$ELK is the life-force of the Elk.Finance ecosystem. It is used for cross-chain value transfer, governance, and will be used for minting our stablecoin, CHFT.
ELK is a utility token built for cross-chain value transfer. All ELK sent through ElkNet will eventually burn a small amount of ELK. As an ERC20 token, ELK is freely tradeable on exchanges and fully compatible with EVM wallets as well as compatible wallets on supported chains. ELK will eventually be available on non-EVM chains.
Unconverted legacy tokens ($lELK & oELK) will remain in circulation, but they will have no utility.
The hard cap of 4.2M $ELK per chain has been lifted (but the total across all chains remains 42M). The upgrade will prevent problems in the future as $ELK flows between chains according to demand. With the legacy contract, once the 4.2M per chain cap was reached, there would be no way to transfer additional $ELK funds onto that chain. The maximum supply across chains remains capped at 42M, so the tokenomics will not be impacted.
The Elk token is currently pausable, which is initially necessary for the security of the mainnet. There is a plan to keep this ability for a time and then relinquish it to a governing council of 7 people for approximately 6 months before it is left up to governance.
The upgraded token supports block-based snapshots, which will help to streamline cross-chain transfers, as well as things like analytics and airdrops.
To upgrade your legacy ELK (lElk) to the new Elk, follow the tutorial shown here.