Dear friends,

As the year is ending, it is a good time to take a step back and reflect on the important things we’ve achieved throughout 2018, and look ahead to see what 2019 will bring.

Many of you will remember 2018 as a challenging year, with lots of useful lessons learned in the midst of market uncertainty. It is in times like this when it’s best to remind ourselves of fundamentals.

Startups are hard; quality teams and products are not built over night; crypto projects might be even harder given the much more aggressive pace of change, higher regulatory uncertainty, and riveting market sentiments distractions.

In spite of all this, we’ve made significant progress and are excited to share this with you as we get closer to releasing the first version of our testnet.

Yearly highlights — Building, building and building

Our main focus in 2018 was to create a solid and compelling blockchain solution addressing scalability through Adaptive State Sharding, efficiency by eliminating PoW and introducing a Secure Proof of Stake algorithm, and preparing the architecture for a new VM that is compatible with the EVM yet does not inherit its limitations.

To sum up our efforts:

Biggest focus in 2019

As we enter 2019, our whole focus is on launching the first version of our testnet, demonstrating an improved version of Adaptive State Sharding and Secure Proof of Stake with 3x–5x performance optimizations from our released prototype version.

A second major focus will be on making sure Elrond is not only creating and unlocking new value, but also capturing some of it through the ERD token. This will be done by adding real-world utility to our token and ecosystem, through a broad range of relevant research and enterprise partnerships, startup incentive programs, grant programs and our ambassador program.

In addition to solving the technical blockchain limitations, 2019 will be the year when we tackle user experience. We think this might be the second most important obstacle for blockchain adoption and are focusing on bringing a simple and intuitive solution to address this.

As momentum is growing, we will be very much looking forward to our mainnet release, which is scheduled for Q2 2019.

A big thank you note to our community and core team

We want to thank our community who have been with us throughout the year, have provided feedback and support as we’ve reached our milestones. We would also like to thank our developers and core team who have worked tirelessly on building the elrond architecture, elrond ecosystem and the community.

Moving forward we will be looking for more feedback from our community on various decisions, and participation in our testnet support and stress-testing period. The strength of blockchain projects has always been in their community, so the next year will bring many more opportunities for meaningful engagement.

2018 was a very productive year where we’ve laid the Elrond foundations. For 2019 we are looking forward for real utility and impact as we launch this architecture.

Finally, we sincerely wish you all a happy holiday season and all the best in the coming new year! 🎄🎁🔔

Best wishes,

The Elrond Team