The Validators Community Call was engaging, thx to all participants.

We’ve had 44 participants for a scheduled 30 minutes quick sync, which turned into a very useful 1h30m conversation. Watch it here https://youtu.be/i7MpSYXbfDw

Don't miss @beniaminmincu 's intro about the mainnet launch, development status, Elrond's effective action plan for #COVID19 and more. Watch @luciantodea explaining the Validator Calculator, which can be found here:

🧮 https://bit.ly/Validator-calculator

@LucianMincu & several of our core devs managed a brilliant Q&A about the genesis process, staking, delegation, VPS requirements.

Best for last: ⚔️Battle of Nodes🛡 starts ~30th of March!

Stay tuned for the official announcements. #Elrond is imminent.

RT: https://twitter.com/ElrondNetwork/status/1240957855550918661?s=20

Last week in summary

👨🏻‍🔬+40 experts in our Elrond Validators Community call
📊The Elrond staking calculator is live - 40% APR!
🎁Unravel the Elrond universe bit by bit #ElrondBits
🔁Network Sharding + Anti-flooding = win @ testnet
📻Elrond CEO - Internet parallels & blockchain @ Neascultatorii

Last week in summary

🔃 Upgrade-able Smart Contracts revealed
🛸 11.4k TPS in the latest testnet
📑 Validators documentation rehaul
♻️ Give the world some space to heal

Elrond partners with Trappist Monks brewery to reduce e-commerce fraud

Elrond is proud to announce the partnership with Trappist Monks from the Saint-Shardus monastery in Belgium, to enhance the e-commerce division managing the demand for some of the world's most coveted beer.

To celebrate the implementation of an efficient solution for their long standing problem, the monks decided to launch a limited edition of their 11.4k% dark ale as "the Internet-Ale blockchain", which can be already ordered on the Saint-Shardus website.

"We found kindred spirits in the brothers, because just like the Elrond team, they too constantly deliver. Completely unrelated, we placed numerous orders with the new blockchain-enabled process, to iron out (burps) any errors." concluded Daniel Serb, Head of Business Development at Elrond.

Read the full story.

RT: https://twitter.com/ElrondNetwork/status/1245344660593291264?s=20

Elrond is an ecosystem of innovations gravitating around our blockchain core. The pieces of our grand design are coming together. Join us Friday 03 April 11 AM UTC for an AMA with @beniaminmincu, who will discuss our recent achievements and next steps.

🔜 https://www.pscp.tv/ElrondNetwork/

In the past few weeks we've seen incredible effort put in by our tech team. Today marks the 100th release of the protocol implementation! Check it out: https://twitter.com/LucianMincu/status/1245836313280077824?s=20

“Battle of Elrond” launches in the Samsung dApp store

Starting today, the “Battle of Elrond” blockchain game from Elrond Network will allow Samsung Galaxy & Note users to engage with a medieval multiplayer 5v5 PVP arena, featuring a blockchain-based in-game economy integrated with the Samsung Blockchain Wallet. 

We are thrilled to work together with Samsung to bring new and exciting blockchain experiences to the Samsung Galaxy ecosystem of devices.

* Availability of the Samsung Blockchain Wallet app may vary by device, country, and carrier.

🔥 New players receive a welcome bonus for 5 PvP games.

👀 Read the official announcement: https://medium.com/elrondnetwork/battle-of-elrond-launches-in-the-samsung-dapp-store-c09ba6d5d76f

🎮 https://battleofelrond.com

Last week in summary

🎮 “Battle of Elrond” official launch with new trailer
👨🏻‍💻 Beniamin Mincu gives Elrond overview in latest AMA
💯 Public testnet reaches 100 releases milestone!
🍻 ”The Internet-Ale blockchain" via latest partnership

Beniamin Mincu discusses the importance of blockchain in the internet era and tells the story about how Elrond set out to bring 1.000x improvements directly at the bleeding edge of innovation.

