MultiversX (EGLD, formerly Elrond): Supernova Upgrade, the September 2026 Halt, and How the Network Works

EGLD is the native coin of MultiversX, the sharded proof-of-stake blockchain that was called Elrond until November 2022. The latest news in two parts. On 10 September 2026 the network activated Supernova, cutting its block round from 6 seconds to 0.6 seconds. Nine days later, on 19 September 2026, MultiversX paused mainnet after an attempted exploit of a virtual-machine atomicity issue. Block production restarted on 24 September 2026. As of 25 October 2026 we found no published full technical incident report. MultiversX had said one would follow.

What changed most recently

The September 2026 mainnet halt (19–24 September)

News reports quote MultiversX's posts on X. The team said "an actor attempted to exploit a VM-level atomicity issue" and that "the attempt caused invalid state changes, and network progression remains paused to prevent any further impact." According to those reports:

• Engineers prepared a fix and tested it on a shadow fork before deploying it to mainnet. The deployment was coordinated with validators, exchanges and infrastructure partners.
• The team said it was evaluating a recovery approach meant to "preserve finalized transaction history and legitimate user state while addressing only incident-related invalid changes."
• Users were told not to submit or rebroadcast transactions, and not to use EGLD or ESDT deposit and withdrawal routes through exchanges or bridges, until the fix was complete.
• Block production resumed on 24 September 2026, about five days after the halt. No reports we found give the amount of invalid state or of affected funds.

After the restart, some exchanges kept EGLD trading, deposits or withdrawals restricted. On 23 October 2026, two South Korean exchanges reportedly extended trading warnings on EGLD. One of them set its next announcement for 16–20 November 2026. We did not check this against the exchanges' own notices.

Our account of the incident comes from news outlets reporting MultiversX's statements. We could not open the original posts directly, and there is no official post-mortem yet.

Supernova goes live (10 September 2026)

The official Supernova builders page says the upgrade "is live on mainnet":

• Activation: round 32,157,661 at 18:06:06 UTC on 10 September 2026, in epoch 2233.
• Round time: cut from 6,000 ms to 600 ms. Rounds per epoch went from 14,400 to 144,000, so an epoch still lasts 24 hours.
• Changeover: the activation epoch ran about 22 minutes on the old clock. Transactions sent during that window waited in the pool instead of being rejected.
• Current release: node operators must run config v2.0.9.0 (binary v2.0.9), dated 14 September, or later.
• For developers: the raw block-header timestamp switches from seconds to milliseconds at the Supernova epoch. The seconds-based smart-contract API (get_block_timestamp(), get_block_timestamp_seconds()) still works. Contracts that need finer timing should use get_block_timestamp_millis().

MultiversX's main site calls Supernova mainnet v2.0, with consensus decoupled from execution and cross-shard settlement of about 2.4 seconds. The builders page does not cover finality or cross-shard timing, so treat the 2.4-second figure as the project's own target, not a measured result.

How MultiversX works

Adaptive State Sharding

MultiversX splits the network into shards. Each shard stores only part of the state and processes transactions in parallel with the others. According to the official documentation, the number of shards is recalculated every epoch "based on the processing load in shards and number of nodes that will form the network in the upcoming epoch." Validators are also reshuffled between shards each epoch.

The metachain

The metachain is a separate chain that coordinates the shards. At the end of each epoch it:

• uses randomness from the previous metachain block to choose which nodes move to new shards;
• sets the shard count for the next epoch;
• promotes nodes that have finished a waiting-list epoch to eligible validators;
• spreads nodes from the network-wide waiting list randomly and evenly across shards.

Consensus

The official documentation describes the consensus as Secure Proof of Stake (SPoS). Validators stake EGLD to take part in block production and validation.

EGLD tokenomics

Transaction fees offset new issuance. The docs give an example: if 100,000 EGLD is scheduled for minting in a year and users pay 75,000 EGLD in fees, only 25,000 EGLD of new supply enters circulation. Live circulating supply and market cap change constantly, so check them on a market-data site or a block explorer.

Background: from Elrond to MultiversX

• Founders: brothers Beniamin and Lucian Mincu, together with Lucian Todea. Most sources date the start of the project to late 2017; one source says 2018.
• Mainnet: launched in July 2020, according to contemporary reporting.
• Rebrand: in November 2022, at the X Day event in Paris, Elrond became MultiversX and added a metaverse focus. It also announced xPortal (the successor to the Maiar app), xFabric and xWorlds. EGLD stayed the native token.

What to watch

• Whether MultiversX publishes the full technical incident report, and what it says about the scope of the invalid state changes and how they were reversed.
• Whether the restricted exchange services reopen and whether the trading warnings are lifted. One exchange set its next announcement for 16–20 November 2026.
• Whether Supernova's 600 ms rounds and the project's settlement targets hold under real load after the September restart.

Limitations: the incident details come from secondary reports of MultiversX statements because no official post-mortem was available on 25 October 2026, and none of this is investment advice.