More than a year ago we interviewed the Elrond team for Wealth Mastery, and I am very excited to welcome them back to learn about some major updates and technical progress.  Also before we begin I wanted to highlight that the Maiar Dex has recently suffered a bug and has spent time offline in the last week. If you want to inform yourself about this situation then I suggest you check THIS out.

What are the biggest updates since we spoke last time?

Most recent milestones:

• Romanian Central Bank approved Elrond acquisition of EMI Institution Twispay
• Elrond acquired Utrust – a crypto payments provider that allows any merchant to accept crypto payments which are automatically converted to fiat
• The Ad-Astra Portal bridge connecting Elrond & Ethereum is live
• Metabonding: a community bootstrapping product for Elrond startups
• Metastaking: a Maiar DEX unique innovation that combines staking, liquidity providing and yield farming into one powerful product
• A new listing process involving a price discovery mechanism has been introduced on the Maiar DEX
• Maiar DeFi Wallet: browser extension for Elrond dApps
• Elrond integrated Anchain’s blockchain analytics suite to allow institutional grade AML
• Itheum is building a new data driven economy on Elrond
• Holoride VR technology will be introduced into several Audi models by June 2022
• Skynet EGLD Capital raised $40+ Million USD to invested in the Elrond Ecosystem 

Recently you announced a bridge to Ethereum, what does this mean for Elrond?

The recently launched Ethereum bridge is just one out of the many pieces of the puzzle slowly coming together in the vibrant and expansive Elrond Ecosystem as of late. It connects the Elrond and Ethereum, enabling the free flow of tokens between them. The implications of this tremendous achievement are hard to overstate, fostering growth for everybody involved and opening new paths to innovation. A wide range of projects, together with their builders, investors, and the communities backing them will be able to get a taste of what true speed, scalability, and decentralization look like, further accelerating adoption.

What is the progress on the Elrond NFT marketplace?

Development for the Elrond NFT Marketplace has reached the final stages. More to be announced soon ⏳

The Maiar Exchange recently introduced Metabonding, can you tell us about that?

Metabonding is a new community program on the Maiar Exchange that helps boost the reach of projects building on Elrond. In essence, it is the ultimate community bootstrapping product for Web3 startups. Projects can apply to take part in the program by establishing a long term commitment with the most hardcore community members, by distributing ~10% of their token supply to EGLD stakers and LKMEX stakers, over the course of 2 years. There are currently 5 projects, with new ones to be added soon. 

The projects registering for Metabonding, will see a rapid adoption taking place in the Elrond ecosystem, benefiting from:

• Awareness from the entire Elrond community
• Listing on the Maiar DEX and Maiar App (exposure to 1M users)
• Access to staking program templates on the Maiar DEX & fiat on ramps.
• Trading competitions & Learn and Earn/ Social campaigns

The distribution of rewards will be segmented between two types of users. Firstly, users who stake EGLD and secondly, users who stake LKMEX in the special pool that can be found on the Metabonding page. Based on staked EGLD/LKMEX daily snapshots, there is a weekly average used to determine each address share of the reward pool on that week. Participants can claim their rewards from all participating projects in Metabonding on a weekly basis.

Can you tell us a few examples of some of the applications being built on Elrond?

Beniamin’s recent twitter thread on the Elrond ecosystem sums up the current promising live/ under development applications building on Elrond.

To what extent do you see gaming being a part of Elrond’s future?

Gaming is a core part of the Elrond ecosystem, given that it has the ability to revolutionize the way we interact with entertainment. We are fully committed to making sure that games will be a driving force behind the Elrond blockchain adoption, so much so that recently we have announced an investment into the Cantina Royale project.

Besides that, we have also spotlighted some of the most exciting projects currently under development from the Elrond community.

What comes next for Elrond?

Keep an eye out for:

• Crypto Debit Cards
• More Launchpad projects
• Growth phase for Utrust
• Maiar App 2.0
• NFT Marketplace
• Elrond conference (potential)
• Hackathons