Elph

Elph was a San Francisco-based company focused on building blockchain infrastructure to simplify the development and use of decentralized applications (dApps). Founded in 2018 by a team of five co-founders—Ritik Malhotra (CEO), Tanooj Luthra (CTO), Abhinav Lanka, Vamsi Chitters, and Sarat Ravi—Elph aimed to tackle critical issues in the blockchain space, including scalability, usability, and privacy. The founding team brought together experience from prominent tech companies like Coinbase, Google, Box, and Yahoo. Notably, co-founders Ritik Malhotra and Tanooj Luthra, both UC Berkeley alumni, had previously founded Streem, a media cloud storage platform acquired by Box in 2014.

The company's mission was to lower the barrier to entry for both users and developers in the Web3 ecosystem. Elph's business model centered on providing a comprehensive suite of tools and infrastructure. For developers, Elph offered a Software Development Kit (SDK) that enabled simple, email/password-based authentication for dApps, removing a significant friction point for mainstream user adoption. This was part of a broader strategy to offer development platforms and tools that other companies could use to build their own blockchain solutions. The company also developed a network of scalable Plasma sidechains, a 'layer-2' solution built on top of Ethereum designed to dramatically increase transaction throughput. These sidechains could reportedly process over 6,000 transactions per second, a substantial improvement over Ethereum's capacity at the time, without sacrificing the security guarantees of the main blockchain.

Elph's product portfolio was designed to address four key areas. The first was a dApp browser and wallet, which allowed consumers to discover and interact with decentralized applications seamlessly. The second was the developer-focused SDK for authentication. The third component was the high-throughput Plasma sidechain network, which was configurable to allow applications to operate in parallel, each with its own specifications. Finally, Elph offered a service for enterprises to establish private, permissioned blockchain networks for secure inter-organizational transactions, which attracted interest from over 50 large companies for use cases ranging from trading financial products to supply chain tracking. In March 2019, Elph was acquired by Brex, a financial technology company, with the entire five-person founding team joining Brex to contribute to its product development.

Keywords: Elph, blockchain infrastructure, decentralized applications, dApps, Ritik Malhotra, Tanooj Luthra, Plasma sidechains, Ethereum scaling, dApp browser, developer SDK, private blockchain, Web3 usability, Brex acquisition, Y Combinator, The House Fund, layer-2 solution, cryptocurrency payments, blockchain authentication, enterprise blockchain, decentralized identity, smart contracts