You are about to read a piece where I expose what I see as obvious lies and manipulation in MultiversX. I think the price is going to zero, and to me this looks like a horrible investment. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I actually owned this last year, and when I actually used it and did further research on it, I realized: uh oh, I think this is going to collapse, and I'd better sell mine before everybody else figures it out. So that's exactly what I did. I'm tired of people getting ripped off on terrible crypto investments that I could take ten minutes to look at and shred for you.
The price chart and the branding
Let's start with the usual: the price chart. MultiversX is ranked around 75 if you exclude stablecoins. It's already down about 93% from its all-time high. From a branding standpoint, to me the name is awful. The abbreviation is EGLD, the project is MultiversX, and the metaverse is a dead narrative for this coming market. So just starting off, the branding feels junky to me, and the abbreviation and the price chart are things that, in my opinion, will scare most investors off all by themselves.
But let's take a look at what is, to me, the most offensive, blatant lying right in your face from the founder. He made a post on X that reads, and I'm quoting: "We are four years in. MultiversX is the most scalable, advanced, and secure layer one in the world today." In my view, that's provably false. This, to me, is the crypto matrix 101 for ripping you off.
The founder's claim I think is provably false
If you compare MultiversX to Internet Computer Protocol, I don't believe anyone in the world, except maybe the founder, would look at the technology on both of these and say that MultiversX is "the most scalable, advanced, and secure layer one in the world today." To me that's absolutely ridiculous. Internet Computer Protocol is, in my opinion, the most advanced and scalable. You could argue the security point, perhaps, but under no circumstances would 99.99% of people look at both and say MultiversX is more advanced or scalable in any way compared to Internet Computer Protocol.
If you look at the MultiversX network, you'll see thousands of decentralized machines that have hardly any computing power, and to me they can't really do much of anything on chain. The founder's post continues: "As for the community, there's no second best. If you look at the ecosystem, you see even more builders fulfilling original visions." If you put Internet Computer in for this, I'd say that's true. But for MultiversX, "as for the community, there's no second best" is ridiculous to me. Did we look at the price chart for a minute? Do we want to talk about all the other projects with far superior communities?
I'm only even talking about MultiversX because a guy made a great video exposing the lies and manipulation of Solana, and then the same guy is out here talking about how great MultiversX is. I'm like, why don't you do your research on what you're actually holding? That's the whole spirit of what I do in my Money playlist — looking at what you might actually be holding instead of just chasing hype.
The IPFS problem: NFTs that aren't really on chain
Let me give you a very clear, concrete example of what I see as the founder blatantly contradicting his own claim. If you go to the MultiversX docs — which I'd guess 99% of people holding MultiversX have never done — and search for IPFS, the Interplanetary File System, you'll see how they host files. IPFS is a way of hosting files where you combine it with the blockchain, the blockchain stores a little hash, and the file is hosted somewhere else. And often that file ends up resolving back to something like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud — centralized hosting. So it's clear in the MultiversX documentation: they can't even put an NFT fully on chain. The actual NFT itself, the picture, is hosted off chain.
Elon Musk, one of the richest people in the world, saw through how fraudulent that kind of setup is very easily, even though his level of crypto experience was pumping up Dogecoin. He laughed on Joe Rogan's show about how worthless it is to have an NFT hosted like that, where it's not even on the blockchain itself. Internet Computer, by contrast, not only does NFTs, pictures, videos, and games 100% on chain — not hosted on IPFS — it can also do AI fully on chain. Right now the AI models are more basic, but it has facial recognition you can run on chain, and that's a big deal, because that's enough to hit some key things for crypto.
So according to its own documentation, this is clearly not the most advanced layer one, in my view. Either the founder, Benjamin, is clueless about Internet Computer, which is possible, or he knows about it and is making statements anyway. How do you go found a crypto and then make claims like this without having done your own research about what else is going on? If we assume he genuinely believes it and isn't deliberately misleading people, I still wouldn't want to invest in a project where the founder is that unaware of what else is happening in crypto. And I'm sure there are many other layer ones besides Internet Computer — Solana people, for instance — who would debate these points themselves. But ICP is so advanced that, to me, it settles it.
Where is the MultiversX foundation?
Look further into MultiversX and, in my experience, the manipulation and lies continue. If you look for a MultiversX foundation, I could not find one. I hear there's supposed to be a MultiversX foundation. I searched for the foundation, I searched for the website, and I don't see one. Then I went on the official MultiversX website and looked at this.
Why does an "internet-scale blockchain" need AWS and Google Cloud?
If you're talking about how great your blockchain network is, why do you need integrations from Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services? Why do you need integrations from these companies? Because, in my opinion, your blockchain is so technologically behind something like Internet Computer Protocol that you can't put a simple NFT directly on chain — you can't put a simple picture directly on chain. And then your narrative is the metaverse. But the reality is that any project that wanted to do anything metaverse — which is exactly where the branding for MultiversX points — would have to use the centralized clouds to do all the real computation, which makes everything happening on the blockchain itself essentially worthless.
