Beniamin Mincu, founder and CEO of Elrond, joins Santiago Velez, co-founder and R&D division lead for Block Digital, to discuss the Elrond Network and how it’s built as well as scalability, interoperability, and future applications. When he founded Elrond, Mincu’s goals were to move away from what he calls the “dial up” version of the blockchain space and simplify the UX in order to lower the barrier to entry. To that end, Elrond aimed to build a system that could bring a 1000x improvement in throughput, execution speed, and transaction cost . This is implemented through adaptive state sharding and a secure proof of stake. Filmed April 26th, 2021. Key Learnings: Elrond tries to solve the central problem of layer 1 blockchains where there is traditionally a trade-off between security, decentralization, and scalability by looking to build a transparent financial system that can extend access to anyone anywhere. Mincu believes this is fundamentally important as the current state of the economy is low-bandwidth and high latency—any user would still have to wait for overnight transfers. Mincu views this inefficiency as a broken piece of the traditional system that cannot be simply fixed from inside. A better solution, he feels, is instead opting to create a system that can act as a complimentary asset. According to Mincu, there are still 1.7 billion people that are not connected to the current financial system and don’t have any kind of basic financial infrastructure. Giving these people a chance to participate would increase the entire effectiveness of the system significantly for the world.