Team background
Monad was founded by the Monad Labs team in early 2022. Most of the team members are from the traditional financial giant Jump Trading. The co-founders include Keone Hon, James Hunsaker and Eunice Giarta, and Keone Hon is the CEO. Keone Hon is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Master of Information Engineering. After graduation, he joined KCG Group to participate in quantitative trading model design. Later, he worked as the leader of one of the high-frequency trading teams at Jump Trading Company for 8 years. After the establishment of Jump Crypto, he also led engineers to research DeFi related applications. , integrating trading and technology professionals.
James Hunsaker and Eunice Giarta serve as chief technology officer and chief operating officer respectively. James graduated from the Computer Science Department of the University of Iowa. James is Keone's partner at Jump Trading. They are both software engineers for high-frequency quantitative trading until they joined crypto in 2022. The currency quantitative trading team is quite good at technology.
Eunice also graduated from the Department of Information Engineering at MIT. Unlike the other two founders, after graduation, Eunice worked as a trading analyst at Merrill Lynch, and later served as product manager and payment department director at Broadway Technology and Shutterstock. , with rich experience in finance and products.
Monad financing situation - the largest financing case in the crypto industry in the first half of this year
The financing situation of Monad is of great concern to the industry, and it also brought a lot of traffic and attention to Monad at the beginning of the project.
Monad announced in February 2023 that it had received US$19 million in seed round financing, led by Dragonfly Capital, with participation from Placeholder Capital, Lemniscap, Shima Capital, Finality Capital and other institutions. In addition, many professionals invested in this round, including well-known investors Naval Ravikant, well-known cryptocurrency trader Jordan Fish (Cobie), Paradigm research partner Hasu, etc. This round of financing has also directly consolidated Monad’s voice in the market.
In April this year, Monad once again received US$225 million in financing led by Paradigm. The huge amount set off a huge wave, with dozens of participating institutions, including Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute, Electric Capital, Greenoaks, Castle Island, and eGirl Capital. , Amber Group, Archetype and many other institutions, holding on to market expectations, Monad has also become the largest financing case in the crypto industry in the first half of this year.
Current status of parallel EVM
What is Parallel EVM?
EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) is the core of the Ethereum main network. It mainly handles smart contracts and transaction verification on the blockchain. In order to ensure the security of the blockchain, the EVM sorts all transactions, which meets the requirements of the blockchain. Security is indeed not enough to meet the throughput of tens of thousands of transactions per second. The current transaction volume per second (TPS) of the Ethereum main network is only 13, and an expansion solution is urgently needed.
Conceptually speaking, parallel EVM can optimize transaction ordering (in parallel). Without going into too deep a technical discussion, here we give an example:
Think of a transaction as a fleet. Each fleet has several vehicles. Traditional EVM has only one lane, and all the cars have to queue up slowly. Parallel EVM defines different lanes for different vehicle types, and there are multiple lanes. Being able to handle traffic flow at the same time can solve transaction congestion.
Existing parallel EVM
Currently, most of the parallel EVM expansion solutions use sharding technology, as listed below:
Monad: Designing a parallel Layer 1 through a fully EVM-compatible architecture is also the protagonist of this article.
Sei: As a parallel EVM L1, the major upgrade of Sei V2 will also be fully compatible with EVM, allowing developers to migrate painlessly.
Neon: Introduce EVM transactions into the L2 of SVM (Solana Virtual Machine). Since SVM itself has sharding technology, it can complete parallel transactions.
Eclipse: Similar to Neon, it integrates SVM and EVM. It has reached strategic cooperation with Neon this year.
Whether Monad and Sei stand on their own and become an L1, or Neon and Eclipse integrate SVM through the L2 expansion plan, they can complete parallel transactions, but among them, Monad is the most popular.
Monad features: Compatible with EVM development environment and optimize efficiency
Compatible development environment
Monad is fully compatible with the solidity bytecode (Bytecode) processed by EVM, so all projects originally developed by solidity can directly move their code to Monad.
Both Ethereum and Monad use the JSON-RPC 2.0 communication specification. This part is compatible with Ethereum and helps communication between applications and the blockchain. Therefore, Monad can directly connect with existing Ethereum applications and even add new ones. Versatile.
