Monad: The Disruptor of the New Generation Layer 1 Public Chain

In the development history of blockchain technology, Ethereum, as a pioneer of smart contract platforms, has laid a solid foundation for the entire industry. However, with the explosive growth of application demands, the technical limitations faced by Ethereum and other existing infrastructures like Solana, especially in scalability and transaction speed, have become key bottlenecks in the industry's development. To address these issues, Monad has emerged, promising to reshape blockchain performance standards with a throughput of up to 10,000 transactions per second. Earlier this year, Monad Labs completed a $225 million financing round, highlighting the market's high recognition of Monad's technological potential. This funding will help Monad further build and optimize its Layer 1 blockchain, bringing revolutionary changes to the industry.

01. Monad: An Innovative Solution Originating from the Ethereum Scaling Problem

Ethereum's position in the blockchain space is unshakeable. It is not only the core of blockchain research, decentralized applications (Dapps), and community development, but it also boasts the highest Total Value Locked (TVL), highlighting its leadership role in the blockchain world. Thanks to Ethereum's vigorous development, the Ethereum and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) developer communities have become the largest in the crypto space, giving rise to countless innovative DeFi and dApp projects.

However, with the surge in the number of projects, EVM is also facing unprecedented challenges, especially as scalability issues become increasingly prominent. The single-threaded nature of EVM limits transaction processing speed and increases execution time. In response to this challenge, the industry has proposed various solutions, among which sharding technology and Layer 2 scaling strategies have received significant attention.

Sharding technology aims to split the vast blockchain network into multiple smaller shards to improve storage capacity and performance. However, the implementation of this technology requires long-term validation and research, and its potential cannot be realized in the short term. On the other hand, Layer 2 scaling strategies handle transactions and the execution of smart contracts by building additional frameworks on top of the main blockchain, alleviating the burden on the main chain and enhancing overall network efficiency and scalability. However, as some well-known Layer 2 companies postpone the decentralization of their sequencers, the challenges Layer 2 faces in terms of centralization are becoming increasingly severe.

In the face of these challenges, Monad's founder Keone Hon proposed unique insights. He believes that the current scalability path of Ethereum has certain issues. The Layer1+Layer2 stratification strategy can lead to the blockchain being divided into independent execution environments, thereby undermining on-chain composability. Therefore, establishing a more efficient underlying network is the most correct solution, and thus Monad was born.

Monad is a high-performance L1 that is fully compatible with Ethereum, focusing on applying "parallel processing" technology at the Layer 1 level to enhance the execution efficiency of the EVM. This means that Monad's goal is to achieve parallel processing of transactions directly on Ethereum's main chain, without relying on additional Layer 2 solutions. This approach maximizes the processing capacity and scalability of the EVM without sacrificing security and decentralization, thereby fully unleashing the potential of the EVM ecosystem. Currently, Monad has reached the capability of processing up to 10,000 transactions per second, and the project team is confident in increasing this number tenfold in the coming years.

Since its establishment in 2022, Monad has completed two rounds of financing: a $19 million seed round in February 2023 and a $225 million financing in April 2024. As of now, more than 50 institutions have participated in investing in the Monad project. These investors are confident about Monad's prospects, believing that it will drive the popularization of cryptocurrency in the next 2-3 years. One founding partner of an investment institution even views Monad as a solid foundation for stablecoins, calling it a "killer application," and expects it to continue to grow exponentially in the coming years.

02, Monad: Reshaping Blockchain Performance with Underlying Optimization and Parallel Strategies

Monad is favored mainly due to its outstanding technical advantages. It has not chosen to enhance scalability through layer 2 solutions, but instead focuses on the underlying foundational network, improving network efficiency through parallel execution strategies. The greatest advantage of this approach is that it maintains the security and decentralization characteristics of the network, which are crucial for Monad's future development.

In terms of performance, Monad directly competes with other established layer 1 public chains, demonstrating significant advantages in throughput and low finality time, far surpassing many other platforms. More importantly, Monad achieves full compatibility with EVM while ensuring high performance, allowing Ethereum developers to easily port their applications to Monad.

With the aggregation of decentralization, extremely high scalability, and Ethereum compatibility as three core advantages, Monad is expected to become a game changer in the future blockchain gaming space.

The working mechanism of Monad

The working mechanism of Monad is mainly achieved through optimizing four core areas: MonadBFT, lazy execution, parallel execution, and MonadDB. Next, we will explore in detail how these four mechanisms work together to promote the efficient operation of Monad.

First of all, MonadBFT is the core of the Monad consensus algorithm, which draws on the essence of classical consensus algorithms and has made innovative improvements. Compared to the traditional three-phase commit process, MonadBFT adopts a more efficient two-round leader-centered fan-out, fan-in method. This mechanism ensures fast confirmation and finality of the blockchain while reducing communication overhead and latency. When the leader proposes a block and distributes it to all validators, the validators quickly respond and send their votes to the leader of the subsequent block. This pipeline consensus process not only improves efficiency but also enhances the security and stability of the blockchain.

