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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. |