Building a Highly Scalable Blockchain with Beniamin Mincu, CEO of Elrond - Ep. 11

Bobby Ong:   0:02
Welcome to the CoinGecko Podcast. For today’s episode, we have the honour of welcoming Beniamin Mincu, CEO of Elrond blockchain. Beniamin is a tech entrepreneur and early blockchain investor, he was part of the NEM core team in 2014, and early investor in Binance, BAT and Tezos. Understanding the inevitable performance problem the blockchain space was facing, he gathered one of the strongest teams in the space, and began working on Elrond to bring a 1000x improvement in blockchain throughput, execution speed and transaction cost. Elrond recently went through the Binance Launchpad and conducted its IEO there we are very happy that Beniamin is able to join us for the podcast. Welcome to the show, Beniamin.

Beniamin Mincu:   0:00
Hello. Hello there. Really glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Bobby Ong:   1:21
For the first question, can you explain to us in your simplest manner what is Elrond and why is it important?

Beniamin Mincu:   1:31
Sure. So first touching on what Elrond is. I think one of the best metaphors to understanding Elrond is looking at the early days of the Internet and the Internet had basically two important inflection points that changed everything. The 1st one was the browser, and the browser opened up the web to the average joe and a love people toe just point and click something, look over websites and so increased the market significantly for the Internet. And the second important inflection point was basically the transition from dial-up to broadband. So what Elrond does is essentially the same off this two components. It basically first brings a transition from dial-up broadband in the Blockchain space. And then second also brings a user interface through which we will ease friction and simplifying experience a lot. So what these actually means years that we are building a new Blockchain from scratch a layer one solution that brings a 1000 x improvement in throughput, execution speed and transaction costs and why this is important? Well, the Internet essentially made the sum of all human knowledge available to all of us instantly through a device that was connected by it. And I think the same will happen with Blockchain in the sense that blockchain will make the sum of all human resource is available to everyone in the world. And more important, I I believe and predict that probably during the next 10 years, we'll see that Blockchain will probably become the most important GDP multiplier since the Internet. So I'm extremely excited about what we're doing and think it will have significant impact on the industry and a future adoption.

Bobby Ong:   3:52
Cool, man! Very big vision, a very big belief induction technology that you just stated - being a main GDP multiplier. I was reading a lot on Elrond before this interview and these two words kept coming up - Adaptive State Sharding Technology and Secure Proof of Stake (SPoS) consensus. Those are some really big words. Maybe you want to break it down into simple terms? What do they mean? And what makes it special?

Beniamin Mincu:   4:20
Sure, It is actually very simple. Actually, When we started Elrond, we thought, we saw the huge problem that the blockchain was going to face. That was already evident at that time. And this was especially true - So if you if your bandwith processing bandwidth is really low and you can process 5 to 7 transactions per second or 15 for that matter, you basically have no hope of global adoption. This is almost like a joke, right? But it still is very useful for you to have an idea that the technology works and so forth. But then off course, you need to rebuild the technology so that you can accommodate Internet scale performance. If you really want adoption on the internet. So this is how we started, we had a very good overview on all the possible solutions that were available at that point. And also we were aware off all the solutions that were attempted to be implemented. And so most of the solutions were really incremental and will only delay the problem. Say you would improve the throughput with maybe 3 to 5 X. Well, you're just delaying the problem. And six months down the road, you'll have the same problem if adoption really kicks in. So what we thought with the one was that if you can bring in but least the 100 x improvement in throughput, executions speed and transaction costs. At that point, it makes sense for you to gather a lot more adoption because you can accommodate a lot more. So this is how we came to adaptive state shard and Secure proof of Stake. What adaptive state sharding essentially means is that first you had sharding - The Sharding part means that you basically parrallelize transaction processing. So while in Ethereum or Bitcoin, you have this serial way off processing transactions where all machines process all transactions at the same time, in Elrond, we basically split, divide and conquer. This is a way to which you can come to an improvement off 1000 X. It's extremely difficult to make this work. But if you can do that, this is the only way that will grant you a sufficiently high improvement so that you can really accommodate Internet scale performance. And the second point is so it's charming than stay charming because there are obviously several versions off Sharding, state sharding is the most difficult of them, but the whole point is again - dividing and conquering things and the adaptivity part is that If you build this network, you want to be able to run it with two shards ,but then also with 100 shards. The idea is is that the network should be able to adapt based on the demand so that you are not constrained to launch with 100 shards from the beginning, which would essentially be very, very ineffective. So this is a sharding in towards early parallelization of transactions, and the Secure Proof of Stake part essentially means that if you can process transactions in parallel and have a much higher bandwidth, then the second thing you really require is a consensus mechanism that is really efficient. So you don't have proof of work and don't run into the same problems that proof of work runs into then second, it's really fast, latency is low and you can have much faster finality, than in other consensus mechanisms and then third and most important of these, it's very, very secure. The security in secure proof of state comes via random sampling of the consensus group. So this means that out off 500 validators numbers - number that you have been a shard. You basically have 61 validators that are chosen every five seconds random me and then reshuffled every five seconds. And then at the end of each epoch that we define as a day in Elrond, you have another layer off security by which essentially 1/3 off nodes in each shard are randomly reshuffled to other sharks. So to summarize this, the Adaptive State Sharding part means that you can paralyze transactions so that you can scale significantly. And the Secure Proof of State part means that you can process these transactions really fast, really efficient and really, really secure. So that's why combining this two compliments. You have a working model for the Internet scale Blockchain. This is how we see Elrond as.

