Elastos’ vision is to become the decentralised internet and DApp platform allowing users to gain full control of their digital assets. Unlike Substratum, which aims at empowering a decentralised internet in a similar fashion to a VPN, Elastos’ goal is to enable a new type of digital economy, which they refer to as the smart economy, where users are able to generate wealth by producing content, while being in full control of their revenue model.
Ultimately, the platform will facilitate the deployment of the smart economy in a reliable, secure, and decentralised way, removing the need for third parties. The network will be powered by ELA, the project’s native token, allowing for smart contract deployment, transactions, and fee payments. If you are interested in trading ELA, you can do so easily by registering on Huobi.Pro, the sole exchange to list ELA.
Elastos Smart Economy
One of the main flaws of the current internet is that we do not own the digital assets in our possession. Currently, we possess copies of a file, rather than the original, with these copies being able to be disseminated freely all around the internet using protocols such as torrents. This hurts not only content producers as they lose revenue streams, or have to uniquely look for contractual work, while other business models might be more appealing to them, but also the owners of the files as these are difficult to monetise – an issue which is bound to worsen.
Elastos aims at removing this issue by creating a new internet paradigm where all digital assets can be traded in a secure, transparent, and fair way. For this Smart Economy to emerge, Elastos has identified three pillars: identification, scarcity, and trade. A good representation of Elastos’ value proposition on this issue is available here
Ref: Medium.com, Elastos.
To allow items to be traded, the ecosystem first needs to incorporate a system to recognise the owner of the product. To this extent, Elastos will allow users to tie blockchain IDs to all types of digital content, whether that be a book, a movie, an infographic, or a photograph.
This identification will not only enable users to sell their content, but also allow DApps to track how many times a piece of content has been seen, and ensure that the people owning them are fairly rewarded when it comes to monetisation. The Elastos ID service chain Open Beta, the first iteration of the system, has recently been published on Github (insert Github link here).
One of the ways Elastos will enable increased capital flow, revenue generation, and wealth distribution, is by allowing content to be tokenised – in the same way as shares – enabling these to represent future potential revenue generation derived from their underlying asset – with these tokens being tradeable as well. This system not only increases asset liquidity but also increases capital allocation efficiency and develops free markets, as anyone can participate in the wealth generation mechanism.
In regards to scarcity, publishers will be able to decide to crowdfund 5,000 copies of their work, and with the help of the Elastos ecosystem and of DApps, no additional units will be created – creating scarcity of the item being proposed. This scarcity leads to price appreciation if demand for the product rises.
Complete DApp Ecosystem
To enable its mission to become reality, Elastos is building a P2P DApp ecosystem which will not be able to connect to the internet. Despite having a closed ecosystem, it cannot block theft as one can simply print-screen or re-write the content, which we describe in the following section.
Additionally, the team clearly understood that for adoption, there is a need to embrace and use current solutions. To this extent, Elastos will allow its ecosystem to run on any OS, such as Android, iOS, Linux, Microsoft, or MacOS, to allow anyone, even with a little IT knowledge, to use the DApps running on Elastos.
Secure and Reliable Ecosystem
The Elastos team aims to provide a safe environment on the web, with DApps being detached from the internet. On the 2nd of July, Huobi conducted a 45-minute interview with the Chairman of the Elastos foundation, Dr. Rong Chen, where this issue was discussed extensively.
One of the major takeaways from the interview is that currently, most hacks occur because the data is being routed or redirected to another interface with no verification system. This problem is caused by the fact that currently, requests, messages, and commands are sent directly from one party to the other, without a middleman or carrier to verify whether the request is legit – allowing, for instance, hackers to redirect websites towards other domains geared towards stealing your funds.
At the time of this writing, Etherscan says there are 92,945 ERC20 token contracts deployed on mainnet. And that’s only ERC20 — that doesn’t include any of the more recent standards.
Many of these token contracts had a token sale associated with them. If they gained even a modest amount of traction, scammers certainly tried to spoof them. This has scammed at least: $4.5 million (7,513 ETH)
Hackers also use other ways to divert users, with for instance the placement of advertisements for fake websites on Google.com, as we briefly described in this article. This insecurity problem also leads to DDOS attacks aimed towards rendering a website inaccessible, among other things.
