Elrond, a scalable blockchain designed for value transfer, today announced that it is now live on mainnet. The first application to launch on the Elrond blockchain is Maiar, a user-focused decentralized financial application enabling seamless onboarding and multiple transaction types between participants.
Starting from today, Elrond will also completely transform its economic model to introduce deflation through scarcity, with a view to creating a new digital gold standard.
Maiar – A Financial Application Designed for Everyone
After putting the testnet through its paces, Elrond is now confident that the mainnet is ready for launch and sufficiently robust to start running its first application, Maiar, from day one. Maiar is a multi-functional financial application allowing users to spend, stake, or lend ERD tokens. Users can purchase within the app directly with 150 different fiat currencies.
However, unlike many blockchain applications, Maiar is designed with the user experience first and foremost. Onboarding is seamless anywhere in the world, requiring just a phone number and therefore, completely inclusive even to those outside the existing financial system. Users can set progressive security levels depending on the value of their funds, with every piece of data tied to their username and secured on the blockchain. It’s even possible to set up friends or family as fund “guardians” in a multi-signature arrangement, using details from the user’s contact list or with any global Maiar username. Maiar will enable any kind of value transfer between peers anywhere in the world. The application already amassed a following of 40,000 waitlisted users.
Along with the launch of the mainnet and Maiar, Elrond is also introducing a new economic model designed to stimulate long-term value for the ERD token. The current token issuance of 20 billion ERD will be reduced to 20 million. Over the next ten years, the issuance rate will gradually decrease from 10.8% in the first year, until there are no new ERD issued in the eleventh year.
The move is designed to generate increased value through scarcity. By the fifth year of decreased issuance, Elrond is forecasting a stock-to-flow ratio of 275.
Speaking of these latest developments, Elrond Co-founder and CEO Beniamin Mincu states:
“Money was never about money, it was always about time. Money was humanity’s best attempt to make fungible something that fundamentally is not: our time. By improving every important aspect of money, we are giving you back control over your time.
Today marks the beginning of an age where the convenience of an interconnected digital world brings back time to us all. The entire internet can rely on a layer of trust that scales with its needs, with a user experience that is intuitive for anyone that has a mobile phone, and which is fueled by the new standard of digital gold.”
Over recent weeks, Elrond has been ramping up in preparation for its mainnet launch with an incentivized testnet. It has proven to be a massive success with over 1500 nodes from 29 countries running the testnet in 50 shards. The network processed a gradually increasing number of transactions, achieving a peak performance of 263,000 transactions per second.
Maiar is available immediately and will be launched in various iterations over the coming month.
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