Bobby Ong:   9:37
Yeah, that's really helpful explanation. For the longest period of time, I've read a lot of the literature on there and I just keep getting lost on all these adaptive state sharding and secure proof of stake terms. But at least explanation helps to clear a lot of things up. Next question is, what do you see as competitors for Elrond and how you see them stacking up against what you guys are doing?

Beniamin Mincu:   10:00
I would go ahead and question the question here a bit. So the idea is for us - If you look at the technology and its adoption cycle and also the most effective way you could use to bring the next wave of adoption, then we basically understand a few important points. First when Bitcoin came along, although Bitcoin you would say would be normally understood by the guys in finance and banking because it does have to do with this part, it was totally misunderstood. Bitcoin did not take off via bankers and finance guys. It has a really interesting niche of people - cypherpunks that believing cryptography that were very interestingly, politically affiliated or unaffiliated to be more precise, and then this was the group with which Bitcoin took off, but interestingly enough when Ethereum came along, the interesting part is that Ethereum did not take off via Bitcoin maximalist. In fact, all the Bitcoin guys hated Ethereum a lot, and they still do at this point. But Ethereum found a niche where it and interesting discussion with developers, it became relevant through developers, and then it took off. At this point, it seems to me that most off the architectures in the space are sort of playing the wrong game, meaning that today you will not be able to win if you trying to play the Ethereum game. Ethereum already exists, already has a niche, already has a strong group of people with network effects and so forth. You will not displace Ethereum in its cold brew. So the only way to weigh in is basically understanding and reframing the problem, understanding the problem extremely well. So what I think Ethereum has done well and Bitcoin has done well is that they have demonstrated that this technology can and work, and that it's power is extremely, extremely effective if used right. But then what both of them have missed is they don't have the performance. The friction is extremely high whenever you try to interact with them, build on them and so forth. So what we're trying to do with Elrond is exactly what I was saying at the beginning - bring the same transition that we saw in the early days of the Internet to the Blockchain space. And this means that on the one hand we bring a significant improvement in the performance part. And then, on the other hand, we bring a very, very simple user interface that redefines are we used watching and makes it available to the average user without them even knowing. Because if you look at the early days of the Internet, the Internet did not take off because people loved the Internet. The Internet took off because it had one of this killer applications, like the browser, like email and so forth that slowly picked up a lot of adoption. And then, as an effect, the Internet moved forward with it. The same, I think, will happen to the Blockchain space. There has been, some wrong and misguided discussions have been in the in the space previously where Vitalik and maybe some some other people just discussed about there not being a killer application for Blockchain. But this, I think, is very flawed, flawed way of seeing things just because they were discussing that particular snapshot of time. So if your performance is really low, if the friction is really high, of course, you will not have a killer application. But this does not speak about the technology itself, right. When the technology works well enough, then you will have a killer application. And so for Elrond, I think, will open up the door to the next wave of adoption by vertical integration. We're not building only the infrastructure layer, but we're also building a user interface that when you connect these two pieces, this creates a new game, a new space that we're basically the first to invent and take hold off.