“The internet had two important inflection points for growth: the move from text to graphics through browsers like Mosaic and Netscape, and later the move from dial-up to broadband. Elrond will bring the same improvements in simplicity and performance to the blockchain space, enabling a new wave of growth.”

Read the article (link) and watch the full interview (link).

📈 Elrond Quarterly report released

The Q1 2020 Report highlights our latest achievements and offers a glimpse into the major things around the corner.

We have performed several audits, refined our ecosystem growth strategy, multiplied business partnerships, while maintaining laser focus on the Elrond architecture development, to the point where it is now ready to launch.

"Before minting the genesis block, we will also introduce a few exciting surprise features."

Check out the full report (link).

Complexity in building a state sharded blockchain - insights on how things look before a mainnet launch

We've managed to increase the speed of development during the last weeks. It's kinda fun testing the limits but also painful. Here's a glance behind the scene👇

To start the next Battle of Nodes phase, everything we need is

- a feature complete code freeze
- robust stability against known attack vectors

💪 So our team has been pulling 14-16 hour work days to move a few mountains, and get the stuff done.

👨‍💻 Here’s how integrating a feature looks like:

Idea -> Specification -> Peer review -> Code pull request -> 2 peer reviews -> merged in test branch -> deployed for large scale testing -> bugs found -> bugs fixed pull request -> 2 peer reviews -> internal hacking -> merged in Master branch

🏋️‍♂️ There are 3 challenges we've been facing, but we've now almost solved them.

1️⃣ Stability - Though we've reached good network stability in the past releases, with each new feature we merged during the last days, stability got a reset. New testing, new bugs, new fixes. Rinse & repeat.
2️⃣ Complexity - Growing system complexity has become increasingly difficult to manage at this speed. Monster large codebase, multiple interdependencies, many features added in a short timeframe, tricky bugs emerging & isolating them takes longer than expected.
3️⃣ Estimates - Given the several levels of overlapping complexity, calculating precise time schedules for a release is practically impossible. All we have, is insane effort directed at these problems, good progress being made, and a rough estimate of next expected release. These estimates are based on: number of features still being integrated * days it takes on average to integrate, perform all tests, and reach stability with new features.

👌 The good news is our solutions are in sight:

1️⃣ Most features are already implemented, the last few are being processed right now.
2️⃣ New tools for managing complexity will be put in place.
3️⃣ Once features are done, predicting timeframes becomes 50% better.

Building a state sharded proof of stake architecture is hard. Doing it on an aggressive schedule is even harder. This is why most projects have failed, and Ethereum will not be able to deliver any working solution in the next 2 years, despite what $ETH supporters might tell you.

💡 Complexity is high, but far from unsolvable. In fact, we are 98% done for Genesis. The last 2% will be:

- finishing 1-2 features and stabilizing via heavy testing
- trial by fire via Battle of Nodes

🤔 Honestly, I'm quite surprised no one is talking about this complexity, especially given how early and unstable the other state sharded architectures look in practice. This might mean they're basically faking it, or maybe they're too far behind to have stumbled into this. Remember, the problem with state sharding has not been a theoretical one. We've published a full solution 2 years ago.

The problem has ALWAYS been in building the solution. This might mean the new moat for open source tech, equivalent to old patents, is the capacity to conquer complexity at high speed.

A high throughput, low latency, high security, low cost blockchain is not sufficient for the next wave of adoption, but without it it's an impossibility. You might think you can get around the performance problem, but there's no shortcut. It will become an inevitable bottleneck. Having the tech is a major achievement, but adoption is the name of the next game level.

