Recently we have stumbled upon an interview with Elastos Founder and Chairman Rong Chen and we found the basic concept of the project very interesting. The project that can only be traded on Huobi.Pro right now is aiming to build a new and decentralized internet and a platform for IoT, which will be more privacy focused and safe for the end-users (and also the machines).
The Elastos platform is built up from 3 parts: Elastos Carrier, Elastos Blockchain, Elastos Runtime (Virtual Machine). The carrier is the key to solve the problem of the decentralized internet.
The project has been featured on Huobi Talk recently and had some interesting takeaways. Most importantly Elastos (ELA) is building an own blockchain to suit all of the projects needs with a complete ecosystem together with a foundation and a mining economy.
Rong Chen went into detail to explain the inherent flaws of the internet to give the viewers a picture on what the problem is that needs fixing. The main argument was that the biggest flaw of the internet is the very nature of it, every peer/server/node can reach and communicate with each other, which makes it transparent system that is also vulnerable to attacks. This feature (which is also the flaw) results in the lack of privacy for the users and also possible attack vectors resulting from malicious peers, like a DDOS attack for example. This, especially in regards to IoT devices, is a terrible design considering that no one really wants others to discover the address and access his/her smarthome system coupled with smart cameras and other smart infrastructure items.
Elastos argues that centralized systems like WeChat (or any other similar app) have a good design feature, they offer a 'carrier' who is inspecting both parties, validates secure communication channels and offers data transfer for the parties involved. The only flaw with this concept is that these carriers are centralized in the real world currently. The Elastos Carrier will offer a decentralized alternative for the Elastos Smart Web to the existing carriers, which will transport the network traffic between the Elastos Virtual Machine on the behalf of decentralized applications.
Every dApp is run by a user and assigned a purpose and will create a new VM when opened inside a Runtime. This means that the dApps are separated from each other and there is no way to connect to them from the outside. The job of the Elastos carrier is to verify the integrity of a dApp and to transfer the data afterwards.
The Elastos Carrier will require an ID Authentication step before data can be transferred, which will prevent DDOS attacks. The ID will be given out to the parties that take use of the Smart Web by the Elastos Blockchain. This is the main reason why a blockchain has been needed and the main component in Rong's vision that he has been working on for the last decades. The communication pathways will be truly decentralized and will be secure versus content leaking and man-in-the-middle attacks. The carrier will also be capable of efficient data transfer, which will make video steaming, audio streaming and text messaging a possibility.
Every current popular service that is needed for the internet will be migrated to a dApp that will run on this secure network, think of messaging apps, video streaming, websites, etc. Roadmap for this year include large scale applications, integration of big data services, the release of the mobile web application framework and the release of Elastos Chain and Elastos ID Chain mining.
We feel that the project has very solid fundamentals, but the idea of a decentralized internet is nothing new. The space will be ruled by the first technology that manages to solve all the problems regarding scalability and usability so that the masses can migrate to the given services. Currently there are only a handful of project, which made good progress recently to solve the decentralization of the internet and Elastos seems to be one of the few.
For the full video featuring Elastos Chairman Rong Chen check out below. There is additionally a giveaway running for 215.25 ELA (which accounts for around $4500), guidelines are under the description section found in here.
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