Bobby Ong:   15:01
So let's just say that Elrond will increase  the Blockchain capacity by 1000 x, and then you guys will launch a Mainnet so then everything goes well. What do you think will be, uh, I'm going to use the same word "killer application" that will be on-boarded onto Elrond?

Beniamin Mincu:   15:17
We thought a lot about this and have also experimented with a lot of different directions. And for us, the most important thing in reasoning about the adoption part is not only where we see the highest or largest potential, but also how fast we can materialize this potential, because it might be that the enterprise part is extremely large. But if it takes us two years to reach that point, because the sales cycles the implementation cycles the testing cycles are extremely long, extremely difficult, then we've also considered if there's maybe not a better option, and as such we've discovered that basically, if you can build something that these consumer facing you can move with the adoption extremely fast. If the application is useful, it's delightful and much better than what people use at this point. So this is what we're focusing on. And so the first use cases will see in the form off payments, what payments really mean and what money means. I believe during this period, especially there's a crisis going on with respect to money, what money is, what it represents. It seems to me that during the last decades we've made some significant mistakes on this part by the coupling money from any let's say, standard, gold standard and so forth and now being able to print as much as possible with no accountability and no point of reference, right. At some point this will become very, very problematic. You have to wonder when the music will stop, right. It seems like even during this crisis, there's a lot of debate and discussion about this. But to come back to your question. I see that payments and money are probably the most important things that we will have adoption during the next, let's say, 6 to 12 months. This is the thing we're putting all our focus on. We also have some interesting use cases that we are already explored an implemented with some companies. So we're moving for that direction. But the primary focus is consumer facing.

Bobby Ong:   17:58
So next question actually is about, I'm suppose to ask this early but I missed it out. How many shard are there in Elrond? You briefly mentioned between 2 to a hundred. How many shard are there working with each other?

Beniamin Mincu:   18:12
Sure. The idea here is that, as you mentioned, when you divide the state and divide information. There is a way to synchronize between all this shards. So how we do it in our case is we have a metachain which has meta headers, which always convey information to the shards and through which the shards conveying information to the metachain. And so this metachain is the key component through which the shards can communicate among themselves and with the metachain and the meta header is basically the information the way who each the shards and the metachain communicate. There's also an important point that you mentioned where, although at some point we will likely need tens and hundreds of shards because there will be a really high demand in throughput. At first we want to make sure that we start with the minimum required necessary, and from the beginning, we send that Elrond will set a new standard, meaning that we will do 10,000 transactions per second with the minimal latency and negligible costs. Now, we initially had twenty shards to do this 10,000 transactions per second. Then we improve things significantly in the testnet and came to five shards, which was a huge improvement to process the same 10,000 transactions per second and out during the last three months, we've made some significant improvements again so that we can process more than 10,000 transactions per second with only two shards. So this is the minimum necessary. We will start the network at Genesis with two shards plus Metachain, and each are will have 500 nodes that will be present in that shard. So it will be to sharks plus meta chain and 1500 nodes. This is the current set up, and I also outlined that while there are several other networks that claim to do sharding, they essentially don't do sharding. At least at this point, they either copied the whole information in the each shard but there's no cross-shard communication or when they start. There are some other networks which intent to start with 1 shard, which basically means you don't have sharding right. But why start with one shard when you basically call yourself a state sharded architecture. But yeah, this being said, we're very excited by the progress. It is extremely difficult at this point right before the main at launch. But I think it will make a huge difference once we're live.

Bobby Ong:   21:14
You guys have your own native Token, ERD on the Elrond Blockchain. So what's the economic or token model for ERD token how does it work?

