Redefining Blockchain Performance Standards: Can Monad Become the New Disruptor of Layer 1?

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 explosive growth of application demand, the technical limitations faced by existing infrastructures like Ethereum, especially issues related to scalability and transaction speed, have become key bottlenecks in the development of the industry. 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, highlighting the market's high recognition of its technological potential. This funding will help Monad further build and optimize its Layer1 Blockchain, which is expected to bring revolutionary changes to the industry.

Monad: Committed to Solving the Ethereum Scalability Challenge

Ethereum's position in the blockchain field is unshakeable. It is not only the core of blockchain research, decentralized applications (Dapps), and community development, but it also has the highest Total Value Locked (TVL), showcasing its leadership in the blockchain world. Thanks to Ethereum's thriving development, the Ethereum and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) developer community has become the largest community in the crypto space, nurturing countless innovative DeFi and dApp projects.

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

Sharding technology aims to split the large blockchain network into multiple smaller shards to improve storage capacity and performance. However, the implementation of this technology requires a long period of argument and research, and its potential cannot be realized in the short term. On the other hand, Layer2 scaling strategies handle transactions and the execution of smart contracts by building additional frameworks on top of the main blockchain, reducing the burden on the main chain and improving overall network efficiency and scalability. However, with some well-known Layer2 aggregation projects delaying the decentralization of their sequencers, Layer2 faces increasingly severe challenges regarding centralization.

In the face of these challenges, Monad's founder Keone Hon proposed a unique insight. He believes that the current scalability path taken by Ethereum has certain issues. The Layer1+Layer2 layered strategy can lead to the blockchain being divided into independent execution environments, thereby undermining the composability on-chain. 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 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 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 investment institutions have participated in investing in the Monad project. These investors are confident in Monad's prospects, believing it will promote the adoption of cryptocurrency in the next 2-3 years. A founding partner of one investment institution views Monad as a solid foundation for stablecoins and refers to it as a "killer application," predicting that it will continue to grow exponentially in the coming years.

Monad: Reshaping Blockchain Performance with Underlying Optimization and Parallel Strategies

Monad is favored mainly due to its outstanding technical advantages. It does not choose to enhance scalability through layer2 solutions, but rather starts from 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 is crucial for Monad's future development.

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

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

The working mechanism of Monad

The working mechanism of Monad mainly achieves this through optimizing four core areas: MonadBFT, delayed execution, parallel execution, and MonadDB. These four mechanisms work together to drive 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. MonadBFT adopts a more efficient two-round leader-centric fan-out and fan-in method. This mechanism ensures rapid 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 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 core of the delayed execution mechanism lies in separating consensus from execution, allowing nodes to quickly reach agreement on the order of transactions without waiting for the execution of transactions to complete. This approach 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 will optimistically process transactions to determine dependencies. During the optimistic execution phase, Monads start 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 the dependencies between transactions and enable efficient re-execution. Through the parallel execution mechanism, Monads can process multiple transactions simultaneously, further increasing transaction throughput.

Finally, MonadDB is developed to address the traditional Blockchain data storage issues. MonadDB is optimized to be natively compatible with the Patricia Trie data structure, enabling support for the parallel execution and asynchronous I/O operations of Monad. 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.

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, the Devnet internal test network has already reached 10,000 TPS, which is a very high starting point. According to the project's plan, Monad can 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 for public chains in the future.

Monad: Spotlight on Hot Ecological Projects

Monad Blockchain developer Monad Labs raised $225 million in Series A funding in April, with a reported valuation of $3 billion. Monad has also become the largest parallel EVM public chain in terms of funding scale, achieving a throughput of 10,000 transactions per second (tps), significantly surpassing other EVM-compatible public chains.

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

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 their assets, allowing users to flexibly utilize their assets while participating in staking.

Financing Situation

aPriori successfully completed a $8 million seed round financing in 2024, which will provide strong funding support for its technology development and market promotion.

Core Functions

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

• 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: Utilizing the high throughput of the Monad network, supporting up to 10,000 transactions per second, ensuring quick processing and efficient execution of liquid staking.

Kintsu

Kintsu is a liquidity staking protocol in the Monad ecosystem, aimed at providing users with a flexible staking experience. It allows users to flexibly use their assets while staking them, meeting users' liquidity needs.

Financing Situation

Kintsu successfully completed a seed round financing of 4 million USD on July 25, 2024.

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, 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 times of the Monad network to enhance the trading experience for users.

Financing Scale

Kuru completed a $2 million seed round financing on July 25, 2024.

Core Functions

• Decentralized Trading: Kuru allows users to trade in a decentralized environment, ensuring transparency and security of transactions, reducing the trust cost for users.

• 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 Pa