• MultiversX is a high-throughput public blockchain focused on providing security, efficiency, scalability, and interoperability by employing two key elements: Adaptive State Sharding and a new Secure Proof of Stake ("SPoS") consensus mechanism.

• MultiversX can process over 30k transactions per second with low block times (6s), negligible transaction fees, and fast finality for cross-shard transactions in a matter of seconds.

• At X-Day Paris 2022, its first annual conference, Elrond announced its rebrand into MultiversX, introducing three new products:

  • xFabric: a high performance sovereign blockchain layer, incorporating several application modules for creatives, brands and companies, ready to scale with the rapid metaverse expansions;

  • xPortal: an all purpose Metaverse SuperApp that will empower users to traverse the legacy digital space into the multiverse of opportunities;

  • xWorlds: a new world of Metaverse, opening a new creative space for builders, entrepreneurs and gamers to explore, discover, and conquer.

• EGLD is the native token of the project. The current use cases for EGLD include:

  • Network transactions: EGLD is paid by users for transaction fees for interacting with dApps, smart contracts, web3 payments and NFTs.

  • Staking: Users can run validator nodes and stake EGLD to secure the network. Alternatively, users can also stake their EGLD to non-custodial staking services providers.

  • Governance: participate in on-chain governance and vote on various improvement proposals.

• The project consists of the following major components working in conjunction:

  • Adaptive State Sharding: works via shard merges & splits for unlimited scalability and uses a fully sharded Architecture, which includes state, transactions, and network. This architecture is deemed highly resilient against malicious attacks due to validators shuffling between shards.

  • Smart-contract royalties: 30% of the fees are reallocated to the smart contract author.

  • Secure Proof of Stake: eliminates PoW computational waste, and combines eligibility through stake and rating with random validator selection, and an optimal dimension for the consensus group.

• As of Jan 17th 2023, the maximum token supply of EGLD is 31,415,926. The current circulating supply is 24,184,559 (~77% of the total max supply).

• Custom tokens on MultiversX operate natively, being as fast, scalable and inexpensive as EGLD. Moreover, their creation and management don’t imply the Virtual Machine (Smart Contracts) at all, which mitigates ‘hidden’ security risks when transferring tokens.

• Learn more about the token distribution of EGLD here.

1. What is MultiversX (EGLD)?

MultiversX is a high-throughput public blockchain focused on providing security, efficiency, scalability, and interoperability by employing two key elements: Adaptive State Sharding and a new Secure Proof of Stake ("SPoS") consensus mechanism.

MultiversX’s blockchain protocol for smart contracts & dApps can process 30k transactions per second with low block times (6s), negligible transaction fees, and fast finality for cross-shard transactions in seconds.

MultiversX’s mainnet has been live with no downtime since July 2020 and can be used for easy deployment of programmable money and dApps, thus operating as the backbone of an open, permissionless, borderless, globally accessible internet economy.

MultiversX combines these key innovations:

• State sharding (transaction, data & network sharding); adaptivity through shard merges, and shard splits.

• Consensus in two communication rounds with modified Boneh–Lynn–Shacham ("BLS") multi-signatures.

• High resiliency to malicious attacks due to intra and cross shard node reshuffling.

• Secure randomness beacon with BLS signing.

• Smart contracts on a state sharded architecture with balanced load on shards.

• Fast finality for cross shard transactions (seconds).

The MultiversX mobile app, xPortal, offers internet users an intuitive first-time experience with blockchain technology, offering progressive security and a gamified approach to unlocking more useful features.

The MultiversX economic model has a capped supply and decreasing issuance, furthering scarcity with adoption. The token is named EGLD to convey the notion of a digital store of value for the next billion users.The MultiversX Network is certified carbon negative by Offsetra, as it offsets more CO2 than what the network is accountable for.

2. Project Key Highlights

The blockchain has low system requirements and can run on various devices, from a normal computer to T2 medium AWS machines. The blockchain features epochs of ~24 hours and rounds of ~6 seconds.

All the validators in MultiversX's network are split among multiple shards, where they will only have to synchronize the state for the current shards and process transactions only for their current shard. To prevent collusion among validators, up to ⅓ of the validators in a shard are reshuffled to other shards at the end of every epoch.

Each shard consists of a minimum of 400 validators and has a separate chain, accounts and application state. The consensus group (currently set to be n=63) changes every round, based on a randomness seed stored in the previous block's header. These validators in the consensus group need to agree on the proposed block in every round of every epoch.