The synchronizable parts are listed below:
Application: Any Dapp built on Ethereum
Developer testing tools: Foundry, Hardhat, Apeworx
Wallet: Phantom, MetaMask
Data analysis: Etherscan, Dune
It can be seen from this that developers who were originally in the Ethereum ecosystem will be able to seamlessly enter the Monad ecosystem, which will be a major advantage for the future expansion of the ecosystem.
Optimizing efficiency and scalability: new consensus and execution mechanism
In the consensus mechanism part, Monad uses the following 4 technologies:
MonadBFT
MonadBFT is an efficient consensus mechanism that evolved from HotStuff . It is a BFT algorithm with optimistic response capabilities and can handle multiple votes and results simultaneously.
Shared Mempool
The concept of Shared Mempool is to broadcast unprocessed transactions in each validator to all validators, and then quickly distribute them for processing. It is a concept where everyone works together to make it faster.
Deferred Execution
Delayed execution is a unique feature of Monad. Monad allows nodes to process consensus and execution synchronously. The concept of Monad is that once the order of transactions is determined, the true status of the blockchain is also determined, thereby improving the efficiency of the blockchain.
Carriage Cost and Reserve Balance
In Monad, in addition to a small amount of Gas for transaction execution, you also need to pay transportation costs (Carriage Cost). In order to avoid network congestion caused by transaction failure, Monad first sets a reserve balance (Reserve Balance) for each address. When a transaction is initiated, Obtain transportation costs from the reserve balance and return the excess to avoid transaction failures and increase the success rate of each transaction.
Execution level:
Optimistic Parallel Execution:
Optimistic parallel execution means predicting in advance that all transactions are separate and parallelizable. If a conflict is encountered (such as account A trading with accounts B and C in a short period of time), it will be re-executed. Of course, there are many long-term transactions in the blockchain. For chain transaction types, Monad has also specially designed a static program analyzer to try to predict this situation and avoid a large number of errors.
MonadDB:
This is a custom database for Monad to store blockchain status, which solves the I/O blocking problem when Ethereum applications read status (generally, you need to wait for I/O operations such as file and database reading and writing to complete before continuing to process other task), MonadDB supports new hardware and cores and can perform other tasks while waiting for I/O processing.
To put it simply, in terms of technology, Monad first makes ecological docking unobstructed through a development architecture compatible with Ethereum, and then improves the speed of consensus and execution levels. These technologies reduce the block time of Monad to less than 1 second. Within, the overall transaction throughput rate has been increased to 10,000 TPS, which is quite impressive. However, in web3, technology alone is not enough. Community culture is also another key element.
Strong community building and MEME culture
First of all, on Twitter, the number of followers of Monad has reached 310,000, and the activity and views are even more popular. The Monad team believes that the community should not just follow the project, but should show the core values and culture, thereby attracting A true supporter.
Therefore, in addition to the progress updates for each project on Twitter, Monad also creates an interesting and positive community atmosphere, such as the special greeting (gmonad) method in the community, which has become the consensus of the Monad community. In particular, In addition to the official account, other Monad accounts also bring more innovations.
Twitter accounts worth following in the Monad ecosystem:
1. Pipeline
In Monad's Pipeline account, the host Danny will share many clips of Monad activities in the form of Vlog, including many current gatherings and interviews, bringing more latest information to the community and spreading the community atmosphere of Monad.
2. intern
Monad can be said to be an "intern" model that amplifies various ecosystems of the blockchain. Different from the official account, intern not only publishes more interesting and funny memes, but also publishes content highly related to the project to interact with the community. Monad While creating a relaxed and positive community atmosphere, it also demonstrates its strong appeal, allowing the community to be influenced by the Monad ecology.
In the Discord part, Monad ranks all members and positions them based on current activity and historical contributions. The clear grading system also encourages users to participate in more community activities, such as effective speeches, tweet interactions, MEME creation, etc. Previously, The Wormhole project's Monad airdrop also prompted users to work harder to complete tasks.
The Monad Telegram community has three special chat groups. The OG group requires users who have made significant contributions to Monad and frequently participate in offline activities to join. The other House of Molandak and House of Moyaki groups have weekly tasks for them to join. Everyone stays active. What's special is that these groups all have "Thursday cleaning days", and the least active users will be kicked out every week. This mechanism helps keep the community hot.
