Romanian blockchain startup Elrond, based in Sibiu, launched its Maiar app on Monday morning, February 1.

The app launch comes after the Elrond network’s native cryptocurrency E-Gold increased its value sevenfold in the last two months, reaching a market capitalization of over USD 1 billion.

However, the EGLD price went down more than 10% in the last two days, after reaching a USD 72 on January 30.

Over 37,000 unique accounts were opened in the first 12 hours after the Maiar app went live, according to Elrond co-founder and CEO Beniamin Mincu.

He says this was only the “soft launch” and that the Elrond team is still working on fixing the key problems signaled by users. This includes improving the registration bandwidth limitation and scaling the speed of EGLD purchases.

The app currently allows users to buy EGLD as well as Binance coins and Ethereum (through partner exchanges) and receive or send EGLD just based on the phone number (or herotag) of the sender or recipient. Maiar thus aims to simplify cryptocurrency transfers and make them accessible to more people.

Elrond’s declared goal is to reach one billion users. However, this would require a growth of 10 new accounts per second for the next 3.2 years, according to Beniamin Mincu.

For comparison, Revolut, one of the most popular money transfer and management apps, had about 12 million users in 2020.

(Photo: Pixabay)

andrei@romania-insider.com