Day 2 - A Quest To Rebuild Elrond, But What Did Elrond Stand For?
If you think about it, Elrond achieved quite a lot. At least, much much more than people thought it would.
Consider where it began. A small country, in Eastern Europe. Built by an unlikely team, most people never heard of. Self-funded until a certain point, and then funded quite modestly. In a time and place where if you'd had asked around, no one would have believed such a thing could even be possible.
But unbeknownst to most people, this small underdog team would go on to achieve the impossible. Literally. Writing a breakthrough architecture from scratch. Going through hundreds of trials to make it work. Days bleeding into nights, and nights into weeks of struggle. Coming quite close, very close, to biting the bullet, and dying. Several times.
Yet through all of it, slowly, steadily, that small team delivered something most people still struggle to fully grasp, even years after launch. An open-source network, built from nothing, delivering a 1000x improvement in throughput over the status quo via sharding.
Now, it's worth pausing for a second and asking, what did Elrond stand for, really? What won the people over, against a massive backdrop of disbelief?
A few things, probably.
For one, the team was small. Nimble. Fast. They shipped. Faster than most. They didn't wait for permission or good weather before attempting the impossible. They jumped headlong into the water and found a way.
Two. Despite every challenge that hit, and some hit hard, the team did not die. Each blow only made them more relentless. This might seem like a strange thing to list, but when looking around at the hundreds of projects that raised 10x or 100x more money and simply vanished, perspective shifts.
Three. And perhaps most important, in Elrond, people saw a rare and unlikely dream finally taking shape, and coming to reality. A new financial system, one where they could be more than consumers. A system they could own a piece of. A system arguably better than what existed, where they could hold a direct stake. As obvious and crazy as this may sound today, seven years ago (which feels like an eternity now) this idea seemed pretty radical and borderline ludicrous. At least outside the technical and startup circles.
*Elrond was perhaps the most ambitious startup of its kind. Building something that looked like the future, felt like the future, and worked like the future, where ordinary people could actually participate.*
That was pretty radical, and rare. And it changed many people's perspectives and lives.
Elrond stood for opportunity. The kind you encounter perhaps once in a lifetime, if you are fortunate enough. It stood for ambition. For resourcefulness. For just building things. It stood for a different future. One open to anyone who saw it, believed in it, and wanted to be part of it.
Elrond delivered a radically better solution. It raised the standard. It pushed people to be better. To do better. To ask how they could contribute. To build things themselves.
We wanted Elrond to be the backbone of a high-bandwidth, low-latency financial system. And we wanted to give anyone, anywhere, easy access to it.
The direction was spot on. But the timing, and many other pieces, were not quite there yet.
With Supernova, we have a genuine chance to make that vision a reality. To push the boundaries once more across performance, resilience, and user experience, in a way that has not been done before.
*We stand now at a moment much like the one before Elrond's mainnet launch. But the opportunity that lies ahead of us, the lessons we've learned, the capabilities we've acquired, the adoption landscape that presents itself, all of it far outstrips our previous conception of what was truly possible.*
Elrond stood for something. People loved it, and they stood for it. Now is the time to take that essence, and embed it at the very heart of what comes next.
Supernova.