Because of the extremely high level of community participation, the MEME culture within the Monad community is also quite popular, extending from purple PEPE to later community-created MEMEs, including Molandak, Moyaki and Chog, which have all become well-known memes. Purple It has also become the logo color of Monad. To become a successful web3 project, a good community is essential, and Monad's approach seems to be quite effective.
When will Monad be launched on the mainnet? Will coins be issued in 2024?
Regarding the launch time of the Monad mainnet, according to the interview content of Monad founder Keone Hon this year, it is expected to be launched in the fourth quarter of this year. However, the official time has not been announced yet. However, as the mainnet launch is approaching, the community activity in the ecosystem is closely related to the online launch time. The heat of activity continues to spread. You can pay more attention to Monad Madness related activities.
Monad Eco Tour
Kuru Exchange is a decentralized order book exchange on Monad. It is still in its early stages. It is committed to bringing the order book system to the Monad ecosystem. In July this year, it received a total of US$2 million in seed round funding led by Electric Capital, especially What’s more, Keone, the founder of Monad, also participated in this round of financing in his own name.
aPriori is a liquid staking platform driven by MEV. Its architecture in the Monad ecosystem can not only provide users with a new DeFi choice, but also help Monad validators benefit from MEV activities. Its core technology can even significantly reduce transaction delays and improve transactions. experience.
The core team of aPriori includes CEO Ray and Chief Technology Officer Olivia. Ray once led projects at Jump Trading and Jump Crypto, and was also an important contributor to the Pyth Network, the leading oracle in the Solana ecosystem. Olivia once served as a senior software engineer at Coinbase.
aPriori received US$2.7 million in pre-seed round and US$8 million in seed round financing led by Pantera Capital in January and July of this year respectively, totaling US$10.7 million, and is currently valued at US$100 million.
Kintsu is a liquid staking protocol in the Monad ecosystem. It improves returns by improving delegated proof of rights, thereby improving the efficiency of the overall POS blockchain. It also received US$4 million in financing led by Castle Island Ventures in July.
In the Monad ecosystem, there are many applications and partners, including PancakeSwap decentralized exchange, Phantom wallet, Pyth Network oracle, LayerZero, Wormhole full-chain protocol and many other well-known projects are also built on Monad, in the NFT market There are Monad Nomads NFT and the native NFT market Poply supported by the community. With the support of the community, the ecosystem has gradually prospered.
Source: X
More Monad activities and potential airdrops
Although Monad has not revealed much information about the token at present, it is close to the launch of the test network, developer activities and offline gatherings are also quite active. Monad Madness NYC, which Monad recently co-organized with Paradogm, is also full, with 20 people allowed in the event. The team will showcase their works and concepts, and more than 60 venture capital institutions will participate in the event. It is a key event to obtain exposure and funds. This also shows that the Monad ecosystem is extremely popular.
Currently, as an ordinary user, the easiest way to join the Monad ecosystem is to follow Twitter updates and Discoid and Telegram-related activities. As long as you stay active, get a Discord role or join a Telegram key group, you will have a chance to receive airdrops.
Monad airdrop possibility in the future? Solana Mad Lads NFT
Since the Monad team itself comes from Jump Trading, it is difficult not to think of the Solana ecosystem and even related leading protocols, which may be related to NFT representative Mad Lads. Therefore, this has also been the most discussed part of potential airdrops in the past few months. , the specific details still need to lock in the latest official news.
summary
Ethereum has gone from being a popular side chain a few years ago, experiencing the explosion of Layer 2, to the emergence of parallel EVM now, which represents a new technological change in Ethereum, and Monad, by being fully compatible with Ethereum, can be used by developers. Painless transfer improves the transaction experience for users and expands more applications and users for Ethereum. This may be the key for all parties to value the potential of Monad.
Some people say that Monad will be the next Solana, or the so-called "Ethereum killer", but Monad founder Keone Hon prefers to compare Monad to the pioneer hunter of Ethereum, helping Ethereum explore more areas and exerting influence on the entire EVM. Contributing to the ecology is the original intention of Monad.
