A brief history
Elrond was founded by Lucian Todea, Beniamin and Lucian Mincu in 2017. Elrond aims to be the "Internet-Scale Blockchain". It offers a highly scalable, fast, and secure platform for distributed applications. In order to achieve scalability while maintaining low transaction fees, Elrond employs two unique features: Adaptive State Sharding, and a Secure Proof-of-Stake. Adaptive State Sharding works by splitting the network into pieces, or shards, for nodes to only process a fraction of the network’s transactions. This practice is also implemented in competing with other blockchains such as Zilliqa and Polkadot. Secure Proof-of-Stake (SPoS) is the consensus mechanism devised to sync separate network components to a common ledger. Similar to traditional PoS, SPoS is used by computers running the Elrond software to secure the network, validate transactions, and distribute newly minted EGLD coins. However, since Elrond’s network consists of shards rather than a single chain, the SPoS consensus mechanism is used to select validating nodes to produce blocks within a shard rather than the entire network.

EGLD in practice
EGLD plays a key role in maintaining its network and can be used for sending, rewarding network contributors, and running smart contracts. By owning and staking EGLD, users gain the ability to vote on network upgrades and are rewarded with newly minted EGL, proportional to the amount staked. Elrond gives out 30% of the transaction fees to the authors of smart contracts in what they call “smart contract royalties.” Elrond also extracts 10% of all transaction fees to reward community participants in special events, bounty projects, and network development. Like many cryptocurrencies, the supply of EGLD is limited, meaning that according to the software’s rules there will only ever be 20 million EGLD.