Elastos (ELA): The Decentralized World Wide Web

This article focuses on Elastos, a platform aiming at decentralizing the internet on a smart web and introduce the world to a new way of using the ‘internet’.

We take a closer look at the history of Elastos, the development team, and community of the Elastos platform. The sections that follow will shortly explain how the decentralized internet will work and also the Elastos token, ticker symbol ELA and its ICO history and the current price of the ELA token and how it is performing across various exchanges.

The final section of this piece focuses on their roadmap and the future of Elastos as a decentralized smart web.

“We don’t consider Elastos as Bitcoin’s competitor because we are co-mining coins with Bitcoin. We don’t consider Elastos as Ethereum’s competitor either, because in the future, some Elastos’ websites will also be based on the consensus and the smart contracts, which will also support Neo smart contracts. We won’t have any restrictions on what they want to choose. We will support all of these.” – Elastos Founder, Rong Chen.

Table of Content

• The Elastos blockchain-powered World Wide Web
• The Elastos main chain + Sidechain mechanism
  -Merge mining
• The ELA token
  -Price Outlook
• The Development Team
• Roadmap of Elastos
  -January 2019:
  -February 2019:
  -March 2019:

The Elastos blockchain-powered World Wide Web

Elastos is creating a blockchain powered world wide web that will enable users to share and monetize their digital content whether its articles, movies, music or photos. Elastos will allow decentralized applications (DApps) to be built on a decentralized, peer to peer platform and access the DApps through any device such as your mobile phone. The Elastos blockchain based internet is built on four key pillars namely; the Elastos blockchain, Runtime, Carrier, and the Software Development Kit (SDK).

Elastos Blockchain: According to the whitepaper, the platform will leverage the blockchain to build its decentralized internet. The devices connected to the platform such as mobile phones, PC, Mac etc., the digital assets and users will have a unique and trustworthy ID recorded on the blockchain for every transaction. More is explained in the section below, “The Elastos main chain + Sidechain mechanism.”
Runtime: The Elastos Runtime is an operating system built to allow users to use the platform from any device as opposed to most projects today that can only run on a blockchain. The Runtime prevents DApps from directly accessing the internet while the blockchain still executes the smart contract on any device.
Carrier: The Carrier acts as the foundation block for DApps. It allows the peers in the network to collect data from the participants and share computational power across the platform.
Elastos SDK: The SDK is set to be used without the Elastos Virtual Machine while giving access to users IDs and carrier services on the decentralized web.
The overall development of the Elastos platform has been largely sponsored by Tsinghua Science Park, the TD-SCDMA Industrial Alliance and the Foxconn Group. The two industry giants have in total combined 200 Million RMB in support of Rong Cheng’s initiative. The blockchain development process has so far been successful with over ten million lines of code published, with four million lines coded by Elastos development team.

The Elastos main chain + Sidechain mechanism

To reduce the pressure on the main chain and provide a better experience for DApps, Elastos adopts the main chain + Sidechain hierarchical structure. The main chain is only responsible for the circulation of ELA. DApps runs on Sidechains, and through the Elastos main chain + Sidechain transfer mechanism, the secure transfer of value between the main chain and the Sidechain is completed.

The Elastos Sidechain can use any consensus mechanism. At present, the Elastos team has already developed a POW consensus-based Sidechain that can connect with the main chain to complete SPV and DPOS based deposit and withdrawal operations. This POW-based Sidechain can use the computing power of the main chain to ensure its own security.

Merge Mining

Illustration showing merge mining between Elastos and Bitcoin

The Elastos blockchain utilizes merged mining with Bitcoin, the process by which consensus is reached on both chains simultaneously. In this case, the Bitcoin blockchain works as the parent blockchain to Elastos, with the Elastos chain as its auxiliary blockchain. This mining strategy saves resources and avoids repeated consumption.

The ELA token

The native token to the Elastos blockchain is the ELA token. The token allows users to pay transaction fees on the system, trade, buy digital assets on the platform among other functions outlined in the whitepaper. The ELA token was launched through an ICO in 2017.

The ELA token can be divided to the smallest unit 0.00000001 ELA, named Sela in respect to Satoshi Nakamoto. The total supply of ELA is capped at 33 million tokens and will be distributed among the developers’ ecosystem (50%), angel investors (15%), private and public funding (24%), and donation to the Elastos Foundation (11%).

Pie chart showing the distribution of the ELA token (Image: Elastos whitepaper)

Price Outlook

The ELA token currently trades at $2.15 USD per token representing a slight rise of 1.55% in the past 24 hours. The coin is ranked 91st on Coinmarketcap with a total market capitalization of $31,150,010 USD.

ELA token all-time price chart (Coinmarketcap)

The Development Team

Rong Chen, Founder of Elastos (Image: Steemit)

The Elastos team is headed by Rong Chen, the founder of Elastos Foundation, the project runners of the Elastos project. The project, however, remains an open-source project that is run and developed by the Elastos community members. The developed software source code and documents are published with the free open-source software license.

Roadmap of Elastos

The project is currently under development and the roadmap offers a clear path on how this development is going to take place and the period the projects should be completed. The official Elastos website offers their Q1 2019 milestones as follows:

January 2019:

• Elastos Carrier v5.2 release to support group message and file transfer / Carrier support for Windows platform.
• Elastos Runtime (Browser) for iOS Alpha release / Elastos ToolChain Alpha release.

February 2019:

• Elastos Storage Proof of Concept release.

March 2019:

• Elastos DPoS Super Nodes election starts

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