[imake]

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.