By Nicky, Foresight News
In April this year, Layer1 blockchain Monad Labs announced that it had completed a financing of up to US$225 million, which is the largest cryptocurrency project financing so far in 2024. This round of financing was led by investment institution Paradigm and attracted participation from investment institutions including IOSG Ventures, SevenX Ventures, Electric Capital and Greenoaks.
Monad Labs aims to introduce parallel execution and superscalar pipeline technology through its parallel EVM Layer1 project Monad, improve the performance of the Ethereum virtual machine, and solve the low throughput problem of existing EVM-compatible blockchains. Currently, the Monad network is in the Devnet stage, and the joint test network is still being prepared.
This article will comprehensively review the development status of the Monad ecosystem from multiple sectors such as DeFi, NFT, and full-chain interoperability protocols. At the same time, it should also be noted that many of the current native projects of the Monad ecosystem are still in a very early stage of development. Investors and participants should be vigilant about this and fully aware of the risks involved.
As of August 1, 2024, a list of Monad ecosystem projects. (Source: Drops Tab)
DeFi Protocols
DEX/AMM Protocols
Ambient Finance
Ambient Finance is a decentralized trading protocol that allows for the combination of bilateral AMMs with centralized and constant product liquidity on any pair of blockchain assets. Last July, Ambient Finance announced the completion of a $6.5 million seed round of financing, led by BlockTower Capital, with participation from investment institutions such as Jane Street, Circle, Tensai Capital, and several individual investors.
Backpack
Backpack is a fully regulated global cryptocurrency trading platform that integrates centralized exchanges, on-chain wallets, and NFTs. It is committed to providing users with a seamless and innovative crypto experience and plans to expand to a wider blockchain ecosystem. Its exchange has obtained a VASP license issued by the Dubai Virtual Assets Authority. It will support the Monad network on the first day of its public testnet launch.
Balancer
Balancer is a DeFi AMM protocol that allows anyone to create a pool of assets with predefined weights in the pool. Balancer is striving to become a platform for DAO and other protocol building tools to provide liquidity for users and products. As of now, the transaction volume of Liquid Staked Token on Balancer has exceeded 25 billion US dollars.
Catalyst
Catalyst is an open source protocol that provides liquidity between modular blockchains. With Catalyst, any new modular blockchain can automatically connect to liquidity and trade with any chain - including liquidity centers such as Ethereum and Cosmos. In May of this year, Catalyst announced the launch of the mainnet, and the second-layer networks built using OP Stack, such as Optimism, Base, etc., can share liquidity between their Rollups.
Dyson Finance
Dyson Finance is a retail user-friendly DEX that aims to democratize the on-chain liquidity paradigm. With its dual investment, innovative dynamic AMM and exclusive referral program, anyone can easily provide liquidity and earn high returns like a professional.
Kuru
Kuru is a fully on-chain order book DEX built on Monad, providing users with a single platform to find, research and trade on-chain spot assets. In July this year, Kuru announced the completion of a $2 million seed round of financing, led by Electric Capital, with participation from institutions such as Brevan Howard Digital, CMS Holdings, and angel investors such as Keone Hon.
Swaap Finance
Swaap Finance is a market-neutral automated market maker (AMM). It combines oracles and dynamic spreads to provide sustainable returns for liquidity providers and cheaper prices for traders.
Timeswap
Timeswap is an AMM-based decentralized money market protocol that does not use oracles or liquidators. Unlike Uniswap, which can exchange assets in real time, borrowing and lending on Timeswap requires exchanging tokens until repayment is completed.
Wombat Exchange
Wombat Exchange is a multi-chain stablecoin trading DEX with services such as open liquidity pools, low slippage, and unilateral staking.
Loan Agreement
Curvance
Curvance is a decentralized stablecoin lending protocol that initially focuses on LPs from the Curve, Convex, Aura, and Frax ecosystems. Curvance seeks to optimize returns for users while maximizing capital efficiency through peer-to-peer lending. Last December, Curvance announced the completion of a $3.6 million seed round of financing, with participation from Arbitrum developer Offchain Labs, Wormhole, and angel investors including Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal. In April of this year, Curvance launched a testnet for early supporters.
Pike Finance
Pike Finance is a native cross-chain lending market that enables direct and secure interactions between different blockchains. Pike is built on Wormhole's cross-chain data messaging protocol and Circle's native USDC minting protocol CCTP. In March this year, Pike Finance announced its token economics, aiming to promote the development of cross-chain DApps through its governance token P.
