The highly anticipated new Layer 1 startup Monad is really coming. On the evening of April 9, Monad Labs announced the completion of a $225 million financing round, led by Paradigm, with participation from Electric Capital and Greenoaks. It has become another top-notch project in the crypto community, and has also set off a hype wave for "parallel EVM".
As the most anticipated project in the Layer 1 track, Monad, which focuses on the concept of "Parallel EVM", hopes to introduce a "parallel processing" execution layer expansion solution to greatly improve network execution efficiency while being 100% compatible with all EVM bytes.
Project Introduction
Monad is a layer 1 blockchain currently under development that is expected to deliver 10,000 transactions per second (tps). Monad’s mission is to provide developers with a permissionless development sandbox that solves the pain points of throughput and computational costs, allowing them to create optimal development environments and usher in a new era of decentralized experiences.
The past few years have proven the value of decentralization, and Monad seeks to provide a solution that can support mass user adoption. Currently, Ethereum can only accommodate 500,000 daily users, averaging two transactions per day, but to achieve mainstream adoption, a solution that can support 100 times the number of users (50 million people) and 10 times the number of transactions per user is needed. Monad aims to position itself as the best solution to achieve this vision.
project team
Tech startup Monad Labs was founded by the former team of traditional finance (TradFi) giant Jump Trading.
Monad CEO：Keone Hon
Keone is a software developer and blockchain researcher. Prior to joining Monad, he worked at Jump Trading for eight years, leading the high-frequency trading team. In 2021, Keone joined Jump's crypto department and led a team of engineers focused on blockchain research and dapp development.
Monad CTO：James Hunsake
James is an expert in systems engineering and low latency optimization. Prior to joining Monad, he spent eight years at Jump Trading, building an ultra-low latency trading system responsible for tens of billions in notional daily volume across major futures markets.
Monad COO：Eunice Giarta
Eunice is a product and technology leader with a background in traditional finance and fintech. She holds a degree in computer science from MIT and previously worked in trading at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, led product teams building enterprise trading systems at Broadway Technology, and led payments and licensing infrastructure teams at Shutterstock.
project financing
In early April this year, Monad Labs (Monad's development team) received a huge round of financing of up to US$225 million led by Paradigm. Other investors in this round of financing include:
Electric Capital、Castle Island Ventures、Greenoaks、eGirl Capital、Amber Group、Animoca Ventures、Archetype、Bankless Ventures、Big Brain Holdings等等
This also makes Monad the highest-funded crypto project so far in 2024, and Monad Labs' valuation has reached $3 billion.
Considering that in February 2023, it also received US$19 million in financing from Inversebrah, Ansem, Hsaka, punk6529, Saquon Barkley, Eric Wall, Rune Christensen, Bryan Pellegrino, Robinson Burkey, Luca Netz, Mert Mumtaz, Shoku, etc., the Monad project's historical financing amount reached US$244 million.
Monad is a Layer1 featuring parallelized EVM launched by Monad Labs. It was jointly created by Keone Hon, head of research at market-making giant Jump Trading, and his colleague James Hunsaker. Monad optimizes the EVM technology stack from the database layer to the virtual machine layer, and then to the consensus and network layers. Through the new EVM parallelization solution, the chain can achieve 10,000 transactions per second (TPS).
The outstanding technical solution is making Monad stand out in the AltVM field and become another competitive "Ethereum killer". Obviously, Monad, which has extremely high expectations in both technical and narrative aspects, is also becoming a key bet project in the AltVM track for many top investment institutions.
What Monads do
Combining decentralization and scale
Monad supports 10,000 transactions per second, significantly improving throughput and opening the door for distributed applications, even those with higher complexity and higher usage, to run in a decentralized manner.
Superscalar architecture
Existing blockchains are extremely slow by modern computing standards. Monad was built with performance in mind, bridging the gap between decentralized and traditional platforms through superscalar, pipelined execution, and optimized architecture.
Portability and core composability
Monad retains full compatibility with EVM bytecode and Ethereum RPC APIs, which means seamless portability for EVM developers, who account for 98% of on-chain TVL across all ecosystems. Supporting all of this in a single shard enables powerful, composable applications to be built on top of the global truth store.
Token Information
Regarding Monad’s future tokens, the official has not yet disclosed much.
In September 2023, Monad briefly released technical documentation for its upcoming PoS chain, which also mentioned that its native token will be named MON and can be used to pay gas fees on the Monad chain, but this information was deleted from the document shortly afterwards.
Since Monad has not yet been launched on the mainnet or testnet, ordinary users do not actually have much interactive content at the moment. Users who intend to ambush are advised to join the official Discord channel as soon as possible and wait for relevant updates on the testnet.
At the end of last year, Keone said on the X platform that nearly 60 projects have confirmed that they will be built on Monad, and it is expected that when the test network is launched, a number of projects will be logged in simultaneously for user interaction.
Monad: The next generation blockchain platform that will disrupt Ethereum?
