Elrond (EGLD)

Elrond describes itself as a technology ecosystem for the new internet. Its smart contracts execution platform is reportedly capable of 16,200 TPS, 6s latency, and $0.001 tx cost, focused on fintech, DeFi and IoT.

The team consists of experienced entrepreneurs, engineers, and researchers with technical experience at Google, Microsoft, Intel, NTT, a Ph.D. in CS, and a former member of the NEM core team. Elrond’s money & DeFi app Maiar aims to offer an intuitive first-time experience with blockchain, offering progressive security and a gamified approach to unlocking more useful features.

The Elrond Proof of Stake economic model has a limited supply; its token is named eGold to convey the notion of a digital store of value to the next billion users.

Developers building on Elrond can earn 30% of the Smart Contract fees as royalties at no extra cost for the user, can program smart contracts in the WASM Virtual Machine using Rust, C, C++, and other compatible languages. The developer kit includes dApp boilerplates, a dedicated VS Code IDE, debugging, testing platform, comprehensive documentation, and support from the core team.

The Elrond network runs on 2169 validator nodes, split into 4 shards: 3 execution shards capable of 5,400 TPS each and 1 coordination shard, the "Metachain". Elrond's Adaptive State Sharding architecture completely shards state, transactions, and network. It can scale with demand by adding an additional shard when the throughput demand is unmet. It was tested to run 263,000 transactions per second in a public environment with 1,500 nodes from 29 countries grouped in 50 shards.