Liquidity Network Protocol
aPriori
aPriori is a MEV infrastructure and liquid staking protocol built natively on Monad. It is committed to building a transaction-centric infrastructure for Monad to reduce gas fees, optimize network traffic, and provide sustainable incentives for validators, helping Monad improve throughput and user experience. In July of this year, aPriori announced the completion of an $8 million seed round of financing, led by Pantera. Previously, aPriori completed a Pre-Seed round of financing co-led by Hashed and Arrington Capital. The total financing amount has reached $10 million. Institutions participating in the investment include Consensys, OKX Ventures, Manifold Trading, etc. At the same time, Binance Labs announced an investment in aPriori through the Binance Labs Season 6 Incubation Program. Ray S, co-founder and CEO of aPriori, revealed that this round of financing will bring aPriori's fully diluted token valuation to "9 figures."
Elixir
Elixir is a modular liquidity network that allows users to directly provide liquidity to trading pairs on order book exchanges and receive market maker rewards similar to AMM. Its network supports a large amount of liquidity from exchanges such as Vertex, Bluefin, and RabbitX, and will be integrated with platforms such as dYdX and ApeX. In March of this year, Elixir announced the completion of an $8 million Series B financing round, with Mysten Labs and Maelstrom. In October last year, it completed a $7.5 million Series A financing round at a valuation of $100 million, led by Hack VC and participated by NGC Ventures and others.
Kintsu
Kintsu is an ecological liquid staking protocol based on the Monad network. In July this year, Kintsu announced the completion of a US$4 million seed round of financing, led by Castle Island Ventures, with participation from Brevan Howard Digital, CMT Digital, Animoca Ventures and others.
NFT Section
Monad Nomads NFT
Monad Nomads NFT is the first community-driven NFT proposal on Monad.
Poply
Poply is a native community-based NFT marketplace on Monad.
Full chain interoperability protocol
Axelar Network
Axelar is a decentralized cross-chain communication network that aims to improve interoperability in Web3 by connecting heterogeneous blockchains and enabling asset mobility and program composability in an optimized manner for builders and end users.
Decent
Decent aims to provide chain abstraction services for applications and blockchains, helping users make payments using anything in their wallets.
LayerZero
LayerZero is an interoperability protocol for messaging that allows any cross-chain contract call containing a payload.
Wormhole
Wormhole is a universal messaging protocol launched in October 2020. It was originally incubated and supported by Jump Crypto. It aims to enable developers to build native cross-chain applications covering multiple chains. It has now evolved from focusing on a two-way cross-chain bridge between Ethereum and Solana to a universal messaging protocol that supports multiple chains.
AI
AIT Protocol
AIT Protocol is a Web3 data infrastructure built on blockchain, mainly used for data annotation and AI model training, allowing users to participate in the "Train-To-Eran" task and contribute to AI model development and training while earning rewards. At the end of last year, AlT Protocol announced the completion of a new round of financing, with MorningStar Ventures, Megala Ventures, Contango Digital Assets and others participating.
On-chain tools
Notifi
Notifi provides flexible support for communications for any Web3 project, with advanced features for applications and built-in global infrastructure to support project applications on a large scale.
Parsec
Parsec is an on-chain data analysis platform for encryption. In October last year, Parsec announced the completion of a new round of US$4 million in financing and launched the DeFi and NFT analysis product "team". This round of financing was led by Galaxy Digital, with participation from Uniswap Labs Ventures, Robot Ventures, CMT Digital and others.
GameFi
Breath of Estova
Breath of Estova (BoE) is a 2D play-to-earn game built on the Monad network. BoE leverages the parallel capabilities of Monad to introduce blockchain integration, enabling users to earn ESTOVA tokens and gain access to unique in-game items and pets.
RareBetSports
RareBetSports is a Web3 ecosystem built on the Monad Network that aims to capture the experience of combining sports and cryptocurrencies, while also being an ideal platform tailored for the next generation of fans and future communities.
Oracle
Python Network
Pyth Network is a next-generation price oracle solution that aims to provide valuable on-chain financial market data, including cryptocurrencies, stocks, foreign exchange, commodities, etc., to projects and protocols and the public through blockchain technology.
RedStone
RedStone is a blockchain oracle, similar to popular oracles such as Chainlink and Pyth Network, but based on a modular design. In July this year, RedStone completed a $15 million Series A financing round led by Arrington Capital, with participation from institutions such as Kraken Ventures, White Star Capital, Spartan Group, and angel investors such as Smokey the Bera and Homme Bera of Berachain and Mike Silagadze of Ether.Fi.
Switchboard
Switchboard is a fast, permissionless, and customizable multi-chain oracle protocol for universal data feeds and verifiable randomness. In May this year, Switchboard announced the completion of a $7.5 million Series A financing round led by Tribe Capital and RockawayX, with participation from Solana Foundation, Aptos, StarkWare and other institutions, as well as some angel investors.
