Elrond (EGLD) is a scalable public blockchain that aims to improve blockchain speed, scale, cost, and user experience. Instead of high energy consumption hardware as required by other blockchains, the platform aims to run on average inexpensive computers to increase transactions throughput. According to the Elrond whitepaper, the public blockchain iterations exhibit limitations in terms of decentralization, scalability, security, efficiency, cross-chain interoperability, bootstrapping, and storage enhancement.
Hence, Elrond aims to solve the problems mentioned above by dividing account address spaces in shards using a binary tree. Shards are the smaller partitions of the blockchain used for scaling blockchain. While binary tree (blockchain’s mathematical data structure) can be built by solely knowing the shard’s exact number in a specific time period. This method reduces the accumulated latency and improves the network liveness. Further, to achieve overall architecture equilibrium, the platform aims to introduce a technique of balancing the nodes in each shard. There is a balanced workload and reward in this technique. Also, to ensure the architecture's sustainability, Elrond uses the shard pruning mechanism.
The Elrond eGold (EGLD) token is the native token to the Elrond Network. The platform aims to use the token for staking governance, transactions, smart contracts, and validator rewards. Smart contracts are just like regular contracts; however, instead of being drafted on paper, these contracts run in protocols on the blockchain.
