interest in the network by holding a minimum number of tokens, they would act honestly. However, Elrond takes a more robust approach to security be integrating a Secure Proof of Stake (SPOS) consensus mechanism.

Through SPOS, block producers gain candidacy based on two factors: stake and rating. Beyond this, candidates are selected as block proposers through a provably random factor, derived from the last block’s signature. Before a proposed block is created, it must aggregate two-thirds + 1 signatures from the consensus group. With such a consensus mechanism, the network is able to maintain utmost security while remaining truly decentralized and scalable.

At present, Elrond can deliver 3,500 transactions per shard; on-going development may further improve this number. With such high scalability, Elrond is the first blockchain to ensure that those who build on it needn’t be concerned about throughput. The network will innate adapt to throughput demands, ensuring that any development that becomes excessively popular reaps the benefits of labor.

 

Please stay tuned for more exciting news to be announced shortly and don’t hesitate to contact us at any given time. To learn more about State Sharding, join our amazing community platform here and register for early access to the testnet.