MultiversX (EGLD)

MultiversX (EGLD) is the native cryptocurrency of the MultiversX blockchain, a proof-of-stake network that splits its workload into parallel shards to process many transactions at once. EGLD, short for eGold, pays transaction fees, is staked by validators and delegators to secure the chain, and is used in governance votes. The network was known as Elrond until November 2022, when the project renamed itself MultiversX.

The coin should not be confused with the company or the wallet app built around it. MultiversX is a layer-1 chain with its own smart contracts and token standard, and it competes with other high-throughput networks such as Solana (SOL) and NEAR Protocol (NEAR), which also uses sharding. Development is led by MultiversX, a team based in Romania, alongside a foundation.

Picture a supermarket with a single checkout. However fast the cashier works, the queue grows when the shop is busy. MultiversX opens several checkouts and sends each shopper to one of them, while a supervisor at the front keeps a master record of what every till has taken. When the shop gets busier, more tills can open.

Each checkout in this picture is a shard: a slice of the network that handles its own share of accounts and transactions. The supervisor is a coordinating chain called the metachain. EGLD is the money used at every till. People who lock up EGLD to help staff the checkouts earn rewards, and the same EGLD gives them a vote on how the shop is run.

Elrond was founded in 2017 by Beniamin Mincu, Lucian Mincu and Lucian Todea. Its original token, ERD, was sold through Binance Launchpad in 2019, and the mainnet launched in July 2020, when ERD was swapped for the new EGLD at a ratio of 1,000 to 1. In June 2022 an attacker exploited a smart-contract flaw to drain about 1.65 million EGLD, then worth roughly $113 million, through the project's Maiar decentralized exchange, which went offline for about two days; the team said most funds were recovered or covered by the foundation. In November 2022 Elrond became MultiversX, renaming the Maiar wallet xPortal and the exchange xExchange, and announcing a push into metaverse projects.

MultiversX uses what it calls Secure Proof of Stake, in which validators are chosen at random for each round in proportion to their stake and rating. Its adaptive state sharding divides network state, transactions and validators across several execution shards plus the metachain, and is designed to let shards split or merge as demand changes. Accounts are assigned to shards by address, and a transaction between two shards is processed in steps on each side, with the metachain notarizing the results. Validators are reshuffled between shards regularly to make it harder to take over any single shard. Holders who do not run a node can delegate EGLD to staking providers and share in the rewards; see staking. The Supernova upgrade, planned for mainnet in September 2026, was designed to cut block times from 6 seconds to 0.6 seconds by separating consensus from execution.

EGLD was designed with a fixed cap of about 31.4 million tokens. In late 2025 holders approved a governance proposal that replaced the cap with tail inflation, in which new EGLD keeps being issued at a declining annual rate, while some fees are burned. The maximum first-year issuance under the new tokenomics is:

• $\Delta S$ is the maximum new EGLD issued in the year.
• $S$ is the total supply at the start of the year.
• $r$ is the maximum annual inflation rate, set at 8.757\% for the first year and designed to decline in later years.

With a starting supply of 29{,}000{,}000 EGLD, the first-year ceiling would be $29{,}000{,}000 \times 0.08757 \approx 2{,}540{,}000$ EGLD. Actual net growth is lower once burned fees are subtracted, and holders who do not stake are diluted over time.

• Fees and staking. Every transaction is paid in EGLD, and staked EGLD secures the network.
• Payments and apps. The xPortal app combines a digital wallet, payments and access to decentralized apps.
• Tokens. Projects issue their own tokens and NFTs on MultiversX, which are handled natively by the protocol rather than by separate contracts.
• Governance. EGLD stakers vote on protocol changes such as the 2025 economic reform.

The end of the fixed supply cap was controversial: some investors argued that it broke an early promise and that the inflation rate was too high compared with the fees being burned. Critics also note that the 2022 rebrand and metaverse plans did not bring the growth in users that the team had predicted, and that activity on the chain remains small next to larger networks. Sharding adds complexity, because transactions between shards take extra steps. EGLD trades on major cryptocurrency exchanges and, like other mid-sized coins, has been highly volatile.

• MultiversX
• MultiversX documentation