Beniamin Mincu:   21:25
Sure. So I will outline that everything you will be able to do in Elrond will require the ERD token. So if Elrond is indeed as powerful in performance and efficient as we build it to be, then the value off the Elrond Token will be directly correlated with this type of performance that will be required by different companies, different applications and so forth. Furthermore, there's the proof of stake part, which means that in order to scale the network, process the transaction, we require a number of nodes and validators that stake tokens in order for them to be able to process transactions and be part of the network and then for their work, for the processing they're doing, they are basically rewarded. So the point is that at this point in time, some details are still a matter of discussion. We will very soon publish an economics paper detailing this. But what I can tell you is that we've made some very significant advances in the sense that when you're thinking about economic model, there are two key ideas that you have in mind. The first is bootstrapping, If you don't find the way for the network to take off and don't have a high enough incentive, then you'll basically be dead on the right. There's no point on being sustainable longer term if you're that from the beginning and nobody helps you bootstrap the network. So bootstrapping is the first important thing that you need to take care of the second important thing. You need to take care of its sustainability, indeed, and this means that once you've taken off and there is a strong incentive for people to come in and be part of the network and help process transactions and so forth, then you need to gradually normalize rewards and make it such that it still competitive, but it's not a point where you're like, say Steem, where the inflation is so high that it breaks the model down. So what we've basically created is a model that in the first 3 years will have a 7.5% inflation. The second year it will have a 6.25% inflation and then, starting with the third year, there will be a 5% inflation. But the key point here is that we've already calculated what it would say for Elrond in the first year and every year afterwards to have zero inflation. So we've created a model to which you can have the bootstrapping process at the beginning. But the network will trend toward dis-inflationary  model and then deflationary model meaning that if you gather adoption, say you have 11,000 transactions per second in the first year, then you will have zero inflation. At that point, the validators will receive 7.5% still rewards, but they will not come out of the inflation, but rather out of fees and real adoption. So I believe Elrond, in short, will be one of them first models not only to bring this type of performance, but which will show that you can bootstrap the network and then transition to a deflationary model via adoption in a sustainable way, which has not been done before, and which will be extremely interesting to see how it plays out and demonstrating practice. Another point that I think, would be very, very useful. To be added in a firefight is that validators will have 36% APR during the first period, especially the first year, and then delegator will also have something like 29%. So the idea is that everyone should be able to stake their tokens, and to do so, they will either be able to become validators or they will be able to delegate. If someone says I have the tokens, but I don't run to run nodes, then they will have several options to be able to delegate tokens and still receive significant rewards out of them.

Bobby Ong:   26:09
So this was fairly recent, like you guys just start staking on Elrond, and that's the node operator, and its delegators, that you mention briefly just now. What's the minimum requirement to run a note on our own, and I think you mentioned 36% a return in the first year, followed by 28% after that. Maybe just tell a bit more, how to stake and so on.

Beniamin Mincu:   26:32
Sure, this is a very, very good question. So that I get is that you will, Since we will start the network with two shards plus metachain, we will have 1500 notes. And for this notes, we will at first have a 2.5 million Elrond requirement, so you can run a node. This will only be during the very early bootstrapping process. But then afterwards, there will be an auction allowing people to putting a lot more Elrond per node and allowing them to still be part of the network, recienve the rewards and so forth. So the first phase, lets say the first 3 months will have this 2.5 million Elrond required to run a node. And then for this, we've started with the rewards. Rewards will will mean that you basically have 7.5% inflation that go to validators to this 1,500 nodes. But then, if you managed to exceed this through adoption and have an increase in fees that exceeds the inflation. Then inflation becomes zero. So first the fees will gradually decrease the inflation. And then when there's when the inflation and the fees rewards are on par. At that point, you start to receive even more rewards through adoption. So to summarize, then you basically start with 1500 notes. There will be a 2.5 million Elrond requirement and there will be a 36% APR that, at least for the first few months when you have a fixed amount of fixed number of nodes, will stay like that. And then after that point, things will will basically become a lot more elastic, and we'll let the market decide how much things will change. But there is a predictable rate of rewards, and so adoption will probably kick in very fast.

Bobby Ong:   28:56
36% APR. I'm trying to reconcile with what you said earlier about the 7.5% inflation. I'm not so sure how that 36% goes with the 7.5% inflation. Is a large percent APR sustainable for the long term?