🔥 For this, we have a new solution, to be unveiled soon

RT: https://twitter.com/beniaminmincu/status/1249650877826240514?s=20

Last week in summary

🌏 Mainnet marketing kicks off with Beniamin's video interview
📊 TPS records, security audits, game & more in Q1 2020 report
📇 New attributes give Elrond accounts SC-like functionality
🛸 Blazing fast stable coins via our ESDT standard
🤝 Elrond partner ecosystem growth overview

Easy2Stake to Provide Professional Infrastructure Staking Services for the Elrond Network

“We have a long history of working with the Easy2Stake team. They have proven themselves in the PoS space and there is a solid layer of trust between us. We are excited to have them as launch partners.” said Beniamin Mincu, Elrond CEO

Easy2Stake provides highly available and secure infrastructure for staked assets. The company ensures the highest security standards by mixing bare metal and virtual servers from reliable public cloud providers across different regions. A “zero downtime” goal is supported by a professional monitoring system, 24x7 on-call support, a hot standby site and disaster recovery procedures.

Read more: https://medium.com/elrondnetwork/easy2stake-to-provide-professional-infrastructure-staking-services-for-the-elrond-network-ed6919a887d3

We are on the verge of entering a new blockchain era - one of simple, global, near instant, and inexpensive value transfer, for anyone, anywhere.  ⚡️

But how, you may ask? For this we've built Elrond, the internet scale blockchain 👇🏻
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UM6mDfV_zc

The internet serves as the most useful metaphor of how blockchain adoption will likely play out. Looking back, there are 2 important inflexion points in the early days of the web: 🌏
https://www.upgrade100.com/updates/somewhere-in-transylvania-a-group-of-young-computer-scientists-are-writing-the-future-of-blockchain/

🔸 the first inflexion point was the browser - which dramatically lowered the barrier to entry, enabling tens of millions of people to come online (thanks for Netscape @pmarca ).
🔸 the second inflexion point was the transition from dialup to broadband - which significantly increased speed and reduced cost, enabling new and more powerful products to be built on the web.

Blockchain has seen extreme enthusiasm during the last years, but it has been largely stuck in high friction, low bandwidth dial-up mode, despite repeated attempts to change that. Just as with the internet, two important components are needed to enable the next adoption wave:

🔸 a high-bandwidth, low latency, high security, low cost blockchain network to accommodate internet scale performance.
🔸 a beautiful and radically simplified user interface, abstracting private key management, significantly lowering friction to onboard tens of millions of users, and enabling sending money anywhere in the world just as simple as sending an email.

This is a glimpse of what we've been working on day and night at Elrond, and as we are closer to the Genesis launch, we'll be sharing more.

P.S. Time to take a closer look at @ElrondNetwork $ERD 🔥

RT: https://twitter.com/beniaminmincu/status/1252179352760041472?s=20

Last week in summary

⌨️Javascript & Typescript dApps via erd.js front-end framework
🔝Elrond ranked highest SC platform by staking rewards
🤝Easy2Stake joins Elrond as Genesis launch partner
🏦Mainnet prestaking: 80% staking cap reached

The Elrond mainnet will launch with Binance $BUSD as the first stable coin

The Elrond mainnet will launch soon with the Binance $BUSD as the first available stablecoin. Developers can already start building on the Elrond testnet with a dedicated IDE and smart contract frameworks for the most popular languages. This way they get a head start on implementing new DeFi use cases and receive 30% royalties from their smart contracts.

Stable coins in general have also seen a spike in use, with transactions nearing $100bn so far in 2020, almost three times more than in 2019. Slow transactions, long confirmation times and large fees are seemingly inescapable infrastructure problems today. Elrond’s innovative infrastructure & economics will enable it to capture a significant portion of the existing transactions and make it the obvious choice for new ones.

“Given that the Elrond launch is so close, the immediate availability of the Binance $BUSD will put the high performance capability of our network to great use. This collaboration marks an important step in our focus to significantly improve current blockchain use cases, and enable new ones as soon as Elrond goes live”. said Beniamin Mincu, Elrond CEO.

Read more: https://medium.com/elrondnetwork/binance-leverages-the-elrond-blockchain-for-fast-inexpensive-busd-stablecoin-transfers-da73d0d5cec3

RT: https://twitter.com/ElrondNetwork/status/1253678185956421637?s=20