Ref: Medium.com, Kapil.Sharma97812
Dr. Ron Chen develops further on the vulnerabilities of the current internet. Taking the Internet of Things analogy, the vulnerability of IoT devices brings vulnerability to the network as a whole, as, for instance, if someone can break into your surveillance camera, the hacker will be able to contaminate other devices running on the same network.
To solve this issue and avoid data being routed, or redirected to another interface, Elastos decided to block or restrict DApps evolving within the ecosystem to access the internet, and to run uniquely on the Elastos Smart Web. This enables the ecosystem to work in a sandbox, and block everything from entering or escaping it (in the case of content). This architecture allows for privacy and security.
However, to allow communication between the blockchain from the sidechains, Carriers will be set in place as the blockchain itself will be in direct connection with the internet, if only to confirm the transactions. The carriers will be set in place to allow for the filtering of malicious requests.
Ref: Elanews.net
Scalability
Another issue which has been discussed in the interview concerns blockchain scalability, an issue which we discussed many times on Bitshouts.com, such as in our Aion Analysis and HPB analysis, two projects tackling this issue. In short, current solutions do not allow for the storage and processing of the amount of data which might lead to congestion issues – such as the CryptoKitties saga – if blockchain technology adopted by the mainstream.
To solve this issue, Elastos developed a system of a mainchain and sidechains. The mainchain is responsible for necessary transactions and the transfer of payments, while the sidechains are used to execute smart contracts. The sole purpose of the mainchain is to provide support as a ledger to the side chains
Opinion
Elastos is a project which could enable artists and content creators to finally be rewarded for their work, without the likes of Google or Apple being able to siphon revenue from them. Unlike most projects evolving within the asset digitalisation field, Elastos has the advantage to not only time-stamp content, but to also create a complete ecosystem geared towards protecting these rights rather than just providing a proof of ownership – despite these having many advantages as well – out of the scope of this overview.
We see as extremely positive the fact that the team has worked on the project for many years, and decided to use the power of blockchain technology as a tool rather than as a gimmick. Additionally, with the founder having developed at Microsoft.net in the late 90s, and Da Honfei from NEO and Jihan Wu (the CEO of Bitmain) being advisors to the team, we believe that the team has the technical and business knowledge as well as the network to achieve their goals.
To follow all news related to Elastos, we strongly encourage you to bookmark Elanews.net, a community-run website for all news and information related to the project.
As a decentralised OS, the key for Elastos’ success is the support from the community, and the creation, adoption, and use of DApps on the platform. To that purpose, the team has started its European tour with meetups having already been held in Zurich, Amsterdam, Ghent, Barcelona, and Paris, among others. On top of their regular meetups, the team also releases weekly updates regarding where the project is currently at.
Lastly, we have seen that platforms’ native tokens are amongst the biggest coins by market capitalisation within the cryptocurrency ecosystem, and believe that for all the reasons described above, Elastos will not deviate from the rule.
Bonus: Huobi Talk Reward
As always, Huobi proposes the viewers of the show to earn some ELA by sharing the talk on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. The top 3 sharers on each platform (9 winners in total) will be rewarded 6.37 ELA ($200 equivalent). Additionally, any enthusiasts who don’t have the social reach to win the contest can still benefit from the event, as all the participants who share the interview will get to share the participation prize pool of 129.15 ELA. Winners will be announced on July 9, at 3 p.m. (GMT+8) on Huobi Pro social media channels.
To participate, you have to (1) subscribe to the Huobi Pro channel on YouTube, (2) share the interview by clicking on YouTube’s “Share” button on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, commenting on the talk, and adding the hashtag #HuobiTalk, (3) lastly, participants need to log their entries on https://goo.gl/forms/zoY36kQ9IMavMFeE2.
Good luck and stay tuned – we are currently writing a complete analysis of the Elastos project – encompassing all aspects of the project from the technical overview, the consensus mechanism, the team, and partnerships, to our final thoughts on the project. Nevertheless, if you would like to trade the token from now on, you can easily do so by clicking here.
This article is sponsored by Elastos and Huobi.