The blockchain space (or, more accurately, the decentralization space), is still very nascent and there ought to be developments on various parts of the ecosystem for it to gain widespread adoption. Myself and the team at Elk are excited about what decentralization can bring, and are interested in exploring what it could bring to embedded devices.

Granted, most of the applications are futuristic, but now is a good time to build proper tools to help spark people's imagination and creativity in this space.

We'll be posting lots of projects you can build with Elk. Sign up for our newsletter at https://elk.cc and let us know if you have any further thoughts or questions.

Hey exoesquitur, thanks for your comments. This is imake from the Elk team.

We did actually think of building Elk as a pure software project, but we opted not to because we didn't find hardware that we could use that would provide the 10x better embedded blockchain development experience that we want to deliver.

We wanted something that's breadboard compatible, 3.3v and 5v tolerant, integrated emmc preloaded with our OS, plug-and-play as a regular micro controller board not a single board computer, an RGB LED for indicating status, and no irrelevant and unneeded ports (HDMI, Audio, Ethernet, camera, etc).

Additionally, building out our own hardware paves the way for us to add hardware security in future iterations of the board.

We'll be adding more details and shedding more light into our development experience in upcoming blog posts. Please subscribe at https://elk.cc to learn more.

Happy to address any other concerns you might have.

Hi this is imake from the Elk team. I'm happy to discuss any claims you feel are unbelievable.

To reiterate what I mentioned in an earlier comment, our true value is in the full experience of developing blockchain applications for embedded devices, which we strongly believe is 10x better than solutions that exist today.

We didn't share details on hardware specs, and part of the reason we haven't done so yet is because we don't want to frame the conversation into specs - we won't necessarily beat other boards in the market when it comes to specs, and it's not our intention to do so.

Our intention is to make a plug-and-play Arduino-like device for embedded blockchain development. We want to an experience where you won't have to fuss over setting up a node, tuning its parameters to run well on a low embedded device, handle crashes, etc.

That's part of the reason why we chose to build our own hardware, it's because nothing existed that would allow us to give the developer experience we have in mind: breadboard compatible, 3.3v and 5v tolerant, integrated emmc preloaded with our OS, plug-and-play as a regular micro controller board not a single board computer, an RGB LED for indicating status, and no irrelevant and unneeded ports (HDMI, Audio, Ethernet, camera, etc).

We'll be adding more details and shedding more light into our development experience in upcoming blog posts. Please subscribe at https://elk.cc to learn more.

Happy to address any other concerns you might have.

Hi this is imake from the Elk team. Our original plan was to actually have hardware security built-in, but we decided to drop it given that it would substantially increase the cost of development. Given the nascent nature of blockchain protocols currently, we felt we would put our resources to better use by focusing on the development experience, which is what we think is quite lacking in the blockchain space today.

We believe current blockchain development is subpar, let alone blockchain development for embedded devices. There's room to make a 10x improvement in its UX, and that's what we're set out to do with this product. With Elk, you won't have to fuss over setting up a node, tuning its parameters to run well on a low embedded device, handle crashes, etc. We are delivering the Arduino-like experience to blockchain development, with all the libraries that Arduino already supports.

Our true value is in our software and in our ease-of-use. The development experience we want to offer is a board that is plug-and-play just like an Arduino, offers over-the-air upgrades, and offers tools for seamlessly controlling your device from your phone through decentralized technologies.

As for why we chose to build our own hardware, it's because nothing exists that would allow us to give the developer experience we have in mind: breadboard compatible, 3.3v and 5v tolerant, integrated emmc preloaded with our OS, plug-and-play as a regular micro controller board not a single board computer, an RGB LED for indicating status, and no irrelevant and unneeded ports (HDMI, Audio, Ethernet, camera, etc).

We'll be adding more details and shedding more light into our development experience in upcoming blog posts. Please subscribe at https://elk.cc to learn more.

Happy to address any other concerns you might have.