Tom and I have been heads down for the past couple weeks putting the finishing touches on what we’re calling Ellipticoin Prototype Phase I.

In this phase we’ll be launching with the minimal set of functionality so we can get working software into the hands of users as quickly as possible. Users will be able to trade Ellipticoin with Ether via Uniswap and a community-run token bridge. Ethereum holders can also unlock Ellipticoins via the “Trade” tab of the Ellipticoin wallet. In prototype Phase 1 tokens will unlock at ratio of one hundred to one. This is to incentivize early adoption similar to how Bitcoin’s halvenings are set up. This phase will be capped at 10,000 ETH/1 million EC. 100,000 Ellipticoin and 25 ETH will be added to the Uniswap liquidity pool on June 17th putting the initial token price at $0.06 USD per token. Later phases will have progressively smaller multipliers as we gain traction. Eventually unlocking will be phased out all together and supply will be capped at 21 million coins. Since burned tokens are recycled back into the system the system doesn’t need to rely on inflation to pay for security. Bitcoin and Ethereum showed that digital assets and smart contracts are possible but we’re confident Ellipticoin will be significantly more scalable, user friendly an energy efficient.

Of course there’s dozens of other so-called “Ethereum Killers” making those promises, what makes Ellipticoin different? Most importantly: our funding mechanism. I’m not aware of any other projects that are bootstrapping without a pre-mine or founders reward. For a layer 1 solution to be successful the sale of tokens needs to be open to the public like the Ethereum and Bitcoin token sales were. The fact is that ownership of blockchains isn’t evenly distributed and it never will be. Power naturally centralizes over time. But the illusion of ownerlessness has to be maintained. It’s not possible to maintain that illusion through traditional fundraising mechanism which all of the other Eth killers are utilizing.

Is this the easiest path? Certainly not but it’s necessary to keep the project sufficiently decentralized. My plan for profiting off of this personally is facilitate the community in creating an Ellipticoin DAO which is funded by miner “taxes”. That DAO can then hire me to continue to work on the protocol. Tom plans to profit off of running a miner. In the last 30 days Ethereum miners have been paid over $16 million dollars in mining fees. There’s plenty of money to be made without raising money privately.

Another question we’ve been getting is how we achieve scalability and zero emissions on consensus. In short: by making trade offs. Other projects will attempt to hide their trade offs. They’ll tell you there are no downsides to their designs. In reality this isn’t ever the case. The first trade off we decided to to make was to remove the DDOS protections of traditional proof of work consensus. That allowed us to elect block winners ahead of time which means they can process transactions in real time. For users this gives the experience of instant transactions that they’re used to in Web 2.0. Miners will have to protect themselves from DDOS attacks through traditional means which is a solved problem. Another trade-off we are making is we are optimizing for miners to use cloud instances instead of running hardware themselves. While running your own hardware does sounds like more fun you can process a lot more transactions per node with powerful cloud servers. There is the argument that expensive cloud servers are cost prohibitive to some people but we think this a worthwhile trade off. Miners on ETH2 will already have to buy $8k worth of ETH at current prices to run a staking node. Why not have them spend that money on a cloud server instead? I don’t expect users of the network care whether the network is running on cloud servers or commodity hardware.

We’re also approaching development differently than Eth 2 and other teams. Waterfall development has been known to lead to missed deadlines and buggy software for years. Instead of writing a specification up front we’re building we’re using a more modern approach and building a prototype and iterating based on user feedback.

Instead of writing our own binary encoding format and networking library we’re using existing standards like CBOR and HTTP. This allows us to ship working software quicker than other teams.

We also leverage existing software like Postgres our database and Rust for our smart contract programming language. Spending less time reimplementing things from scratch gives us more time to focus on building the best possible network.

Ethereum does have network effects. This is what we will working around in Prototype phases II and III. In prototype phase II we’ll be setting up a decentralized bridge from Ellipticoin to Ethereum using RenVM. In prototype phase III we’ll be setting up a decentralized bridge from all ERC20 tokens on Ethereum to Ellipitcoin. Also in this phase we’ll set up a simple automated market maker similar to Uniswap version 1 so people can trade these tokens. The first real use case will allow for people to buy sell and trade all ERC20 tokens instantly. This is not only a much nicer user experience but will solve for the front running issues seen on Uniswap. Imagine being able to convert your ETH to Bitcoin instantly and then sending it to someone else who can instantly convert it to a Gold synthetic for storage. That will all be possible in prototype phase III. And that’s just the beginning! After the prototype phases we plan to enable full smart contract support and add a DAO that’s funded by miner taxes which will take ownership of the network.

What set us apart from other chains is that we ship working software. You can already trade ETH for Ellipticoins via the Ellipticoin wallet. As is noted on the website these balances won’t be persisted and is just available for testing purposes. On June 17th we’ll flip the switch and kick things off for real!

Yesterday I was charged $29 in transaction fees and had to wait 12 minutes for a single transaction to confirm when adding liquidity to Uniswap. A single Bitcoin transaction requires the same energy it would take to power 18 US households for a day. We’re confident we can do better. Join us!

As always you can join us in the Telegram chat room if you’ve got any questions or comments on any of this! See you there!