Monad: The Emerging Force Reshaping Blockchain Performance Standards

In the rapid development of Blockchain technology, Ethereum, as a pioneer of smart contract platforms, has laid a solid foundation for the entire industry. However, with the surge in application demands, the technical limitations faced by existing infrastructures like Ethereum, particularly issues of scalability and transaction speed, have become key bottlenecks in the industry's development. To address these challenges, Monad has emerged, promising to redefine 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, demonstrating the market's high recognition of its technological potential. This funding will drive Monad to further improve its Layer1 Blockchain, bringing revolutionary changes to the industry.

Monad: An Innovative Move to Tackle Ethereum Scalability Challenges

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), showcasing its leadership in the blockchain world. Thanks to Ethereum's vigorous growth, the Ethereum and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) developer community has become the largest community in the crypto space, nurturing numerous innovative DeFi and dApp projects.

However, with the surge in the number of projects, the EVM also faces unprecedented challenges, particularly the increasingly prominent scalability issues. The single-threaded nature of the EVM limits transaction processing speed and prolongs execution time. To address this challenge, various solutions have been proposed in the industry, among which shard technology and Layer 2 scaling strategies have garnered significant attention.

Sharding technology aims to split the blockchain network into multiple smaller shards to enhance storage capacity and performance. However, the implementation of this technology requires long-term validation and research, making it difficult to realize its potential in the short term. Layer 2 scaling strategies handle transactions and smart contract execution by constructing additional frameworks on top of the main chain, alleviating the burden on the main chain and improving overall network efficiency and scalability. However, with some well-known Layer 2 aggregation projects delaying the decentralization of sequencers, Layer 2 is increasingly facing challenges related to centralization.

In the face of these challenges, Monad's founder Keone Hon proposed a unique insight. He believes that there are problems with the current scalability path of Ethereum. The Layer1+Layer2 stratification strategy may lead to the blockchain being divided into independent execution environments, thereby undermining on-chain composability. Therefore, establishing a more efficient underlying network is the best solution, which is the background for the birth of Monad.

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 EVM execution efficiency. This means Monad directly implements transaction parallel processing on the main chain, rather than relying on additional Layer 2 solutions. This approach maximizes the processing power and scalability of the EVM without sacrificing security and decentralization, thereby fully unleashing the potential of the EVM ecosystem. Currently, Monad has achieved the capability of processing 10,000 transactions per second, and the project team is confident in increasing this number tenfold in the coming years.

Since its founding in 2022, Monad has completed two rounds of financing, including a $19 million seed round in February 2023 and $225 million in financing in April 2024. To date, more than 50 institutions have participated in investing in Monad. These investors are confident in Monad's prospects, believing it will drive the adoption of cryptocurrency in the next 2-3 years. A founding partner of a well-known investment institution has even regarded Monad as a solid foundation for stablecoins, calling it a "killer application," and expects it to continue to experience exponential growth in the coming years.

Monad: Reshaping Blockchain Performance through Underlying Optimization and Parallel Strategies

Monad is favored mainly due to its outstanding technical advantages. Instead of choosing to enhance scalability through layer 2 solutions, it starts from the underlying basic network and improves 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 some well-known layer 1 public chains, especially showing 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 three core advantages of decentralized aggregation, extremely high scalability, and Ethereum compatibility, Monad is expected to become a game changer in the future of the blockchain gaming sector.

Monad's working mechanism

The working mechanism of Monad is mainly achieved by optimizing four core areas: MonadBFT, lazy execution, parallel execution, and MonadDB. These four mechanisms work in synergy to promote the efficient operation of Monad.

First, there is MonadBFT. This mechanism is the core of the Monad consensus algorithm, which draws on the essence of some classic consensus algorithms and has undergone innovative improvements. MonadBFT adopts a more efficient two-round leader-centric fan-out and fan-in approach. This mechanism ensures the quick confirmation and finality of the blockchain while reducing communication overhead and latency. Specifically, when the leader proposes a block and distributes it to all validators, the validators respond quickly and send their votes to the leader of the subsequent block. This pipelined consensus process not only improves efficiency but also enhances the security and stability of the blockchain.