2.1 Cross-shard transaction processing

For an in-depth example of how the cross-shard transactions are being executed and how the communication between shards and the metachain occurs, the entire process is illustrated using the simple two shard case and the metachain as shown in the figure below.

The strategy for processing one cross-shard transaction is to use an asynchronous model. Validation and processing is done first in the sender's shard, notarized in the metachain and then finalized in the receiver's shard.

• Step 1: The cross-shard transactions are first processed and added to a block in the sender's shard. The transaction value has thus been deducted from the sender's account.

• Step 2: The block header is sent to the metachain where it is added to a metablock.

• Step 3: The metablock arrives in the destination shard and then needs to be processed there. The destination shard requests the transaction from the sender's shard (if missing).

• Step 4: The transaction is then added in a block in the destination shard and the block header is sent to the metachain. As a result, the transaction value has been added to the recipient account.

• Step 5: The metachain notarizes the block that includes the processed transaction in the destination shard and the transaction is then finalized.

This iteration consists of static state sharding, secure proof of stake consensus, Schnorr signature for transactions, BLS signatures for random seed generation, and modified BLS multisig for blocksigning.

Metrics that are being monitored to check improvement of the network include: latency, bandwidth limitations, running each validator node on a separate machine with very limited compute power (average dual-core CPU with 4GB of memory), and different geographic locations.

Key stats for the current testnet are as follows:

• Sharding setup: 3 Shards + Metachain

• Nodes: 500 x AWS T2.medium (validator nodes) and AWS 12 x T2.large (observer nodes)

• Nodes per shard: 800

• Consensus: BLS round every 6 seconds on each shard

• Consensus size: 63 nodes per shard

• Max-Blocksize: ~800KB

• Peak-TPS: ~15,000 (263,000 TPS with 51 shards in testnet on community nodes)

The team is working on improving the network stack used for communication to reduce the bandwidth and network overhead within the consensus group of each shard. Another improvement from the initial prototype architecture has been upgrading the consensus model to reduce the number of communication rounds between consensus groups on each shard from 5 to 2. An illustration of MultiversX's latest implementation of Secure Proof of Stake is as follows:

An illustration of Elrond's Adaptive State Sharding Approach is as follows:

2.2 Development toolkit

Writing Smart Contracts on MultiversX is made easy by frameworks in Rust, C, C++ and other languages compiling down to WASM. The erdpy back-end is a complete CLI & Python SDK for building, deploying and interacting with Smart Contracts. The erdjs framework allows for front-ends to be deployed using TypeScript & JavaScript and makes testing easy with tools such as Mocha. The MultiversX Integrated Development Environment is available via the Microsoft marketplace as a Visual Studio Code extension. Its integration with the SC framework allows developers to focus solely on smart contract logic and handles boilerplate code, dependencies and inheritances while offering a transparent debugging interface.

3. Economics and supply

3.1 Key metrics

(as of Jan 17, 2023)

3.2 Token supply distribution

• Launchpad sale tokens comprise 25% of total supply.

• Private sale tokens comprise 19% of total supply.

• Team tokens comprise 19% of total supply.

• Reserve tokens comprise 17% of total supply.

• Advisors received 2.5% of total supply.

• Ecosystem Rewards tokens comprise 7% of total supply.

• Marketing tokens comprise 8.5% of total supply.

• Community tokens comprise 2% of total supply.

3.3 EGLD token release schedule

The following chart represents the number and breakdown of all EGLD tokens that are intended to be released into circulation on a monthly basis.

3.4 Token overview and use cases

The use cases intended for EGLD include but are not limited to:

• Network transactions: EGLD is paid by users for transaction fees for interacting with dApps, smart contracts, web3 payments and NFTs.

• Staking: Users can run validator nodes and stake EGLD to secure the network. Alternatively, users can also stake their EGLD to non-custodial staking services providers.

• Governance: This year, with the EGLD token holders can participate in on-chain governance and vote on various improvement proposals.

4. Roadmap, updates, and business development

At X-Day Paris 2022, its first annual conference, MultiversX has announced the transformation and evolution of its vision, expanding the scale and scope of building the new internet economy to include the digital meta-space frontier.