It's like if I told you that you could buy my house, and that my house is on water, and you came over and found that 99%-plus of my house was in fact built on land, with a small puddle in the backyard. And I said, "Well, this 1% of my house is built on water." You'd say, "But I thought, when you said your house is on the water, that it was on a lake." Instead there's a puddle in the backyard. That, to me, is MultiversX, "the internet-scale blockchain." What a joke.
It's described as a distributed blockchain network for building next-gen applications, decentralized via 3,000-plus nodes. But to me it is not scalable, because you have to use Amazon Web Services and other services to build all the real stuff. So it doesn't matter how decentralized your nodes are, because if somebody tries to build an application, they then have to use centralized infrastructure. Your blockchain basically becomes a wallet sign-in, which I consider useless.
Show me the engineers
And it continues to get worse. Which actual people are involved in this project? For a project saying it's "the internet-scale blockchain," the "most scalable, advanced, and secure layer one in the world today," okay — show me the engineers who are actually working on it. Because unless you have real engineers working on the protocol itself to make it do new things, like Internet Computer Protocol does, you've got nothing new.
The engineers at DFINITY are working on adding graphics-card nodes to the network that will fundamentally improve the ability of the network itself to run higher-level AI models fully on chain. And why can DFINITY do things like that? Because, as I understand it, they have the largest research and development team in blockchain — not MultiversX. When you listen to the founder, Dominic Williams, talk, almost everything he says just seems brilliant to me. Back when I held both ICP and MultiversX and was doing my own research, I watched Dominic Williams talk and thought, wow, this guy sees the future. And he says: if you want to research an altcoin, show me the engineers who are actually working on improving the protocol itself. Show me the money — the engineers are the money. DFINITY has a deep list of engineers; I don't think anyone has this many.
And if I'm wrong, go tell me. Go to jerrybanfield.com, which is hosted fully on Internet Computer Protocol — something you can't even dream of doing on MultiversX — and find me a team bigger than DFINITY's. Because MultiversX says it has the largest R&D team in blockchain, yet I literally cannot find a single person. I looked all through the MultiversX website and I cannot find anything about the actual team. Isn't that insane? If you look at their FAQ, they're talking about Bitcoin, and it says MultiversX has rebuilt everything from scratch. They say to think of it like the transition from dial-up to broadband. Are they watching my videos? Because I've been saying that. Except, to me, this version is fraudulent. In my opinion it is only marginally better than Ethereum — it works basically the same way Ethereum does.
The Ledger partnership and the wallet
And do you know why I think they're touting their Ledger partnership on the homepage? Because, in my experience, it's not even practical to hold this in a wallet without using a third party. It's not like Internet Computer, where you can go directly to internetcomputer.org, create an internet identity, and interact directly with the blockchain. With MultiversX, you create a wallet, you have to create a seed phrase, and then they tout their partnership with Ledger. That's just your wallet.
What I found using it: fees, unstaking, and no team
I used MultiversX on Ledger, and it was really annoying. The transaction fees were significant, the time to unstake was slow, and the rewards were disappointing. But what's arguably worse than that is: where is their team? There's no team that I can find. I looked at the FAQ and I don't see a team anywhere. Where is the group of engineers working on this? There's no transparency, which to me is a really bad sign. The only person I could find in a reasonable amount of time was the founder — and the first thing I see the founder saying is, in my view, provably false.
The roadmap and the explorer
Then you look at their tech roadmap. What are they making? EVM compatibility, sovereign support, an upgrade for MetaMask. The stuff they're working on is, to me, so far behind what's being done on Internet Computer Protocol that it's ridiculous.
And then you go look at the Explorer, and it continues to get worse. They've got hundreds of millions of transactions according to what they report, but what are these transactions actually doing? Here's one: "X Portal claim XP shard." And another: "X Portal claim XP shard." What are these transactions even doing? "X Portal claim XP shard, claim shard, claim shard." This could be one single person, or a bot, sitting there playing a game. And there aren't even that many raw transactions — in some seconds there's literally not even a block or a transaction, and the only thing happening is claiming an XP shard.
A ghost chain compared to ICP
So you compare MultiversX's relative lack of transactions, wondering what is even happening on the chain itself, to Internet Computer's dashboard: 4,000 transactions a second, 43 blocks a second. On the MultiversX explorer, almost the only thing happening in a given second is claiming an XP shard, claiming an XP shard, an exchange here and there — you're lucky to have a transaction or two a second. Then you look at Internet Computer and remember what the founder said: that MultiversX is the most scalable, advanced blockchain. Well, ICP does 4,000 transactions a second, which is roughly the equivalent of 300,000 Ethereum transactions a second in terms of what the network itself is doing. Compared to that, MultiversX, to me, is an absolute ghost chain. There's very little happening on it.
