Huobi Pro has managed to grab hold of the very busy CEO and Founder of Elastos to have an honest, technical discussion on Elastos and what to expect. The Founder of Elastos, Rong Chen, rarely gives such candid media interviews, and it is helpful to see his views on Elastos role in this budding Blockchain industry.

📈 First up! What is Elastos?

Elastos aims to create a safe and reliable internet of the future. Built utilizing the blockchain, this technological breakthrough provides the first completely safe environment on the web where decentralized applications are detached from the internet while also permitting full scalability to millions of users. Elastos enables the generation of wealth through ownership and exchange of your data and digital assets.

Quoting Rong Chen, he wishes Elastos to be “a smart web, first peer to peer, decentralized network that is open sourced.”

During the interview, Rong Chen explains the need for the decentralized applications being detached from the internet. Using an example of users interacting with the fingerprint scanner on a phone. The fingerprints ID is stored on a dedicated CPU in the phone in a “trust zone”. It cannot connect to the internet and the only way to break into this “trust zone” is to physically break the phone to get into it.

🚧 A Blockchain with a “Trust Zone”

Similarly, this is what Rong Chen, founder of Elastos believes of Blockchain. Elastos aims to create a “trust zone” for users to be able to interact with decentralized applications.

The 4 Pillars of Elastos: Blockchain, Light OS, Carrier, SDK

💻 Elastos Blockchain. Elastos wants to build a decentralized Smart Web, where each device, individual, Web site and digital asset has a trustworthy ID. Blockchain technology enables the establishment of trust on the Internet. Rong Chen gave an example of using the Blockchain to issue ID for all the users, microsensors and routers. The properties of the Blockchain makes the IDs hard to fake.

⚡ Elastos Runtime. Elastos Runtime is a lightweight operating system that prevents applications and services from directly accessing the Internet. Elastos Runtime runs on a customer’s mobile device or PC.

🚚 Elastos Carrier. Elastos Carrier is a completely decentralized peer-to-peer platform. This carrier takes over all network traffic between virtual machines and conveys information on applications’ behalf. Rong Chen explains that the decentralized carrier is relied upon by the network to ensure security of the messages transmitted and that the virtual machine becomes the “middle man”.

📜 Elastos Software Development Kit (SDK). Applications need the Elastos SDK to access their IDs and Elastos Carrier services on the Smart Web. This is to facilitate the app development community.

🚚 Why the Need for Elastos Carrier?

The Blockchain community is always wary of a middle man. Remove the centralization is the mantra, so why did Elastos introduce one?

Rong Chen explains with an anecdote of the Internet. Right now the internet is designed peer-to-peer. A message can be sent from one to another without a carrier or middleman moderating. If there were a carrier and the carrier is sending the message on your behalf, that is a different relay model. Elastos believes that to make the internet safer, there has to be a carrier in the middle, because it has the ability to check the unique ID before. It’s akin to when 2 people text each other through Facebook. It is Facebook’s responsibility to ensure that the person behind the account is truly who he says he is. The onus of responsibility is on Facebook. Having a carrier can ensure the provenance of the messages in the decentralized web.

What is Elastos Public Chain About?

Elastos aims to use Blockchain technology to try and recreate the web. Among other purposes, a key mentioned reason by Rong Chen is to use a Blockchain to issue internet ID. Another reason is to have the technical requirements of Elastos web be built into the public Blockchain.

Rong Chen envisages a strong community of developers, vibrant Dapps building community. A community of users that trust the code of the public chain and would transact on the public chain, will lead to its success, he claims.

10,000 nodes is the goal for the public chain. It remains to be seen when this will be implemented.

Elastos CEO on Content Management

Rong Chen opines that there are two levels of content piracy ongoing. The first level of content piracy is outright torrenting or downloading without paying. The second level of content piracy is the middleman media player streaming it out and not counting it or underpaying it. Elastos aims to create a platform that will be able to regulate both levels of content piracy.

Content Management by Creating Scarcity

Creating scarcity is the first step to content management, believes Rong Chen. The building of the foundation for smart economy is to create a limited supply of content so that a smart internet can work. Blockchain has the ability to limit the content, and is the natural antidote to the content pirating that is going on right now.

Looking Back at the ICO

Elastos CEO and Founder gave some opinions on the ICO of Elastos. He shared his opinion that coin economics is a double edged sword. On the one hand, it is bad because the nature of coin economics has become very speculative in nature, with investors looking to make a quick buck.

On the other hand, it is a good way to incentivize and reward miners of the chain. When done well, the value raised from ICO can be used to develop the chain too. He shared that about 75% of the coins have been kept for the community and developers and to develop applications. These coins are held by the Elastos Foundation and it has no right to sell the unsold remainder of the Elastos. It will be this foundation that is going to create a council to decide on the future of Elastos.

Looking Forward on the Roadmap for 2018

Jul 2018 — Elastos will embark on large scale applications and projects which dock financial big data services and medical insurance.

Aug 2018 — The framework for mobile web applications will be published open source, contributing to Elastos’ application ecology.

Dec 2018 — The mining of Elastos Chain and Elastos ID Chain by external nodes will be open and accessible.

In the meantime, Elastos has been focussing on building partnerships and fostering the community. In these months, Elastos has done the following:

💁‍♂️ Meetup. A face-to-face airdrop

🐙 Decentralized gaming project

🏦 Smart home projects

Huobi Talk — Interviewing CEOs of Blockchain Projects

Huobi runs a cryptocurrency exchange and believes in educating its users on Blockchain. Its greatly informative series called Huobi Insider, looks to interviewing CEOs of Blockchain Projects and getting the latest scoop and news on the project from the man helming the ship. Such informative content is hard to come by in the world of shilling. The author has subscribed to their YouTube page and highly suggest you do so too.