Moreover, three new products were introduced, as the pillars for this evolution:

• xFabric: a high performance sovereign blockchain layer, incorporating several application modules for creatives, brands and companies, ready to scale with the rapid metaverse expansions;

• xPortal: an all purpose Metaverse SuperApp that will empower users to traverse the legacy digital space into the multiverse of opportunities;

• xWorlds: a new world of worlds Metaverse, opening a new creative space for builders, entrepreneurs and gamers to explore, discover, and conquer.

4.1 Completed Milestones

Q4 2021

• Launchpad - https://xlaunchpad.com/

• DEX AMM - https://xexchange.com/

Q1 2022

• Web3 Payments https://multiversx.com/blog/elrond-acquires-utrust-web3payments/

• Metastaking - https://xexchange.com/metastaking

Q2 2022

• Metabonding - https://xexchange.com/metabonding

• MultiversX SuperWave

• Ad Astra Bridge - https://ad-astra.multiversx.com/

• Jungle DEX - https://jungledex.com/

Q3 2022

• MultiversX Gamify

• Inspire ART NFT Aggregator - https://inspire.art/

Q4 2022

• X Day Paris - https://xday.com/

• DEX becomes xExchange

• 4.2 Current Roadmap

4.2 Current Roadmap

Q1 2023

• Strategic Multi-country hypergrowth

• Onchain governance

• Inspire Art becomes xSpotlight

• Explorer becomes MultiversX Explorer

• Web Wallet becomes MultiversX Wallet

• xPortal launch

• Debit Card

• Ad-Astra Portal becomes MultiversX Bridges

• xWorlds first glimpse goes live

Q2 2023

• UTRUST and Twispay become xMoney

• xFabric, the creative blockchain module for individuals and brands, goes live

• Launchpad becomes xLaunchpad

4.3 Commercial partnership and business development progress

To drive adoption and build a robust ecosystem, MultiversX has partnered with several companies and blockchain projects, including the following:

• Utrust: Acquisition of Utrust, crypto payments processor that enables merchants to easily accept payments in any currency and automatically settle in fiat.

• Twispay: Acquisition of Twispay, a card issuer and payments processor that holds an EU e-money license.

• Samsung: Samsung is a South Korean multinational technology conglomerate. MultiversX entered a collaboration with Samsung and released a mobile game with blockchain integration, exclusively Samsung’s flagship smartphones.

• Opera: Opera is a web browser giant with a strong focus on Web3 technologies. The MultiversX network has been integrated into Opera’s products suite, enabling access to EGLD, ESDT tokens and MultiversX applications through their popular platforms.

• Romania’s National Institute for Research and Development In Informatics: ICI Bucharest experts, alongside MultiversX developers, are working in parallel on building an institutional NFT marketplace and a decentralized Domain Name System (DNS/TLD), both first-of-their-kind initiatives in the European Union.

• Global Digital Assets Corporation (GDAC): GDAC works with high-growth economies and regions to enable innovation, boost economies and help to create new jobs. MultiversX and GDAC are exploring the implementation of fast payments & clearance networks, as well as the definition and implementation of smart contract frameworks.

• [BUSD:] BUSD will use the MultiversX Standard for custom tokens, which makes token transfers as fast and inexpensive as the native protocol coin.

• Industrial Internet Consortium: The Industrial Internet Consortium aims to transform business and society by accelerating the adoption of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). MultiversX and the Consortium members are working together to develop business solutions.

• Netopia: Netopia is an electronic payment processor from Southeast Europe. MultiversX and Netopia have jointly worked on integrating EGLD into the Netopia payment platform.

• TypingDNA: TypingDNA is a behavioral biometrics company, protecting online users based on how they type on their keyboards. MultiversX and TypingDNA aim to explore the integration of TypingDNA biometrics solutions into the MultiversX platform and future products in order to improve security.

• SmartBill: SmartBill is a fintech company providing SaaS-based services to small, and medium-sized businesses for invoicing, accounting and inventory management. MultiversX and SmartBill aim to explore the potential integration of the two platforms to provide their users and clients blockchain-based features for transparency or traceability.

• Distributed Systems Research Laboratory (DSRL): DSRL is a laboratory focusing on distributed systems related research areas such as machine learning, big data analytics, and IOT. MultiversX and DSRL aim to collaborate on Blockchain Research and educational initiatives.

Link to original whitepaper: https://files.multiversx.com/multiversx-whitepaper.pdf

5. Project team

6. Community

• Twitter

• LinkedIn

• Facebook

• Instagram

• Reddit

7. Appendix

• Website

• CoinMarketCap

• xExchange Guide

• xPortal

• xFabric

• xWorlds