Monad

Ethereum-compatible L1 with parallelization

Basics

• Based in:
• Started in / Announced on: 2022
• Testnet release: 11-2024, has begun rolling out its testnet as part of a phased release
• Mainnet release: "mainnet launch later this year" (14-2-2023), still none (11-2024).

History

• From influencer/researcher Thor (8-2-2024):

"Monad has been in development for roughly two years and is founded by Keone Hon, James Hunsaker and Eunice Giarta. Keone and James are the two technical co-founders and worked together for eight years at Jump Trading. Sitting at the same high frequency trading desk and competing against 20 other teams internally at Jump, Keone and James were able to consistently rank as one of the top performing desks over the years, facilitating more than $10 trillion dollars in notional trading volume per year. With this level of volume, and by conducting thousands of transactions per second, Keone and James experienced firsthand the difference a microsecond makes in execution.

After moving into crypto, Keone was working on Solana DeFi and James was building Pyth. They started building Monad in 2022 after realizing that it’s possible to implement a series of fundamental optimizations to the EVM, which have been standard in high performance computer science over the last 20 years, but have not yet been implemented to the EVM."

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].

Technology

• Whitepaper or docs can be found [insert here].
• Code can be viewed [insert here].
• Consensus mechanism: MonadBFT
• Algorithm:
• Virtual Machine: EVM
• Development language used: The Monad client is built with a focus on performance and is written from scratch in C++ and Rust.

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS): 10,000 (9-2023) with 1 second block time (8-2-2024).
• Latency:

How it works

• From this report (16-9-2024):

"Consensus - Monad BFT

Monad BFT is heavily influenced by HotStuff BFT, but it has devised a method of direct communication with other nodes when experiencing poor network conditions. Unlike HotStuff, which went through three processes per round, Monad BFT focuses on reducing latency by going through only two processes per round. Additionally, when conducting votes, instead of cross-validation communication where vote data is propagated to all nodes except oneself, Monad BFT adopts a linear communication method where data is propagated only to the leader of the next round, improving blockchain throughput and latency. Lastly, through pipelining, Monad BFT has achieved consensus efficiency by introducing a method where all consensus processes are not handled in a single round, but are divided and processed over multiple rounds.

Execution - Transaction Parallel Execution

Monad uses optimistic concurrency in parallel processing of transactions. In simple terms, during parallel processing, it assumes all operations are valid, executes them first, and then re-executes if problems occur during the verification process. The reason Monad uses this approach is that they judged it to be more efficient to execute transactions and then re-execute based on information gathered when problems occur, rather than analyzing the relationships between transactions in advance.

Storage (Database) - Monad DB

In fact, parallel processing at the execution level is not such a difficult task. It has already been implemented many times, and various blockchains are doing parallel processing at the execution layer. The real important thing is "efficiency of parallel processing," and the answer to this lies in the storage method. Therefore, Monad is investing a great deal of time and effort into optimizing the DB. Monad DB does not use the Merkle Patricia structure that Ethereum has, but instead natively implements the Patricia tree structure on both disk and memory to reduce inefficiencies. Moreover, by supporting async I/O, it allows the CPU to process other transactions concurrently without waiting for the results of transaction inputs and outputs."

• From influencer/researcher Thor (8-2-2024):

"Monad utilizes parallel execution which allows several transactions to be processed at the same time. It’s important to note that Monad blocks still are a linearly ordered set of transactions just like on Ethereum.

Monad uses optimistic execution which means that the chain will start executing transactions before earlier transactions in the block have completed. To avoid errors and incorrect execution, the state of transactions are merged sequentially in the blocks to ensure correctness."

Interoperability

Monad announced a day one partnership with Layerzero.

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].

Pros and Cons

Cons

• One co-founder, James Hunsaker, a former Jump employee is a SEC whistleblower (11-4-2024) who was part of Jump during the Terra era.

Team, Funding and Partners

Team

• Full team can be found [here].
• Monad Labs, both founders come from Jump Trading (15-2-2024).
• Keone Hon; co-founder & CEO
• Eunice Giarta and James Hunsaker

Funding

• Announced a $225M fundraise (9-4-2024) with participation of Paradigm, Electric Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Greenoaks, Egirl Capital, Rune Christensen, Robinson Burkey, Mert Mumtaz, Bryan Pellegrino, Eric Wall, Luca Netz, Saquon Barkley, Ansem, Hsaka, Inversebrah and others.

• From Techcrunch (14-2-2023);

"Raised $19 million in seed funding led by Dragonfly Capital. The round included 70 participants, including Placeholder Capital, Lemniscap, Shima Capital and Finality Capital, as well as angel investors like AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant. The capital will be used to double the team to about 24 in the next several months, Giarta said."

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