Beniamin Mincu:   29:12
Sure. So both question, I think are very relevant. The first one is we have this inflation rate which is out of the total circulating supply. For the first year, you have, say, 7.5% right. And then this 7.5% divided it by 1500 nodes gives you a clear idea of what you will get it right, and then you also have the variable of 2.5 million Elrond. This basically gives you a clear idea of what you will gain, and this is how it's calculated. The second point is, if this kind of inflation or APR is sustainable and to this, I want to just clarify that the Elrond direction is not very different to other directions that we have in the space. So it's basically a bit off a deviation from the standard just because, as I mentioned first, the highest priority is to bootstrap. If you've not managed to bootstrap the network, then all the other calculations are basically worth nothing. On the other hand, if you manage to bootstrap the network at that point, the other process kicks in, of making it all sustainable and allowing the market to recalibrate everything so let's the system works extremely well. Not only rewards the validators and people that are in the network, but then also allows them to gain a lot more while decreasing inflation to zero, which is this is probably the most important thing about Elrond. It not only as I said, not only brings the performance part and rewards the people and developers, but then it also does so by creating a hard version of money where the inflation although it exists at the beginning, it very, very rapidly goes to zero as adoption kicks in and you have a very similar model to what Bitcoin has, but much more robust in the sense that with adoption, you see specifically how inflation disappears or goes to zero.

Bobby Ong:   31:35
Yeah, Yeah. Next question is you guys recently did an IEO on Binance. You guys went through the Binance launchpad and did an IEO on Binance. I just want to get your thought and experience. How was it like going through the Binance Launchpad and launching an IEO and how much you guys raised? How long did it take from your first conversation with the Binance team until you guys finally did the IEO in Binance? Just want to hear your thoughts and experience from you.

Beniamin Mincu:   32:00
Sure, this is a very good question. Although it's not done recently. So we've done that your last year. Basically, it's almost a year now if you look at things. And this was a very, very interesting experience for us because it was exciting, very, very difficult, as you would expect. And then, um, well worth it. And what I mean by this is of course, The process was long. We had a lot of back and forth discussion explanations going through different things that we were building. But the reasoning why we were building this and then the most important part which I always appreciated on Binances' part, and their team was the ferocity with which they pushed things forward, the speed and hard core spirit off just building whatever needs to be built and finding solutions to problems. And then, while we were discussing with them, we've had calls at 2 a.m. In the morning, 3 a.m. In the morning, where we were during the day still in office, But then during the evening and night again in the office and I think it was very difficult in the sense that we kept pushing ourselves as much as possible, trying to come up with new solution, faster solutions and demonstrate what we were capable of. And yet, at the end of the day, it was well worth it because they there was a fit between their hardcore spirit and our our hardcore spirit. And yeah, it really paid off in the sense off exposure, right, because we're building this architecture that he's boast of compliment the Open Web. But if nobody hears about you, if you don't take off as I mentioned before, then you basically have many, many other problems to solve. Binance was a very efficient way of bringing Elrond to market, giving it a lot of exposure after we put a lot of work into it. We've raised $1.9 million first in the private round and then through the Binance IEO we've raised $3.25 million and yeah, the experience was a memorable one and a fun one for the team. So we thought with a lot of excitement about it.

Bobby Ong:   34:42
Good timing for doing an IEO last year because you just delayed by one year like now, it's impossible. No one's doing an IEO. Raising five million plus is still pretty good but If you did it during the ICO [boom] it would have been crazy times back then. Yeah, I'm glad I get to hear that you guys did an IEO with Binance, i've heard a lot of good things about Binance Launchpad and everyone who had gone through the Launchpad said the same thing. As you said that it's a 24 7 crypto market. It's not surprising that you have calls at 2 or 3am in the morning. So my next question right, is "What's the plan for Elrond, 2020 and beyond?" I understand that you have some sort of Mainnet that is coming soon this year and a few phases to this Mainnet. Maybe you can talk through with us about that and some of the plans for this year and beyond?

