Richard Ells – The Man With a Big Crypto Idea
Richard Ells is a digital entrepreneur who has become the focus of public interest in connection to the development of the digital currency Electroneum, the first British Cryptocurrency launched through an initial coin offering (ICO) in September 2017.
Electroneum is a big and revolutionary idea in the crypto world and Ells is determined to make it a success.
However, not everything went as planned and many users accounts were initially compromised, before eventually being resolved. Here we take a look at this new digital currency, Richard Ells’ role in its development, what went wrong, and how Ells fixed it.
So who is Richard Ells?
He has 19 year experience in the digital space and is an “Entrepreneur, executive, serial start-up and all round stand-up guy.” He is a coder, programmer, hacker, developer and designer who is quite good at tennis when he can spare time to play.
He was the technical director of SiteWizard Ltd., director of Retortal.com, a white label social media management dashboard business, and now the man behind Electroneum.
Electroneum is the first cryptocurrency designed specifically for the users of smartphones, though to be around 2 billion individuals. It is aimed primarily at two market sectors; gaming and gambling. It can also be mined by anybody with a smartphone by using the Electroneum app.
Richard Ells is the leading player in this development and works closely with eleven other highly talented members of the development and marketing team, backed up by around forty employees. Ells is no newcomer to the digital scene; he has a history of launching and running a range of successful digital businesses.
How Will Mobile Mining Work?
Describing the mobile mining aspect of Electroneum, Ells said “It is so easy anybody can do it”. He points out that usually cryptocurrency mining is a notoriously complex and difficult task that is simply not available to the “man on the street.” His aim was to make mining cryptocurrency generally available to anyone.
Mining Electroneum requires no special computer knowledge or hardware; all you will need do is download and install a free app, and in a relatively short period of time you can start accruing the currency in a wallet. The app was not launched as planned in 2017 as it was decided a period of testing was required before launch, so a start date of early 2018 was decided on instead.
Pointing out the differences between bitcoin and Electroneum, Ells described how Electroneum has a 21 billion cap.
“Bitcoin is famous for having 21 million coins and each bitcoin can be broken down into 100 million parts, so effectively you’ve got eight decimal places. So when you buy something with bitcoin you might be transferring a tiny fraction such as 0.00002 bitcoin. Working in such numbers simply doesn’t sit comfortably with human beings; we are used to working with just two decimal places. That is the nature of the currencies we are used to.”
“We wanted to humanise cryptocurrency, which meant pushing all those decimals places to the right. The difference is we have simply lid the decimal place along to create a human friendly digital currency.”
Breaking into Gaming and Gambling
A large part of the Electroneum platform is its use in MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games) where it can be created in the game and taken out of the game to be used in the real world. Also in gambling there is a market of 200 million mobile phone users who don’t have a bank account. According to Ells, “If these people had a micropayment system such as Electroneum they would be able to gamble online even without a bank account.”
Launch Gone Wrong
As stated in the introduction, the launch of Electroneum did not go as planned. The ICO had been highly successful and raised over £30 million, however a DDOS cyber-attack locked investors out of their accounts. Around 140,000 people were affected.
Ells explains “Firstly, don’t panic – your ETN Coins are safe!” He assured us that “Electroneum was not hacked.” What happened was the email accounts were accessed using usernames and passwords that had been hacked elsewhere. In response they closed down the Electroneum system.
Ells then engaged the services of the top line security service HackerOne which explored and fixed any potential vulnerabilities in the system. Ells said “HackerOne have NOT successfully penetrated our system security, but if they do any bugs will be fixed.”
The system testing was completed in December 2017 and those who had purchased Electroneum during the ICO then had access to the wallets containing their coins.
Unsurprisingly Richard Ells came under attack in the media during the delayed launch. While some have suggested that Electroneum is a scam, others have criticised Ells for not ensuring that all the testing was carried out prior to launch. However Electroneum is far from being the first cryptocurrency to come under attack. Recently a different cryptocurrency lost $7 million of its currency units to hackers within minutes of launching.
Big Plans for the Future
There are big plans for Electroneum to become a globally used cryprocurrency, serving the needs of the unbanked, gamers and gamblers alike. With MOUs signed with Telecommunications & payment giant XIUS, Japanese agency BMedia, (which works with big players like FOX, MTV & Lacoste), and a major African mobile phone company, the future is looking bright for the digital currency.
Electroneum has also signed up Michael Stollaire – the founder and CEO of Titanium – as their new Technical Advisor, with more big names expected to follow.
The key test will be how widely the Electroneum mining app is used and whether it can function when the user numbers get into the multi-millions.
It will be a challenge, but it seems serial entrepreneur and stand-up guy Richard Ells will be up to the task.
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