Epistemic status: this is an autobiographical note. Crypto people reading this will not find any announcements here. Instead, the careful reader may discover a few clues about the road to Supernova.

I

I am in this small-ish white room. Alert. Patient. Curious. Been looking forward to this conversation. One by one, a few guys enter and take a seat. A few chairs have been pulled together. Nothing remarkable about the room itself, nothing formal. Just an older building, with an office room, where the chairs sit along with 1-2 desks. There’s something in the people's eyes. A spark. Curiosity maybe. A little anxiety too, from what I can tell. The kind that comes when you know you’re about to step into untried waters. Maybe you have a sense you’re about to be tested, but you’re not entirely sure how. Presently, everyone is here. Over the previous days, I’ve taken some of the hardest, most complex, and, to me, most fascinating problems in computer science, broken them down, and given one to each of them as a personal challenge.

The problems matter. As strange as it may sound, I want a new and better solution for each of the problems. I want that solution in an impossible amount of time. But today the problems are only partly the point. The challenge is a filter. If you look at one of these problems and feel daunted by it, if your first instinct is to retreat from its size or complexity, there probably isn’t much I can do to help you with. But if you look at the same problems and difficulty pulls you closer; if it begins to feel less like a wall and more like a puzzle; if, after staring at it long enough, you start to sense a dim intuitive path for a solution that comes to you before you can even explain it, then we have something. Then we can really play. I look around the room, take a breath, and take the moment in. I smile. And, for but a split second, wonder what may come of it. As it turns out, that was the first Elrond core meeting.

II

Blink for a second, and two years have passed. It’s Friday. Nine in the evening. The team is cranking hard. The room is full of energy. The last few weeks have finally brought home some fruit from a long and arduous stretch of work. A wild 30x improvement in core performance, just in time for the early testnet release. A testnet, dear reader, is an important step-change. A whitepaper is a theoretically formalized idea. A prototype is the first crude attempt to prove the idea can actually work. A testnet, or test network, is the closest thing yet to a real, working product. The idea has to leave the paper now. It must survive contact with reality. And it has to run.

I stop and think out loud, as if to make sure this is all real. That’s a thirty times improvement I think to myself. Almost unbelievable. Oh man, how shitty that prototype was. Beyond a certain threshold, it was awful. It failed us almost every time. It was written in a language nobody liked. Well, actually, a language everyone actively hated. But it had done one thing well. One surprisingly important thing. It demonstrated, for the first time, that you could architect a transaction flow in a completely parallelized way, without what’s technically called “double spending”. If this held, transaction capacity could scale to levels no other network in the world had previously reached.

My mind wanders. Zooms out. And for a moment, the whole stream of reality rearranges itself. A breakthrough. A real, genuine breakthrough. But not a finished product, yet. More like the discovery that there is, in fact, a path through the mountain. The path itself is riddled with grandmaster-level problems. A maze of sorts. You solve one problem and earn the right to face the next. You keep going until either the thing works, or you never emerge on the other side.

Anyway. As we make our way through this maze, something interesting begins to happen. The higher we climb, the more people can see us. Actually, the more people want to see us. Larger and larger investors start reaching out. They want a piece of this. A piece of what we’ve been building. Then a friend sends me a note. Binance is reviewing us. Binance, at the time, is the largest exchange in the world. And it is known for one thing above all: a pure execution machine. Its products beat the competition, day after day. The culture is 9/9/7. Nine in the morning to nine at night, seven days a week. Moving, experimenting, shipping. New products by them keep appearing on every front. The review itself is a funny thing. We don’t really know what it’s for. Maybe Binance investments. Maybe Binance Launchpad. Maybe something else. What we do know is that they are checking everything. Every post we’ve published. Every technology feature we’ve shipped. The robustness of the architecture. The soundness of the assumptions beneath it. The go-to-market strategy. Everything we have done up until that point is suddenly on the table. And the people on the other side are good. Really good. Their questions have a savvy, razor-sharp quality that is almost uncanny in this space. They know where things tend to break. They know where people tend to bullshit. And they keep digging. With a good nose for where the value sits.

