On Monday (November 22), three days after decentralized exchange (DEX) Maiar went live, the price of $EGLD, the native asset of layer one blockchain Elrond, recorded another new all-time high of $478.99 at 10:09 a.m. UTC.
What Is Elrond?
According to Elrond’s documentation, Elrond, the mainnet of which went live in 2018, is “a distributed transactional computation protocol which relies on a sharded state architecture and a secure Proof of Stake consensus mechanism.” Although it can currently process around 15,000 transactions per second, theoretically it can be much faster than that (over 263,000 transactions per second has been achieved when using testnet).
Here is the Elrond team explaining what is special about Elrond:
“The Elrond network is the first to present a viable solution where all the three aspects of sharding – state, network and transactions – have been implemented at once. Combined with its “Adaptive” component, this novel architecture allows for dynamic network configuration to maintain a high level of security while scaling with demand.
“In addition to scaling through sharding, Elrond also approaches the consensus problem with a mechanism called Secure Proof of Stake, which mitigates potential attack vectors when compared to Proof of Work, while also enabling large throughput and fast execution.
“By solving some of the hardest consensus and sharding problems in the blockchain space, Elrond is able to provide a very high level of performance on a network made of inexpensive computers, resulting in a very low cost per transaction. In addition to performance and cost, Elrond also stands out through the quality of the developer experience and the resulting boost in usability on the end-user side.“
In June 2020, Elrond had its initial exchange offering (IEO) on Binance Launchpad (back then, its native token was called ERD).
$EGLD is the native asset of Elrond and is used to “pay for transaction fees and the cost of deploying dApps on the network, along with rewards for various contributions to the network.”
Elrond is being developed by Romanian startup Elrond Network, which was co-founded in by Beniamin Mincu (CEO), Lucian Todea (COO), and Lucian Mincu (CIO).
The Maiar DEX and the $1.29B Liquidity Incentive Program
Last Friday (November 19), Elrond Network CEO Beniamin Mincu announced that Maiar DEX, “a state of the art DEX built on a sharded architecture, w/ 100% community ownership” was going live and to “supercharge” the launch of this decentralized finance (DeFi) platform, he unveiled Elrond Superwave, “a $1.29 Billion USD liquidity mining incentive program for 1y, w/ $282M for first month.”
In a blog post published on November 19, the Elrond team said this could be “the largest DeFI incentive program to date.” It went on to say:
“The incentives will be denominated in MEX, the Maiar DEX utility and governance token. Therefore $1.29 billion dollars worth of MEX tokens – of which $282M in the first month – will be distributed to Maiar DEX users who will provide liquidity in EGLD, MEX, and USDC tokens.
“The program will start on November 19, at the same time as the official launch date of the fully community owned DeFi platform that has already distributed ownership to more than 60,000 accounts in the form of claimable MEX tokens.“
And here is what the Elrond CEO tweeted after swaps got enabled on the Maiar DEX:
Also, on November 20, the Elrond CIO had this to say about the the impressive early success of the Maiar DEX:
Maiar can be considered Elrond’s “official DEX” since it is created by the same team that build the Elrond blockchain. Maiar is “the engine for DeFi products such as swaps, liquidity pools and yield farms.”
$MEX is name of the token that powers the Maiar DEX. It is needed for “the governance of the decentralized exchange platform, as fuel for the perpetual decision-making process that will maintain the Maiar DEX ahead of the curve in terms of innovation, operational model, listing policies, and other actions aimed at creating a sustainable value cycle for its stakeholders.”
In addition, the $MEX token is “designed as a value capture mechanism and incentive vehicle that will allow the compelling attributes of the economical advancements it enables to scale with its adoption.”
Maiar’s first initial DEX offering (IDO) will be Audi-backed crypto project Holoride ($RIDE). The public sale date is November 26.
$EGLD’s Price Action
According to data by TradingView, currently (as of 10:20 a.m. UTC), on Binance, $EGLD is trading around $475.68, up 18.94% in the past 24-hour period.
At 07:55 a.m. UTC on November 19, hours before the Maiar DEX fully went live, $EGLD was trading around $303.74. As you can see in the five-day EGLD-USD price chart below, since then $EGLD has gone up 56.60%.
As for $EGLD’s performance in the year-to-date (YTD) period, its return-on-investment (ROI) vs USD is +1828.95.
What Crypto Analysts and Influencers Are Saying About $EGLD
A short time ago, Canadian cryptocurrency educator Brad Laurie said that he expected fireworks as more projects moved to Elrond.
Yesterday, New Zealand-based crypto analyst Lark Davis told his nearly 700K Twitter followers that the main reason for $EGLD’s red-hot performance seems to be the attractiveness of yield farming on the Maiar DEX:
On November 20, crypto analyst Wesley Kress explained why he feels that the best pair for yield farming on Maiar is $EGLD- $MEX:
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.