The core of the delayed execution mechanism lies in separating consensus from execution, allowing nodes to quickly reach agreement on transaction order without waiting for the completion of transaction execution. In traditional blockchains, consensus and execution are tightly coupled, meaning transactions must be executed first to determine state and correctness before reaching consensus on the block. However, this approach has efficiency issues since the execution process can become a bottleneck for consensus. Monad, through the delayed execution mechanism, allows nodes to determine transaction order during the consensus phase and execute transactions independently in the subsequent execution phase. This method greatly improves resource utilization efficiency and enables Monad to handle more transactions.

Parallel execution is another key feature of Monads. It achieves parallelism through optimistic execution, which means that Monads process transactions optimistically to determine dependencies. During the optimistic execution phase, Monads begin processing transactions without waiting for the previous transaction in the block to complete, while tracking the inputs and outputs of each transaction. This approach can reveal dependencies between transactions and enable efficient re-execution. Through the parallel execution mechanism, Monads can handle multiple transactions simultaneously, further increasing transaction throughput. Additionally, Monads determine the dependencies of each transaction empirically, effectively reducing the need for complex scheduling algorithms, thereby lowering system complexity and overhead.

Finally, MonadDB is an innovative database developed to solve the storage problems of traditional blockchains. Traditional blockchains use Merkle Patricia trees to store their state, but often utilize key-value storage databases such as LevelDB or RocksDB for local storage. These databases do not understand the tree structure of MPT, and therefore cannot support Monad's parallel execution requirements. MonadDB has been optimized to be natively compatible with the Patricia Trie data structure, enabling it to support Monad's parallel execution and asynchronous I/O operations. By leveraging the latest advancements in asynchronous I/O, MonadDB avoids the bottleneck issues that can occur when the system waits for one transaction to complete before moving on to the next.

Monad has only been established for two years, and although this is a relatively short time, it is undeniable that Monad is a blockchain with significant long-term potential. Although the Monad mainnet has not been launched yet, the Devnet internal test network has already achieved 10,000 TPS, which is a very high starting point. According to the project's plan, Monad could expand to 100,000 TPS in the coming years. If this expectation can be realized, then Monad will undoubtedly become a disruptor in the entire blockchain industry, and its representative parallel execution and superscalar pipeline framework will also become the mainstream development direction of public chains in the future.

03, Monad: Hotspot Ecological Project Review

The developer of the Monad blockchain, Monad Labs, raised $225 million in Series A funding in April, reportedly valued at $3 billion. Monad has also become the largest parallel EVM public chain in terms of fundraising scale, achieving a throughput of 10,000 transactions per second (tps), which surpasses other EVM-compatible public chains significantly.

Although the Monad mainnet has not officially launched yet, its strong technical capabilities and broad market prospects have already attracted the attention of numerous developers. Currently, over 80 projects are deployed on Monad, and it is expected that an additional 150 projects will choose to build on this platform when the mainnet goes live. This prosperous ecological development trend fully demonstrates Monad's potential and industry influence. Here are a few noteworthy Monad ecological projects.

aPriori

aPriori is a liquidity staking platform within the Monad ecosystem, focusing on Miner Extractable Value (MEV). It aims to provide users with efficient staking solutions while maintaining the liquidity of assets, allowing users to flexibly utilize their assets while participating in staking.

Financing Status

aPriori successfully completed a $8 million seed round financing in 2024, led by a well-known investment institution and supported by other organizations. This financing will provide strong financial support for its technology development and market promotion.

Core Functionality

Liquid Staking: Users can stake their crypto assets and receive liquidity tokens, making it convenient to use in other DeFi protocols and enhancing the efficiency of asset utilization.

MEV Optimization: Optimizing transaction order through smart contracts to maximize user profits and ensure that users receive the best returns when participating in the market.

High-performance support: Utilizing the high throughput of the Monad network, supporting up to 10,000 transactions per second, ensuring fast processing and efficient execution of liquid staking.

Kintsu

Kintsu is a liquidity staking protocol within the Monad ecosystem, designed to provide users with a flexible staking experience. It allows users to flexibly use their assets while staking, meeting the demand for liquidity.

Financing Situation

Kintsu successfully completed a $4 million seed round financing on July 25, 2024. This financing was led by a well-known investment institution, with participation from several other renowned investors.

Core Functions

Liquid Staking: Users can obtain liquidity tokens after staking their assets, which can be used in other DeFi applications to enhance asset liquidity.

Decentralized Validator Mechanism: Supports permissionless joining of validators, enhancing the decentralization and security of the network, and ensuring the safety of user assets.

Composability: Kintsu's liquid staking tokens (LST) can be easily integrated with other DeFi applications, creating more opportunities for users to earn.

Kuru

Kuru is a decentralized order book exchange (CLOB) within the Monad ecosystem, designed to provide users with a single platform.