Solana has recently gained a spot in the crypto industry as a potential Ethereum competitor, although Ethereum’s virtual machine has established a strong network effect, controlling 93% of the total locked value (TVL). However, even Ethereum’s most critical observers have to admit its strong market share.

Ethereum's Rollup centralized solution has caused a lot of concern, with many people worrying that it could fragment liquidity and complicate user experience. On the contrary, some critics prefer a holistic expansion strategy, advocating that the network should remain in a single state to improve efficiency.

Nevertheless, some Ethereum-based forks, such as the BNB chain, have reduced their reliance on Rollups and have overcome the scalability issues of the EVM to some extent by adopting more centralized consensus mechanisms such as proof of authority. However, many people believe that the future of finance should not rely on centralized blockchains.

In order to truly become the next "Ethereum killer", a blockchain platform must significantly technically improve the outdated EVM, while maintaining strong decentralization features and meeting the needs of modern users and developers.

In this technological competition, Monad Chain shows great potential. Today, we will explore the innovations provided by Monad and analyze why it has the potential to surpass Ethereum and become the leader of the dominant smart contract platform in the future.

Monad is leading the decentralized computing revolution at the forefront of the crypto industry. As an innovative layer 1 blockchain project, Monad has designed an efficient system that is expected to process up to 10,000 transactions per second. This strong performance expectation is based on its mission: to provide developers with a permissionless, efficient development environment that significantly reduces throughput and computing costs, and opens up a new era of decentralized applications.

Industry developments over the past few years have proven the value of decentralization, and Monad is committed to providing a solution to support wider user adoption. Ethereum currently has a daily user cap of 500,000, and Monad's goal is to support up to 50 million users and higher transaction volumes per user.

In terms of the team, Monad has gathered a group of experts with rich backgrounds in traditional finance and quantitative trading. Co-founder and CEO Keone Hon was the leader of the high-frequency trading department of Jump Trading. Co-founder and COO Eunice Giarta has deep financial technology experience in companies such as Shutterstock and Broadway Technology. Another co-founder, James Hunsaker, worked as a senior software engineer at Jump Trading before jumping to Monad Labs and has worked for JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs.

In terms of financing, Monad completed a $19 million seed round led by Dragonfly Capital in February 2023, with participation from several well-known investors. By April 2024, Monad completed another $225 million in financing led by Paradigm, which brought the project's valuation to $3 billion.

Monad's technical highlights include:

High performance: Achieve processing capabilities of up to 10,000 transactions per second through parallel processing, with the goal of reaching 400,000 TPS at the physical bandwidth limit.

EVM Compatible: Maintain full compatibility with the existing EVM and Ethereum RPC API, allowing existing Ethereum applications and smart contracts to run seamlessly on the Monad platform.

Security and decentralization: It uses advanced security protocols and MonadBFT consensus mechanism to ensure network stability and data security.

Community and ecosystem building: Committed to building an active developer community and supporting the development of a variety of decentralized applications.

Monad not only demonstrates the potential to challenge Ethereum technically, but also provides developers with the convenience of seamless migration through its high compatibility with Ethereum, greatly enhancing its competitiveness in the future cryptocurrency ecosystem.

The latest concept of EVM representative project "Parallel EVM" currently includes 7 projects, such as Monad, Sei, Canto, