Elastic has no masternode system (unless they#ve built on in the last few months and I completely missed it). Or do you mean the regular nodes? There are obviously nodes, but afaik, there's not collateral needed. It's basic block production layer is NXT-style PoS. On top of it is the computation layer, which works a bit like PoW. Since XELs supply is fixed, the only rewards are transaction fees. How much XEL is needed to be decently successful in producing blocks depends on the overall staking weight, I'm not familiar with the current situation.

Regarding Discord and stuff, not sure if there is one, but I don't use it anyway. You are free to create one, though.