It says they have 23,000 active accounts today — and I suspect some of that is bot accounts pushing the number up. You'll see something like 200,000 active users on a date like July 18th, and I wonder: was that a network of bots, a limited-time event, or something else? Even if you have a decent number of active users, and even if that's authentic, what are they actually doing? They're claiming XP shards in a game. A lot of these crypto games are mostly bots.
Real computation vs. claiming XP shards
Someone in my chat, Benny, points out that not all of ICP's transactions are sending money — they're pinging nodes. Right, ICP's transactions are doing real computation. They are serving the web. When you go to jerrybanfield.com, that's generating a transaction from ICP that's doing real computation — it's not just sending money from one person to another. When you go to jerrybanfield.com and click on OpenChat, that goes into my fully on-chain, Telegram/Discord-style community, and that generates transactions. When someone in there types a chat message, it's generating a transaction. That's really valuable computation — running real-world applications on chain. If you want to come see what that looks like in practice, you can join me and the rest of the family and ask me anything you want about it.
The way we know MultiversX is built is that things like that are being done on Amazon or some other centralized service. You can't do significant higher-level computation — like serving a website — directly from a blockchain unless the blockchain is actually capable of it. So if you look at the most-used applications, it says there's something like Knights, an in-game NFT marketplace. But remember, we read the developer documentation: the NFTs themselves are not on chain, which absolutely ruins any possible value proposition. If you don't have the stuff itself on chain, then the things on chain don't control the stuff off chain. It's web3 theater. It's not actually decentralized.
The NFT marketplace that isn't really on chain
So this is the most popular application right now on the blockchain — people swapping NFTs, trading, listing, making offers. Every time somebody creates a listing, that generates a transaction. But most of what's happening could easily be bots. A lot of the time when you have NFTs like this, you have trading bots that create offers, and they'll be constantly creating and canceling. You'll notice there aren't a lot of actual buying transactions — somebody actually buying. Lots of times in games like this you have a bunch of trading bots making all of this happen. So from what this looks like to me, the vast majority of activity in their top application is bot activity.
Then there's an on-chain XP system for users to earn benefits, which probably gets botted pretty heavily as well. And there's an application to buy, sell, stake, and swap cryptos cross-chain, where it looks like people are clicking a button to claim XP rewards, which generates transactions too. But again — what real value is being created by these transactions?
Why bots love MultiversX and why ICP is different
Benny asks: aren't you concerned there's a lot of bot value on ICP too? Here's the difference, the way I see it. On ICP, you have to pay for transactions and computation with cycles. Developers have to pay the cycle balance, so developers on ICP have a lot of motivation not to have bot transactions, because those transactions cost them money. Most of these other networks are heavily incentivized to make you think they're active by having all these transactions. In many cases — and this is possible here — these applications have been subsidized and paid for by MultiversX; they get subsidized for the transaction fees, because they're the most-used applications. So some of these may be incentivized to pay all these gas fees.
On ICP, applications have to pay their own gas fees, not the individual users. Whereas on a chain like this, applications often have users botting them, and the users are being incentivized in some way — essentially tricked into paying these gas fees. On ICP, because the developers pay the gas fees, developers have an incentive to limit bots using their programs as much as possible, because every bot is costing them their fees. On OpenChat, for example, you can now verify that you're a unique person and get a Diamond membership. ICP does so many transactions that, sure, there are some bots on ICP too, but the level of computation on ICP has, on average, tripled every year since the network started.
Flat transfers and my final take
On something like MultiversX, where you can't actually do real things on chain, the on-chain activity doesn't really matter, because it's not all on chain anyway. And you can go look at the max transactions and the token transfers: they've been fairly flat for years. The token transfers, on average, are not growing — in fact, the token transfers on MultiversX right now are about as low as they were two years ago. That's not good. And this is pretty typical of what's happening across crypto: there's no transparency about what's actually happening. When you compare it to ICP, it's obvious to me that the claims aren't true.
This is why I sold my MultiversX. All I could see were manipulation and lies. I see no real value proposition here. I see a blockchain that, to me, looks like it was created with the minimal effort possible in order to raise as much money for the insiders as possible. I see no reason to use MultiversX, and I see no good future for it — especially when you've got other chains like Solana that are, in my opinion, doing even better manipulation and lies than MultiversX. But the more manipulation and lies crypto is filled with, the more people are going to start looking for the truth, and the more crypto creators will see that finding the manipulation and lies serves investors a lot better than talking about how something's going to 100x.
That's why I do this. I make videos and write posts to try to show you the weaknesses in the things you might hold or the things you might be researching, because I'm tired of people getting tricked and throwing their money and time away into junk coins. If you want to see how I think about the rest of this market, I lay it out in pieces like why crypto is basically Call of Duty Warzone and ICP wins and why crypto market caps are a distraction. So to me, MultiversX is just straight-up manipulation, lies, and false promises — nothing exciting at all — and the future is not at all heading toward MultiversX.