# 0x00 Preface
The long-awaited Monad testnet is coming soon. Its main goal is to become a large-scale Layer 1 blockchain with high performance, low transaction costs and EVM compatibility. It is said to have performance that exceeds Solana, which has been long awaited. Now Monad has announced on the X platform that it will soon launch the testnet. Many friends have already started preparing the three-piece set and the testnet water. If you are not familiar enough, let's make up for it right away!
Hello, everyone. I am Momo. As a blockchain technology learner, I will organize my learning experience into articles to share with you. This series is a sharing of the study, use, and summary of current hot projects. Combined with my own understanding, it will make it easier and faster for everyone to understand the project and participate in it. Therefore, the following content sharing is my own understanding and cognition. If there are any questions or errors, please forgive me and contact me to correct them in time!
# 0x01 Project Introduction
As blockchain technology develops rapidly, new Layer 1 public chain projects continue to emerge, among which Monad has become one of the most popular projects with its innovative technical architecture and high performance. Compared with existing Layer 2 solutions, Monad has not only achieved a qualitative leap in transaction throughput, but also solved the bottleneck problems of traditional blockchain in terms of decentralization, interoperability and overall performance through a series of technical innovations.
Monad is a high-performance, Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible Layer 1 blockchain founded in 2022 by a team with extensive experience in high-frequency trading. The team members have worked at well-known institutions such as Jump Trading, and their expertise in low-latency trading systems has made them keenly aware of the bottlenecks caused by the sequential processing methods in traditional EVM-compatible chains. Therefore, Monad's core goal is to break these limitations through parallelization technology and optimized consensus mechanisms, providing an efficient, low-cost and scalable blockchain infrastructure for decentralized applications (dApps).
# 0x02 Financing Background
In terms of financing, Monad has performed very well. In February 2023, the project successfully completed a $19 million seed round of financing, led by Dragonfly Capital, with participation from well-known investment institutions such as Placeholder Capital, Lemniscap, Shima Capital, and Finality Capital. This funding provides a solid foundation for Monad's early development and team building.
Then, in April 2024, Monad Labs once again attracted great attention from the capital market and completed a round of financing of up to US$225 million. This round of financing was led by top venture capital firm Paradigm, and a number of star investment lineups such as Electric Capital, SevenX Ventures, IOSG Ventures, Greenoaks, Amber Group, Animoca Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and Wintermute Ventures participated. This not only reflects the investment community's high recognition of the potential of Monad technology, but also injects strong impetus into its subsequent ecological construction and mainnet development.
With these two rounds of financing, Monad's valuation has soared to US$3 billion, making it one of the blockchain projects with the highest financing amount so far in 2024. These funds will be mainly used to accelerate Monad's development progress, promote the implementation of its high-performance blockchain technology, and provide all-round support for the development of its ecosystem.
# 0x03 Technical Features
Monad achieves superior Ethereum Virtual Machine performance and significantly advances the tradeoff between decentralization and scalability by implementing pipelining and other optimizations in four main areas:
1. MonadBFT: High-performance consensus mechanism
Monad achieves a balance between high performance and decentralization through a series of innovative designs. Monad's consensus mechanism MonadBFT is optimized based on the HotStuff algorithm, simplifying the traditional three-stage consensus process into two stages. Through the "pipeline" design, it allows consensus rounds to advance with actual network delays rather than fixed time intervals. This mechanism not only significantly improves consensus efficiency, but also supports single-slot finality (1-second block time), ensuring that transactions can be confirmed quickly while maintaining the security and fault tolerance of the network under partially synchronized network conditions.
2. Parallel Execution: Parallel Execution
Optimistic Parallel Execution predicts dependencies between transactions and processes transactions in parallel on multiple virtual machines. This parallelization significantly increases transaction processing speed, enabling Monad to achieve a throughput of 10,000 transactions per second, while optimizing transaction scheduling and reducing the likelihood of conflicts through static code analysis.
(The core of optimistic execution is to allow transactions to be executed in parallel to improve efficiency, and to ensure the correctness of the final result through conflict detection and re-execution mechanisms.)
3. Asynchronous Execution
Decoupling the execution of transactions from the consensus process allows independent execution of transactions after consensus is reached. This design not only improves the overall efficiency of the system, but also reduces hardware requirements, allowing ordinary hardware to run nodes efficiently, while reducing the delay in transaction execution and further improving the user experience.
4. MonadDb: A custom database for storing blockchain state
As a custom database optimized for its parallel execution, MonadDb uses asynchronous I/O operations, allowing the system to initiate multiple read and write operations simultaneously without waiting for each operation to complete. This design significantly increases transaction processing speed, especially when combined with parallel execution. In addition, MonadDb uses the Patricia Trie data structure, which optimizes state storage and reduces hardware requirements, allowing ordinary hardware to run nodes efficiently.
By introducing innovative technologies such as MonadBFT, parallel execution, asynchronous execution, and MonadDb, Monad not only solves the trade-off between performance and decentralization in traditional blockchains, but also achieves the goals of high throughput, low latency, and low hardware requirements. These technical features make Monad a strong competitor for the next generation of high-performance blockchain platforms, laying a solid foundation for the development and large-scale adoption of decentralized applications (dApps).
# 0x04 Project Ecosystem
Monad's ecosystem covers DeFi, NFT, games and other fields. Through cooperation and integration with multiple projects, it has formed a diversified and high-performance blockchain ecosystem. With the approach of the mainnet and the launch of more projects, Monad's ecological potential will be further revealed, providing users with a richer and more efficient application experience.
# 0x05 Summary
As a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain project that has attracted much attention, Monad is becoming the focus of the blockchain field with its innovative technical architecture and strong team background. Through parallelization technology, optimized consensus mechanism and customized database, Monad has achieved an excellent balance between performance, decentralization and scalability, providing efficient and low-cost infrastructure for the development of decentralized applications.
Are you ready?
