What is Monad?
Monad is one of the newest L1 blockchains aligned with EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) to scale transaction speeds and lower costs.
Although Monad is a completely new L1 blockchain it has built in full compatibility with current EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) standards along with the Ethereum RPC API which will enable developers to easily adopt their existing work to Monad.
Monad is taking the best parts of parallel executions blockchains (such as Solana) and making it compatible for existing Ethereum applications.
100+ established Ethereum platforms have already pledged their support to align with Monad once it reaches Mainnet status.
Monad supports 10,000 transactions per second, significantly increasing throughput capabilities and opening doors for distributed applications--even those with greater complexity and higher usage--to run in a decentralized manner.
Monad
Monad is introducing parallel execution and superscalar pipelining to Ethereum for the first time. Learn more about that in "How does Monad work?" section below.
What are the origins of Monad?
Monad is the brainchild of Keone Hon, James Hunsaker and Eunice Giarta (CEO, CTO and COO respectively).
Both Keone Hon and James Hunsaker left longtime technical roles at Jump Trading/Jump Crypto to focus on building their 'Ethereum killer' blockchain, Monad. Eunice Garta operated as a product manager in the trad tech world before aligning with crypto.
Building of the new L1 blockchain officially kicked off in February 2022 and the team has at least 30+ disclosed members working full time on the engineering end.
Together, we are solving the unsolved and building towards a more performant future in blockchain technology.
Monad Labs Team
Monad Milestones
Although New York City headquartered Monad began building in February 2022, the world was largely introduced to Monad (Monad Labs) on the back of a $19M investment round announcement in February 2023.
70+ backers including Dragonfly Capital, Placeholder Capital and Lemniscap aligned with the Monad mission to build an EVM-compatible lightning fast blockchain.
More recently Monad announced a Series A investment round which secured another $225M.
- February 2022 | Monad is founded
- February 2023 | Monad raises $19M in seed round
- September 2023 | Monad releases technical documents
- Q2 2024 | Monad Testnet launched
- April 2024 | Monad raises $225M in Series A round
- TBD | Monad Mainnet launch
Backpack 🤝 Monad
Backpack and Monad forged a close relationship while building in the bear market and share a common goal of scaling crypto to mass adoption.
There will be continuous collaboration including Backpack verticals of Wallet, Mad Lads and Exchange. Both platforms have a shared mission of scaling cryptocurrency and the blockchain to the mass adoption.
Mad Lads (the NFT collection of Backpack) and Monad communities have become intertwined through a mutual obsession with memes and pushing the boundaries of crypto culture.
Monad has embraced meme culture as one of the most important pillars to scale a web3 business. They have hired a team of personalities focused solely on creating an interconnected community who believe in the Monad mission.
Meme after meme, Monad Monday after Monad Monday, we grew as a community, and waited patiently for the smallest whiff of an update from the engineering team. And then we watched protocols begin to take notice, and new projects joined the ecosystem; slowly at first, and now all at once.
It goes beyond a parallelized EVM, beyond the promise of a globally scalable EVM chain. It goes beyond the legendary memes and lore, into the heart of crypto twitter, where the infectious community vibes are now starting to fully take over.
Danny Pipelines (Ecosystem Growth at Monad)
How To Join The Monad Community
Monad currently has two main outlets for the community to flex on: Discord and Twitter.
The Monad Discord is full of community-oriented channels, activities and knowledgeable Nads looking to help newcomers.
Monad memes have taken over Twitter and hardly a day goes by without the official Monad account posting community (and bespoke) graphics.
How does Monad work?
Monad operates in a similar fashion to Ethereum and users will interact with the new blockchain using established Ethereum wallets, explorers, etc.
Once Monad is live, developers will be able to port existing Ethereum apps to Monad and users will be able to interact with those dApps.
Monad has focused on four major areas of improvement to scale EVM blockchain transactions:
- MonadBFT
- Deferred Execution
- Parallel Execution
- MonadDb
MonadBFT
MonadBFT is the consensus mechanism which ensures the integrity of the blockchain by validating transactions and synchronizing validator nodes.
It's framework allows the consensus mechanism to quickly verify transactions even if it detects faulty or malicious validator nodes.
MonadBFT is a high-performance consensus mechanism for achieving agreement about the transaction ordering under partially synchronous conditions in the presence of Byzantine actors.
It is a derivative of HotStuff with the improvement proposed in Jolteon/DiemBFT/Fast-HotStuff which is the reduction from three rounds to two rounds by utilizing quadratic communication complexity in the event of leader timeout.
MonadBFT Docs
Deferred Execution & Parallel Execution
The Monad BFT consensus mechanism operates differently than established blockchain practices by "decoupling" the execution from consensus.
With Monad, nodes reach agreement about transactions without a validating node executing the transaction.
The leader proposes an ordering without yet knowing the resultant state root, and the validating nodes vote on block validity without knowing (for example) whether all of the transactions in the block execute without reverting.
Monad Docs
Monad removes the requirement that nodes execute prior to consensus.
They call this "optimistic execution" meaning that Monad will begin to execute transactions before earlier transactions in the block have been completed.
MonadDb (Monad Database)
Monad departs from traditional Ethereum platforms with their parallel execution architecture.
This design requires brief storage of data points when there is a delay between transactions being read and the operation completing.
Simply put, MonadDb is a bespoke database used for storing blockchain state with simultaneous support for input and output data.
When one transaction needs to read state from disk, one should not block waiting for that operation to complete - instead one should initiate the read and then start working on another transaction in the meantime.
Therefore the problem needs asynchronous i/o (async i/o) for the database. The above mentioned key-value databases lack proper async i/o support (although there are some efforts to improve in this area).
MonadDb fully utilizes the latest kernel support for async i/o (on Linux this is io_uring). This avoids needing to spawn a large number of kernel threads to handle pending i/o requests in an attempt to perform work asynchronously.
Monad Docs
How To Run A Monad Validator Node
The requirements to run a Monad validator node are estimated to be:
- CPU: 16 core CPU
- Memory: 32 GB RAM
- Storage: 2 TB NVMe SSD
- Bandwidth: 100 Mb/s
The hardware requirements to operate a Monad validator node are relatively inexpensive and convenient to acquire (e.g. many off the shelf computers from big box stores exceed these specifications).
Although the Monad Testnet is up and running, they have not released the infrastructure needed for individuals to set up and operate validator nodes.
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