whitepaperConsensus2019
Elrond: A Highly Scalable Public Blockchain via Adaptive State Sharding
MultiversX. The Elrond team.
The 2019 Elrond paper on adaptive state sharding: shards that hold state, a metachain that notarises results, and a secure proof-of-stake selection of validators. The network later rebranded as MultiversX. The paper remains the design document.
The problem the paper names
Transaction sharding without state sharding pushes the bottleneck into whoever still holds the full state. The paper's claim is that state, transactions and network can be sharded together, with a metachain that certifies shard results.
What the design proposes
- A metachain records shard headers and cross-shard outcomes.
- Validator selection uses stake plus a random sample, with reshuffling.
- Adaptive means the number of shards is not a constant carved into the genesis story.
How the mechanism is specified
- A cross-shard transfer is a protocol dance between source shard, metachain and destination shard. It is not one atomic call.
- The security argument depends on the cost of entering a shard and on the randomness.
- The rebrand did not rewrite the 2019 text. Current client behaviour has to be read from current docs.
What this page does not treat as proven
- The paper is not a performance certificate for the live network.
- Metachain liveness is a single place the design can still stall, even if shards are many.
- We do not describe token terms or later product modules.
Why a venture studio still reads it
State sharding is the version of 'scale' that actually changes what a node stores. If a pitch shards execution but every node keeps every account, it has not adopted this paper's problem statement.
This is Blockchain Lab's reading of a public design paper. It is not the paper, not a copy of it, and not an offer of tokens, equity, custody or a partnership. Later network behaviour can diverge from the text. Nothing here is investment, legal or technical advice.