Beniamin Mincu:   35:35
Sure, the whole point of Elrond, as I mentioned before, is to bring forth an Internet scale Blockchain that once this is live you will basically not worry about performance. You will not worry about friction but can finally, focus on building whatever you want built, and it just works. We've been working on this for the last 2.5 years. It's a very, very difficult period, at some time of some point in time, but then also an exciting period and a good period to reinvent ourselves. And we're now at the point where during the next couple of weeks will basically have the "Battle of Nodes" competition, and the "Battle of Nodes" competition essentially means that we've gone through several audits, internal and external, independent audits. And at this point, we're preparing in preparation for the main and launch will go to a final trial by fire. Where we put the network out, we run things as we would in the main launch and then allow people to stress test the network, attack the network and go through several scenarios that you have absolutely no way off testing beyond running them in the wild. And so as soon as the network withstands this test for 15 days without interruption, at that point we know everyone is robust enough to finally launch the mainnet - to have the Genesis launch, which is extremely exciting because up until this point, we've heard a lot about sharding, we've heard a lot about performance. But this has not been a theoretical problem. We've had the theoretical solution two years ago. We've published that. This has been a very, very hard problem to build in practice because there are so many inter-dependencies and so forth. But now we basically have the whole architecture. We're just going to the final tweaks and processes where we validate that it's robust enough to really launch it, and then we'll have the Genesis launch. What will happen after the Genesis launch is will probably during the next weeks announce a lot of stuff cool stuff that we've been building experimenting with me behind the scenes, and it's not time to bring it out. But then, as I mentioned before, there's this user interface secret product that we've been working on there will also want to launch pretty soon, and the whole focus will be twofold: First, bring a lot of users in, and our target is to have one million users by the end of the year on this user interface and then [Second] have a lot of discussions with developers and the companies we're already discussing with with respect to the performance, the tooling and the incentives that we have already built in. As you may know, in the economics part, we also have a building economic incentive for developers so that when someone builds a smart contracts that is getting real adoption, they have a building business model because 30% of the fees that the smart contract will process will go directly to them, which I think is something very different and we'll put applications build in the blockchain based on a different trajectory, because this means that you will not have to create a new token necessary. If you have a business model which is breathing you money based on auction off the application you built. At that point, you will just build applications for the sake of bringing adoption bringing in utility to the users, but not necessarily to create a token for each of this application. So the Genesis part is right in front of us. A lot of excitement is building in the community for a few things that will share during the next couple of weeks. After the Genesis launch. There's also this secret user interface that we've we've built and are working hard on. A lot of energy and focus will be put into this because this will redefine the whole blocking game will make blockchain essentially invisible and bring the utility are watching to the user without them even knowing. And so this is the second point. And then the third point is, we've had a lot of discussion with applications with companies, and they can't wait to start testing and building on Elrond. So a lot of the focus will shift from building. Once we have things, it will shift into sport mode on the architecture and then full focus on adoption. And for this, we have some very, very different approaches that will soon bring to market.

Bobby Ong:   40:55
Sounds very interesting. I think you brought up a very interesting point about smart contract getting a percentage of fees from the Elrond blockchain. That is not something I've heard very often. Not so sure if this is the first time i've heard something like this before, But I think that would be very interesting. So I think we've reached the end of the podcast. One last question before you go. If someone's interested to learn more about Elrond, where's the best place to follow and learn more?

Beniamin Mincu:   41:19
There are basically three places where you can follow Elrond. The first one is You can do it on Twitter on the @elrond handle. You can go on elrond.com and subscribe to the newsletter. And then we also have several telegram groups with a lot of excited community members that will guide you through. If you're technical, there's a technical group. If you're just business orientated, there's a general community group, and the community is actually growing very, very fast, and we very much appreciate any kind of feedback and support from people. So I will be happy to have anyone in the community.

Bobby Ong:   42:02
Cool. I include all these links in the show notes later, So if you're interested, you can take a look and general of this community. So, Beniamin, thank you very much for taking the time to come on a CoinGecko podcast and explaining to us what Elrond is and the plans for the year ahead. it was very exciting hearing all your plans so I just wanna say thank you very much for taking your time.

Beniamin Mincu:   42:24
Thank you. Thank you very much. It was a great discussion, and you can't wait to see the mainnet out and then discuss some more once think things are live and we see people are coming to the Blockchain with the next wave of adoption.

Bobby Ong:   42:41
All right, that wraps up the show. Thank you for listening to the CoinGecko podcast with Bobby. If you like our show and want to know more, check out podcasts.coingecko.com or please leave us a review on iTunes. Do you have any feedback? Do drop us an email at hello@coingecko.com. Join us for more next week. See ya!

Bobby Ong:   43:34
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