We speak almost every day. Sometimes mornings. Sometimes evenings. Sometimes in the middle of the night. And slowly, through these conversations, I begin to sense something. They get it. They actually get it. They understand what we are trying to build. They see the hard parts. They appreciate what has already been solved. There is a certain respect in the air. Another month passes. Then I receive a secret invitation. I am to meet someone. No one I ask seems to know exactly who he is. I’m only told that he is very sharp, and high up inside Binance. By coincidence, I am in the US. New York, to be precise, for the Consensus conference. That is where we meet. The guy has this intense focus in his eyes. He listens very attentively. Probes. Asks a few questions, then follows the answers where they lead. The meeting ends, and I walk away realizing I cannot fully read it. It should be positive. I think it’s positive. Is it positive? No idea.

The Binance review has now been running for more than a month. Every day brings another question. Another piece of feedback. Another idea. And hanging above all of this, an unstated fact becomes more and more obvious. Thousands of world class projects want to get into Binance Launchpad. One actually gets picked. Brought inside, accelerated, and eventually put in front of the world on the Launchpad platform. The intensity of those weeks is unlike anything I have felt before. Every piece starts moving faster, all at once. The technology. The team. The investors. Binance. Something that had existed for years as an idea, then a prototype, then a stubborn little group of people solving impossible problems in a room, is suddenly gathering a certain new type of momentum. The acceleration is dizzying. And somewhere inside all these questions and late-night calls, I sense why they keep coming back. They see an edge in us. Something familiar. Maybe, for once, they see a little of their own edge in someone else.

III

It’s July, 2020. 2am. I am awake. I am also completely dead. Pain at levels I didn’t know I could take. Body finished. Mind racing. We’ve had a full day in Bucharest. Not the best of days though. We spent most of it on a filming stage. Somehow, after years of wondering whether we would ever actually reach launch day, we have somehow decided that reaching it isn’t enough. We’re also going to film a proper live session, on a proper stage, with the core team, while simultaneously setting the actual network in motion. The filming part now sucks. Big time. It’s awkward. Slow. Painful. There is too little time for the filming crew to acclimatize to us, and us to them. Too little time to grasp each other’s rhythm. Too little time to calibrate the stage, the conversations, the cameras, the live show. Take, say, a week or two and this could probably be pretty decent. Maybe even a bit fun. But try to compress it all into twenty-four to forty-eight hours and it becomes torture.

It’s evening. Things are not falling into place. Too many things. Too many voices. Each trying to drive things in a certain direction. It’s clear to me today is lost. So I might as well get a reset, a regroup, and plan the next steps. I leave the stage and come home. Well, not home home. Some random apartment we’re staying in for a few nights. I’m supposed to sleep. Instead, my mind keeps racing. There is still so much to do. And so little time left to do it. I don’t think we have enough time. The truly big part is actually done. Sort of. The network is all in place. Our technical team has been at it for months. Days, nights, weekends. Ironing out bugs, refining performance, getting it to the point it is now. Patiently, and meticulously getting it ready. Now, the telling of the story is the thing that needs to click. The two videos we’re working on are close, but still unfinished. Almost ready, but not quite. Both need to be released tomorrow. Several people are working on them, sending new iterations every hour or two. Visuals almost done, now on to the right soundtrack. My presentation isn’t written. For some reason, I had assumed the words would simply come and flow. Meanwhile, the technical team is preparing the final launch sequence. One last round of checks before the network goes live. The product team is testing the apps. Marketing and community are preparing messages, coordinating people, making sure everything moves together. It’s 4am. I should probably go to sleep. A few hours from now it will be morning. I fall asleep, two hours. A reset is good. Even when that reset is brief.