Monad's optimization not only improves transaction speed, but also reduces operating costs, making it an ideal platform for developing decentralized applications (DApps). Through these technological innovations, Monad is expected to become the standard of Ethereum in the next few years, providing users and developers with more efficient and economical blockchain solutions.
Each of Monad's technological advancements is a challenge and advancement to existing blockchain technology, heralding that decentralized applications will become more widespread and popular in the future. Through its strong technical foundation and active market strategy, Monad Labs is gradually realizing its vision of becoming a high-performance blockchain platform.
Monad Labs: Unlock the performance bottleneck of Ethereum and open a new era of blockchain. With the continuous evolution of blockchain technology and the rapid expansion of the encryption market, the performance limitations of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) have become an urgent challenge to be solved, especially When dealing with large-scale transactions and application scenarios. Against this background, Monad Labs has significantly improved the processing capabilities of the blockchain with its revolutionary parallel execution and superscalar pipeline technology, increasing throughput to 10,000 transactions per second.
Monad has not only achieved a major breakthrough in technology, but its full compatibility with Ethereum also ensures that existing Ethereum applications can be seamlessly migrated, greatly reducing the migration costs of developers and the threshold for users to use it. In addition, its innovative MonadBFT consensus mechanism and MonadDB state database provide strong guarantees for the security and stability of the blockchain.
Monad Ecosystem Application
What is Monad's key technical innovation?
Monad retains full EVM compatibility but improves on Ethereum with four key innovations: MonadBFT, deferred execution, parallel execution, and MonadDb.
Each innovation is an optimization for Ethereum, and when combined together, the end result is a sufficiently decentralized blockchain with Ethereum bytecode compatibility that can execute up to 10,000 transactions per second, with a block time of 1 second, and single-slot finality.
1.Month DBFT
MonadBFT is the chain’s high-performance consensus mechanism, a modified version of HotStuff that reduces the two rounds required for communication between validating nodes and block leaders to three.
To reach consensus on a new block, Monad’s block leader will send a proof to the network’s validating nodes that the previous block was valid (or timed out), and the validating nodes can approve the block by sending a signed “yes” directly to the next block’s leader, thus starting the process again.
If the leader times out while the validators are unable to reach consensus, Monad will fall back to quadratic communication, a more time-consuming alternative that requires communication between all validators.
2. Delayed execution
In Ethereum, transactions must be executed before the network can reach consensus and agree on the list of transactions included in a block and the state of the network.
This paradigm leaves very little time for the execution of transactions in a given block, as the majority of block time is reserved for the multiple rounds of cross-global communication required for the network to reach consensus.
By delaying execution, Monad decouples execution from consensus, allowing the chain to agree on state before knowing whether all transactions in a block have been executed, thus enabling execution to take place across the entire block!
3. Parallel Execution
Existing EVM blockchains must execute transactions sequentially (i.e. one after another), while chains that can execute transactions in parallel, like Solana, can process multiple transactions with no common dependencies at the same time, thereby increasing speed!
Blockchains that can process transactions in parallel take full advantage of modern computing technology by allowing their virtual machines to run on multiple cores and threads of the validating nodes’ CPUs.
However, to execute transactions in parallel, the blockchain must first determine which transactions can be executed independently of each other. Solana solves this problem by requiring transactions to specify the state they access during execution, but doing so requires creating a new virtual machine.
Instead of requiring transactions to declare state dependencies, Monad optimistically assumes that each transaction can be executed at the same time, and attempts to execute them in parallel. When a transaction conflicts on its first execution, it is rerun once with the updated data, ensuring that it executes.
Monad leverages a static code analyzer to predict which transactions have dependencies on each other, to avoid wasting time trying to execute transactions that have prerequisites.
4.MonadDb
Ethereum clients use a different database design than Ethereum itself, resulting in a suboptimal storage solution where one data structure is embedded within another different type of data structure that does not support data rewriting while data communication is ongoing.
Since Monad executes transactions in parallel, multiple transactions need to be able to read and write to the database at the same time. MonadDb is a custom database on-chain used to store its state that allows this, providing high-performance, asynchronous state access, allowing the benefits of parallelization to be realized!
Summarize
Monad is a first-layer public chain built by the former Jump trading team based on the POS mechanism and equivalent to EVM. The core personnel of the team have the advantage in trading and the resources are also relatively good, but as an L1, how to stand out in the public chain war is a big problem.
Those so-called "Ethereum killers" have long since faded away, and many chains have become forks of Ethereum. The innovations proposed by Monad, the improvement of the consensus mechanism, and the tens of thousands of transactions and block confirmations in seconds brought about by parallel transactions still need to be tested in practice. After all, many blockchains that claimed to have high performance and high TPS have undergone an "inscription test" some time ago. The real thing needs to be tested. 交 留 威: lz1zz1476 The project test network has not yet been launched, and the project has received a lot of attention. Monad has also announced that Layerzero will support the Monad ecosystem. It is still very early, so you can continue to pay attention.