Elastos as an operating system has a history of over 17 years. Their technology including side-chains and digital IDs for tracking of digital assets and creating digital scarcity makes them a very interesting new player in the smart economy space, right next to Neo. Its main team known as the Elastos Foundation is based in Singapore, its chairman is Rong Chen and interestingly also includes Neo CEO, Da Hongfei. Time to take an in-depth look at their whitepaper.
Introduction to Elastos
Elastos aims to move the internet to a new level by making digital assets like for instance e-books, movies, music and games tradable. Right now you can purchase songs on iTunes or an e-book on Amazon, but do you really own these? In practice these digital assets are not treated as owned assets and you can not transfer their ownership or trade them. Elastos aims to change this by issuing digital blockchain IDs for digital content secured by and stored on the blockchain, making them transferable. Elastos will be a platform for Dapps running on a peer-to-peer network. In this so called elastos web the elastos tokens will focus as the base currency.
With the current blockchain technology recording of digital property rights is already possible. However you cannot prevent other people from stealing or using the related assets (books or movies etc.). Elastos aims to solve this by creating an environment in which the execution of the digital asset (viewing, buying or selling) all take place on the Elastos Smart Web, and therefore need to follow the rules of the smart contracts. Authors can then for instance decide to only publish a limited amount of copies of a digital asset, creating digital scarcity and enabling realization of capital. This enables users to see their assets more as an investment as prices may increase. This also enables authors to create limited editions of Dapps.
In such as smart economy filmmakers can even raise capital by issuing digital tokens for their movies. Smart contracts could be written, stating that the owners of the tokens receive an incentive every time that a movie is watched as this is all tracked on the Elastos Smart Web.
Technology background
Elastos has identified the below limitation to the Ethereum based Dapps and seeks to address these:
- Storage and slow speed
- Bugs cannot be fixed as smart contracts cannot be changed
- High usage costs
- Historical junk data
- Lack of flexibility (due to coupling between Ethereum Virtual Machine and its blockchain)
- Security
Due to the above limitations the Ethereum network is seen as unfit for users to read digital books, play games and run encrypted chat programs. Elastos by contrast aims to run Dapps that are enabled by blockchain technology, but do not have to run on the blockchain itself. Dapps wil run instead on Elastos runtime, which itself runs on top of Android, iOS or any other PC based operating system.
Elastos believes the Ethererum Virtual Machine is not suitable for running Dapps because:
- Lack of computation speed or flexibility
- Current blockchains are designed to record transactions, not to store data. There is simply not enough space to store large quantities of data needed for movies and books.
To address the first problem, Elastos will built a main chain used to store transactional data and multiple side chains used for smart contracts and Dapps.
The second problem is addressed by letting the Dapps run on Elastos Runtime instead of the already congested blockchain. Elastos sees this also as a more secure way, as with Elastos all the data needs to be send through the trustable identity-verifiable channel. Identification will come from the digital blockchain ID.
Elastos: A blockchain-Powered World Wide Web
Elastos Smart Web is composed of four pillars:
- The Elastos blockchain on which each device, website and digital asset has each own trustworthy ID
- Elastos Runtime operating system that is the gateway and protective layer between the internet and the applications and services
- Elastos carrier peer-to-peer platform taking care of all network traffic on the applications behalf (this is a decentralized internet service provider)
- Elastos Software Development Kit (SDK) to make the Elastos services available to non-elastos apps.
ELA Token
The Elastos token (ELA) will be used for trading or investing in digital assets and paying for processing fees on the network. Elastos will issue a scarce amount of tokens of 33 million however to compensate for natural losses, as well as to keep up with slight inflation, the amount of ELA in circulation will increase annually at a fixed rate of 4%.
The Elastos Vision
The Elastos project dates back to the year 2000 when founder Rong Chen returned to China to start his business in developing a secure operating system for the internet age. In 2017 the Elastos project grew into a global open-soure software project driven by the Elastos community. Elastos is now working to become the technology power house for the smart economy. Elastos seeks to create a new world wide web that is both safer and smarter and calls this the Internet of Wealth.
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