Elrond(EGLD)

Elrond Network is a scalable smart contract platform for decentralized applications and enterprise use cases, with its native cryptocurrency EGLD powering the ecosystem. After three years in development, Elrond’s mainnet arrived in mid-2020. The project was founded by a group of Romanian entrepreneurs and engineers coming from big tech companies. The core team remains the same since 2017, headed by Beniamin Mincu. 

Since its launch, Elrond Network evolved into an ambitious ecosystem aiming to tap into the European payments market with its crypto solutions alongside nurturing its DeFi ecosystem. Elrond uses a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism to secure the network and a sharding mechanism, dubbed Adaptive State Sharding, to enable network scaling. Elrond’s native coin EGLD, ranked in the top 50 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization as of Q1 2022.

EGLD price

Ассording to our EGLD USD live price chart, Elrond saw its first bull run in early 2021, when EGLD price went from around $7 in November 2020 to a local peak of over $200 on Feb. 9, 2021, marking a gain of over 3,000%. The price of EGLD took a two-month breather before rallying to a new high of over $240 on Apr. 11, 2021, but then lost a large share of gains, further extending losses as the broader crypto market was hit by a severe crash in May 2021. 

Elrond Network again saw significant attention in autumn 2021, as evidenced by EGLD token’s elevated trading volumes. EGLD price rallied in line with other smart contract platform coins like Solana (SOL) and Avalanche (AVAX) as the market sentiment turned extremely bullish on Ethereum contenders. As per our live price chart, EGLD hit an all-time high over $540 on Nov. 22., 2021.

Despite the significant price drop after the November pump, EGLD cryptocurrency managed to close 2021 with a whopping 800%+ gain. Since then, EGLD price has been relatively stable, with EGLD trading around the $150 zone. 

Elrond’s ecosystem is still in its infancy, ranking 19th among smart contract platforms in terms of total value locked (TVL) in Q1 2022. EGLD coin’s future price performance depends heavily on the pace of ecosystem development and scale of adoption. 

How EGLD works

Elrond’s EGLD coin has all the standard use cases of a smart contract platform. Users pay with EGLD for sending transactions and running smart contracts on the Elrond Network. On the other hand, EGLD is used to pay out rewards to validators for contributing to network security. To earn rewards users can either delegate their EGLD tokens to network validators, or run an Elrond validator node. 

Elrond is a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain that uses a novel type of consensus algorithm known as “Secure PoS” to validate transactions on its network. Elrond Network can be used to create WebAssembly (WASM) smart contracts thanks to its Elrond Virtual Machine. Unlike its peers, including Solana and NEAR, Elrond is not compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, which means the DApps built for EVM can’t be easily ported to the Elrond network. 

To achieve high network throughput and speed, Elrond leverages the Adaptive State Sharding mechanism. Elrond claims to enable 15,000 transactions per second (TPS), six-second transaction finality and low fees, which makes it one of the most efficient blockchains in a slew of competitors all looking to capitalize on Ethereum’s scalability issues. 

EGLD news, updates and highlights

Elrond is operating in a crowded smart contract platform space, where the new generation of PoS blockchains is eating the market share of Ethereum, while the historic market leader is floundering on its transition from PoW to PoS. Like its competitors, Elrond is looking to attract users with high network throughput and scalability, offering faster transaction execution speeds and lower fees compared to Ethereum. Yet, it didn’t get the same traction as, SOL, AVAX and Terra (LUNA). 

However, Elrond’s recent M&A possibly indicates that the network is seeking a niche where other smart contract platforms have not gained a head start: the European payments market. In March 2022, Elrond announced it was granted an approval from the National bank of Romania to issue electronic money under the European digital assets framework. The entitlement to issue e-money is a part of Twispay acquisition. The deal came just two months after Elrond acquired Utrust, another European payments firm. With these acquisitions, Elrond is making a strategic move to establish itself as a bridge between traditional finance and crypto. 

Elrond is trying to catch up with competitors on building the DeFi side of the ecosystem. In April 2022, Elrond announced a $40 million ecosystem development fund backed by Morningstar Ventures and Spark Digital Capital among others, and featuring behemoths like Binance Institutional and Huobi Global as supporters of the fund. Skynet EGLD Capital plans to deploy capital across three major verticals - Web3 payments, DeFi 2.0 and the Metaverse. 

As of Q1 2022, The Elrond DeFi ecosystem features just a few projects, and no DeFi staples such as lending and synthetics. The first DEX on the network, Maiar, accumulates 100% of the network’s total value locked, but there is a second DEX called AshSwap currently in testing mode, which can attract some capital. Elrond’s CIO Lucian Mincu announced on Apr. 10, 2022 that bridges to Ethereum and other EVM chains are coming soon, so the ecosystem may see new capital inflows once the bridges are live.

Frequently asked questions about EGLD

• Can you mine or stake EGLD?

Elrond is a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain, which means that EGLD coins cannot be mined, but can be staked. Users can delegate their holdings over 10 EGLD to a validator to earn rewards for staking, or become validators themselves by running a node. 

• What are some of the best EGLD wallets?

Maiar is a non-custodial wallet serving as a major gate to the Elrond ecosystem, available as a mobile wallet, a web extension, and a lighter DeFi wallet designed to interact with DApps on the Elrond network. Among hardware wallets, Ledger supports EGLD. 

• What can you do with EGLD?

Users can use EGLD tokens to pay for transactions on the Elrond network, trade them against other cryptocurrencies like BTC or USDT, or stake them for rewards.

• How to buy EGLD? 

You can buy EGLD on exchanges like HitBTC (EGLD/BTC trading pair), and MEXC (EGLD/UST trading pair). You can also buy EGLD coins using fiat currency with on-ramp services like Changelly.