Then I’m awake again. 6am. Ten hours left. Ten hours until go-live. Now the day becomes arithmetic. Every hour matters. Every minute matters. There is no room left for wasted motion. I’m back on the stage, and something has changed now. This time, we go in and make the rules. Our rhythm. Our energy. Our way of doing it. We stop trying to fit the stage and make the stage fit us. And then, slowly, it begins to flow. Then, I look at the clock. One hour left. Wow, how time flies. We’re almost ready. Almost. A few final uploads are about to come in, and we can begin the genesis live stream.

The tension is at its peak. We’re fine, I tell myself. We’re going to make it. We’re going to set some new records for the world. Backstage, the team is sitting behind screens. Checking servers. Checking scripts. Checking the final sequence. Checking that the message for the genesis block is there, exactly as it should be. Years of work, compressed into a handful of minutes. All those nights. All those arguments. All those problems that looked impossible until, somehow, they weren’t anymore. All the things that broke. All the things we rebuilt.

And now, there’s nothing left between us and this genesis moment.

Ready or not, we are going live.

Interlude

I’ve sometimes wonder why someone would do something like this. Why someone, in their right mind, would voluntarily go through the painstaking process of building something new in this world of bits and atoms. It’s an odd thing, when you think about it. You see something that doesn’t yet exist. Then you press on, giving it years of your life. But why?

Maybe it’s pure curiosity. Maybe it’s an insatiable obsession for discovering, learning new things. Maybe it’s the urge to make something with your own hands. To take some small corner of the world that refuses to yield, wrestle with it long enough, understand it deeply enough, until eventually it does. Maybe, in some sense, it is simply the desire to master the world. I don’t really know.

What I do know is that the phenomenon is wild. Bewildering. Unreasonable. Something inside a person begins to stir. A whisper at first. So easy to miss. Except it keeps returning. It pulls you closer. It bothers you. Refuses to leave you alone. And if you listen to it long enough, you may eventually find yourself at two in the morning, completely exhausted, body aching, mind racing, years deep into some impossible thing you once decided had to exist.

And somehow, despite all of it, there’s nowhere else you would rather be.

Maybe that’s all it is. A mysterious pull toward something you were meant to do.

IV

So what did we actually achieve through all those years?

For one, we built something millions of people could actually use.

More than 3 million users came through xPortal. Together, they made more than 2 billion transactions, moving over 10 billion dollars. We built onramps, offramps, cards, and increasingly simple ways to move between this new financial world and the old one. We became almost obsessive about keeping people safe, building things like Guardians as onchain 2FAs, some of them firsts of their kind.

The point was never merely to build another wallet. It was to make a technology that could feel complicated disappear into the ordinary flow of someone's life.

Then came a very different problem.

Merchants. And payments.

More than 20,000 of them. Roughly 1 million transactions. Around 1.5 billion dollars processed. Getting there required us to enter a world that, from the outside, looks almost impossibly boring: licenses, compliance, banking relationships, regulation, audits, risk controls. From the inside, it is anything but. We acquired and maintained licensed entities across Liechtenstein, Romania, and Portugal. Became a licensed principal member of Visa and Mastercard. Built onramps and offramps. Cards. Now, during the next sprints, IBAN accounts. Stablecoin rails.

A huge amount of machinery. Almost all of it invisible. You don't appreciate that machinery much when it works. You appreciate it very suddenly when regulations change, the doors close, and businesses around you discover that the product they built can no longer legally operate. That machinery became xMoney.

And underneath both of these, almost from the beginning, we were building something stranger. A programmable financial balance sheet. People call it a blockchain. Technically, of course, it is one. But that description has always felt incomplete to me. It is closer to a bank from the future. One that never closes on Friday evening. Doesn't reopen Monday morning. It does not sleep. There is no small committee deciding which applications may be built on top of it. Anyone, anywhere, can write a program, put capital into it, and let that program run. Around 9.2 million accounts have used it. Roughly 622 million transactions have crossed it. More than 12,400 smart contracts have been deployed on top of it. Billions of dollars have moved through it, and over time, more than 50 billion dollars in value have flowed across the network, spanning users and businesses in 50+ of countries of the world. This became MultiversX.

