The brains behind the Electroneum project is Richard Ells. Before his foray into the crypto industry, Richard Ells worked as an entrepreneurial marketeer while harboring his desire to become a coder.

He is also the owner of Retortal, a social media management platform designed for businesses in the direct selling industry, and SiteWizard, a digital agency which he co-founded and still serves as a director to date.

In late 2019, Richard Ells, as CEO of Electroneum, founded and organized the launch of AnyTask, the first freelance platform to focus on creating a digital economy for the developing countries.

Although the platform is open to freelancers from all over the world, the emphasis is placed on the unbanked in developing countries, similar to other products launched by Electroneum.

At its launch in 2017, Electroneum, which was originally built using the Monero codebase, focused on the gaming and gambling industry. However, things soon changed and Electroneum turned its sight to creating a platform for instant payments across borders.

Electroneum migrated from the Monero blockchain to the moderated proof-of-responsibility (PoR) blockchain in Q2 of 2019 to focus on delivering better payment services.

While the primary objective of Electroneum isn’t very different from what many other crypto projects offer, it goes about it in a unique fashion. Electroneum has focused largely on bringing cryptos an easily accessible option, smartphones.

The goal of Electroneum is to reach out to the millions who do not have access to a banking system but own a smartphone; like PayPal, but with cryptocurrencies.

Electroneum takes a unique approach from other cryptocurrencies, even in mining. Electroneum effectively removed the need for expensive, dedicated, power-hungry mining devices, when it launched the first “mining” app in March 2018.

Electroneum’s total and circulating supply is limited by the company, and will never exceed 21,000,000,000 coins. Currently, there are 10,229,924,760 ETN coins in circulation which represents 49% of all the coins there will ever be.

Since migrating to its own blockchain, based on the proof-of-responsibility architecture, miners have been hand-picked by the project. This is done to ensure that there are only reliable miners in the Electroneum network.

Miners who are picked on Electroneum’s PoR are expected to spend the block rewards they receive responsibly in helping those less fortunate in harmony with Electroneum’s humanitarian agenda and also to maintain the integrity of the payment network.

Electroneum’s proof-of-responsibility also reduces the amount of energy required for the mining process. Hash rates are reduced from Giga hashes to less than half a kilo hash on the network, as Electroneum embarks on a journey to eco-friendly crypto mining.

This, in addition to the mobile mining app, are the two ways new coins are created on the Electroneum network.

Electroneum uses a new, unique algorithm which is called proof-of-responsibility (PoR). The goal of the PoR network is threefold: to provide a safer, more responsible, and greener blockchain.

On PoR, Electroneum now chooses and authenticates its validators, thus preventing a group of miners from controlling more than 50% of the network's mining hash rate or computing power; the 51% attack. Where the attack eventually happens, the blockchain layers are built to respond by identifying the source and shutting down the validator.

The new PoR blockchain also creates a permissioned network where Electroneum chooses miners based on their interest in the sustainability of the project. The 12 validators on the network are NGOs who use their block rewards for charity work.

Electroneum (ETN) is popular among online exchanges focused primarily on delivering mobile services. The top exchanges where you can trade Electroneum currently are:

• Huobi Global
• KuCoin
• BiKi
• BiONE
• HitBTC
• Sistemkoin, and
• Liquid.

If you are new, you can find our simplified guide for purchasing crypto and more exchanges where you can trade here.