Project Overview

Monad is a high-performance, developer-friendly smart contract platform. As a Layer 1, it leverages technologies like parallel EVM to achieve a performance of executing 10,000 transactions per second. It aims to attract more quality projects into Web3 with its high-performance features, providing users with a smoother Web3 experience. The project launched its testnet on January 24, 2024.

Team and Investors

The three founders of Monad, Keone Hon, James Hunsaker, and Eunice Giarta, have extensive and impressive backgrounds in the Web3 industry.

• Keone Hon is the co-founder and CEO of Monad. He graduated from MIT and previously led a high-frequency trading division at Jump Trading.
• James Hunsaker, another co-founder of Monad Labs, was a senior software engineer at Jump Trading. He graduated from the University of Iowa.
• Eunice Giarta, the co-founder and COO of Monad, has rich experience in traditional fintech. She previously worked as a senior product manager at Shutterstock and led development teams building enterprise trading systems at Broadway Technology.

Other core team members also have relevant experience in their respective fields. For example, Abdul Rehman, the head of business development, was the ecosystem development lead at Sei Network and the product and growth lead at Falcon Wallet.

With such a strong team background and project vision, Monad has garnered support from numerous investors. On April 9, Monad secured $225 million in funding from notable VCs such as Paradigm, Coinbase Ventures, and Wintermute Investing. There are also dozens of institutions and individual investors.

Source: RootData

High-Performance Architectural Design

The key to Monad’s high performance lies in its parallel execution technology. The basic principle of parallel execution is strategically performing tasks using multiple cores and threads while submitting the results in the original order. Although transactions are executed in parallel “behind the scenes,” from the perspective of users and developers, they appear to be executed serially. A simple analogy to understand the efficiency boost from parallelism is in traffic route planning: the more lanes there are, the more vehicles can pass through.

Source: Monad Documentation

In the traditional process of on-chain transactions in blockchain, each transaction is executed sequentially. However, Monad utilizes optimistic execution, allowing one transaction to execute before another transaction begins. For example, consider comparing transactions by volume:

When A wants to transfer 1 ETH to addresses B and C, respectively, these two transfer transactions would be sequentially packaged in Ethereum according to their order (assuming equal Gas fees). However, theoretically, these two transactions could co-occur in Monad. Of course, this raises a potential issue: if one transaction relies on the result of another transaction, executing them simultaneously could lead to incorrect results. For instance:

1. Transaction 1 reads and updates the balance of account A (e.g., it receives a transfer from account B).
2. Transaction 2 also reads and updates the balance of account A (e.g., transfers to account C).

Optimistic execution addresses this issue by tracking the inputs used during the execution of transaction 2 and comparing them with the output of transaction 1. If they differ, the network detects that transaction 2 used incorrect data during execution and needs to re-execute with the correct data.

If there are long transaction “chains” with mutual dependencies in a block, parallel execution of these transactions will lead to a high failure rate. Therefore, a simple implementation of optimistic execution in Monad is to attempt to start executing the next transaction when the node processor has available resources. Monad has also designed a static code analyzer to attempt predictions of transaction dependencies. In the best-case scenario, Monad can predict many dependencies in advance; in the worst-case scenario, Monad falls back to a simple implementation, i.e., re-execution using available computational resources.

Technological Innovations and Advantages

In the aforementioned parallel architecture, several key component technologies work together to maintain the network’s operation:

• MonadBFT: MonadBFT is a pipelined consensus mechanism that operates in rounds. It is also a type of Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) algorithm, which ensures healthy network operation even in the presence of up to 2/3 malicious nodes.
• Delayed Execution: Consensus in Monad involves nodes agreeing on the formal order of transactions, while execution is the process of actually executing these transactions and updating the state. In Monad’s consensus, nodes agree on the formal ordering of transactions, but leaders or validating nodes do not necessarily have to execute these transactions. This means that leaders propose orders without knowing the resulting state root, and validating nodes vote on the validity of blocks without necessarily knowing (for example) whether all transactions in the block were executed without rollback.
• MonadDb: This is a custom database designed to store blockchain state. It natively implements the MPT (Merkle Patricia Trie) data structure and utilizes the latest asynchronous I/O and other optimization techniques to improve efficiency and performance.

Key Features

EVM Compatibility

Monad is fully compatible with EVM, which means developers can experience the same programming environment as Ethereum on Monad, greatly reducing the development difficulty for ecosystem builders.

High Performance

The main network, capable of handling up to 100,000 transactions per second (TPS), can meet the performance requirements of almost all Web3 dApps, with further scalability prospects in the future.

Low Transaction Fees

In Monad, transaction fees are less than 1 cent per transaction, enabling faster and cheaper transactions than other platforms.

As shown in the table below, Monad’s comparison with Ethereum demonstrates that Monad outperforms Ethereum in performance while utilizing the same EVM architecture. This allows developers on Ethereum to easily migrate their applications to Monad and use Ethereum-compatible RPC APIs, facilitating a quick start for users. The main difference between the two lies in their consensus mechanisms, with Monad employing the MonadBFT algorithm designed by the HotStuff mechanism for parallel operation. Although both use a Proof of Stake (POS) mechanism, Ethereum requires 32 ETH to operate as a node, leading many ETH holders to acquire LST for staking their ETH. In contrast, users can delegate directly to nodes on Monad. As mentioned earlier, the simple implementation of parallel execution relies on remaining computational resources, resulting in higher hardware requirements for nodes on Monad.

Source: Monad Doc for developers

Ecosystem Development

As of May 22, 2024, Monad’s Twitter account had over 280,000 followers, and its Discord community had reached 297,000 members. Projects such as PancakeSwap (V4), Wormhole, Balancer, Layerzero, and Curvance are also partnering with Monad.

Source: x.com

As a high-performance Layer 1, DeFi infrastructure will form the most fundamental layer of asset liquidity on the Monad chain. These early strategic partners are well-known projects in the DEX field and prominent projects in the cross-chain domain. According to statistics from Rootdata (as shown in the chart below), projects participating in the Monad testnet currently cover various fields such as DeFi, NFT, AI, and infrastructure, with DeFi projects being the most numerous.

Source: Rootdata

Potential Airdrop Opportunities

As a public chain aimed at a broad audience of technical developers and expected to support a larger scale of Web3, Monad may also consider issuing token airdrops as community incentives. However, since Monad is currently in the internal testing phase, there are yet to be opportunities for broader community participation. Some potential steps to prepare for future airdrops include:

1. Join the official Discord and aim to obtain early access. You can also join the official Telegram for the latest updates.

2. Prepare to participate as a testing node in the next phase of network testing. According to official guidance, the hardware requirements for a Monad full node are:

   CPU: 16-core CPU

   RAM: 32 GB RAM

   Storage: 2 TB NVMe SSD

   Bandwidth: 100 Mb/s

3. Engage early with ecosystem projects to increase your chances of receiving airdrops. While internal testing is limited to collaborators and the team, some ecosystem builders may have participated in early testing. Interacting with these projects may enhance your chances of receiving airdrops.

Keep an eye on official announcements for any updates regarding potential airdrops and community participation opportunities.

Conclusion

While Ethereum has chosen the Rollup scalability solution due to performance issues, Solana achieves high performance through extremely high node requirements but still faces issues such as downtime. Monad utilizes sharding technology to achieve top-tier performance: 100,000 TPS. This level of performance not only lays the foundation for projects in traditional industries requiring fast and frequent transactions but also accommodates more users. Despite being in the testnet stage, Monad has already gained significant attention and garnered some community support. Monad’s achievements are worth anticipating.