The delayed execution mechanism separates consensus from execution, allowing nodes to quickly reach an agreement on the transaction order without waiting for the transaction execution to complete. This approach greatly improves resource utilization efficiency and enables Monad to handle more transactions.

Parallel execution is another key feature in Monads. It achieves parallelism through optimistic execution, which means that the Monad handles transactions optimistically to determine dependencies. In the optimistic execution phase, the Monad begins 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, the Monad can handle multiple transactions simultaneously, further enhancing transaction throughput.

Finally, there is MonadDB. To address the issue that traditional key-value storage databases cannot support the parallel execution needs of Monad, Monad launched its own database, MonadDB. This database is optimized and natively compatible with the Patricia Trie data structure, enabling support for Monad's parallel execution and asynchronous I/O operations. By leveraging the latest advancements in asynchronous I/O, MonadDB avoids the bottleneck issues that may arise when the system waits for one transaction to complete before moving on to the next.

Despite being established for only two years, Monad has shown tremendous long-term potential. Although the mainnet has not yet launched, the Devnet internal test network has reached 10,000 TPS, which is a very high starting point. According to the project's plan, Monad may expand to 100,000 TPS in the coming years. If this expectation is realized, Monad will undoubtedly become a disruptor in the blockchain industry, and its representative parallel execution and superscalar pipeline framework may also become the mainstream development direction for public chains in the future.

Monad Ecosystem Project Review

Although the Monad mainnet has not been officially launched yet, its strong technical strength and broad market prospects have already attracted numerous developers' attention. Currently, more than 80 projects have been deployed on Monad, and it is expected that 150 more projects will choose to build on this platform when the mainnet is launched. This thriving ecological development trend fully demonstrates Monad's potential and industry influence. Here are several Monad ecological projects worth paying attention to.

aPriori

aPriori is a liquidity staking platform in 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 Situation

aPriori successfully completed an $8 million seed round of financing in 2024, led by a well-known investment institution, and received support from the investment department of another prominent trading platform. This financing will provide strong financial backing 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, enhancing the efficiency of asset utilization.
• MEV Optimization: Optimize transaction order through smart contracts to maximize user profits and ensure users receive the best returns when participating in the market.
• High Performance Support: Leverage 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 utilize these assets flexibly while staking them, 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 firm, with participation from several other well-known digital asset investment companies.

Core Functions

• Liquidity Staking: Users can receive 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, ensuring the safety of user assets.
• Composability: Kintsu's Liquid Staking Token (LST) can be easily integrated with other DeFi applications, creating more earning opportunities for users.

Kuru

Kuru is a decentralized order book exchange (CLOB) within the Monad ecosystem, designed to provide users with a single platform to discover, research, and trade on-chain spot assets. The design philosophy of Kuru is to offer better capital efficiency and liquidity through an efficient order book mechanism, leveraging the high throughput and fast block time of the Monad network to enhance the user trading experience.

Financing Scale

Kuru completed a $2 million seed round financing on July 25, 2024. This round was led by a well-known investment institution, with participation from several renowned digital asset investment firms and angel investors including the CEO of Monad.

Core Functions

• Decentralized Trading: Kuru allows users to trade in a decentralized environment, ensuring the transparency and security of transactions while reducing users' trust costs.
• Diversified financial products: Offering a variety of financial products including lending, liquidity mining, and insurance to help users optimize asset allocation and achieve higher investment returns.

Monad Pad

Monad Pad is a token and NFT launch platform based on Monad. Monad Pad supports project parties or developers to initiate early fundraising for tokens or NFTs in the form of presales or public sales. It provides a convenient fundraising channel for emerging projects, helping project parties obtain the necessary financial support.

Financing Situation

Monad Pad at