And then there are all the other things. Some of them worked spectacularly, for some time.

Maiar DEX, later xExchange, began with tens of thousands of users, then hundreds of thousands. At its peak, billions of dollars moved through it in a single day. For a brief and remarkable period, it stood among the largest platforms of its kind in the world. Then the world moved. Users moved. Liquidity moved. Markets moved. Something that had once looked unstoppable became a fraction of what it had been. There are several stories like this. Products that caught fire and then faded. Ideas that were right for one moment and wrong for the next.

The world does this. It moves while you are building. Sometimes faster than you can. There is a certain humility that comes from living through enough of these cycles. You learn that building something difficult is not enough. Being right is not enough. Even being early is not enough sometimes.

Look around today and the lesson becomes harder to miss. Hundreds upon hundreds of startups have disappeared in the last year alone. Crypto. Finance. Technology more broadly. Companies with brilliant teams, extraordinary investors, beautiful products, enormous ambitions. Gone. That sounds dramatic until you spend enough time around startups.

Then you realize that death is not the exceptional outcome. It is the default one. Survival is the anomaly. I sometimes look back at the companies that launched beside us. The competitors we studied carefully. The teams we respected, feared, learned from. Many of them no longer exist. And there is something sobering about that. We are still here.

Scarred? Certainly. Mistakes? Many. Failures? More than I would have liked. But also something else. Seven years of reality pressing against us. Seven years of discovering which assumptions survive contact with the world. Which products people actually need. Which technologies matter. Which advantages compound.

And after all of that, somehow, we are still standing.

Still building. And now carrying something we did not have when we started: a few products people genuinely use; a few capabilities that are extraordinarily difficult to reproduce; and a much clearer understanding of the problem we were actually trying to solve all along.

V

So where are we today?

Seven years ago, we walked into a small white room with a handful of problems that looked almost impossible.

Build a high bandwidth low latency financial system. Then give anyone, anywhere easy access to it. That was the mission of Elrond.

We thought the hard part was technological. Build the network. Make it fast enough. Scale it far enough. Keep it secure. Get the machinery to work. That was complex and difficult, no doubt about it. But seven years later, something more interesting has become clear.

The network was only one piece. Along the way, we took some serendipitous detours. Some deliberate. Some forced on us by reality. Some extraordinarily valuable. Some, in hindsight, probably not worth taking at all. We built consumer products. Merchant products. Exchanges. Payment systems. We entered regulation. Acquired licenses. Built things people loved. Built things people stopped using. Watched markets appear, accelerate, turn, and sometimes disappear beneath us.

We thought we were building the pieces. What those years taught us was which pieces actually mattered. And today, remarkably, three of them are sitting in front of us.

(a) The first is the network. With Supernova, MultiversX becomes a financial system capable of processing transactions in fractions of a second, at the speed people expect from the internet itself. Open. Programmable. Global. Always on. A place where money can move, and software can act on it.

(b) The second is the bridge into the real economy. Licenses. Banking relationships. Cards. Stablecoins. Onramps. Offramps. Compliance. Very soon IBAN accounts. The dense, mostly invisible machinery required to connect an open financial network to the enormous regulated economy already moving around us. That is xMoney.

(c) The third is the interface. The thing people actually hold in their hands. Simple. Secure. Delightful. A way for a person or a business to hold money, receive it, send it, exchange it, spend it, invest it, and interact with new financial products without needing to understand the complexity underneath. That is xPortal.

A network. Regulated rails. An interface.

Separately, each is useful. Together, they become a complete path to move money. Across borders. Across markets. At internet speed. And back into the real economy again.

The network that moves the money. The bridge connecting it to the world. And the interface through which people actually use it.

And perhaps this is the most surprising thing of all. We were never really building a blockchain. We were building a new way for money to move.

The pieces are finally in place. Now comes the fun part.

Making the money move.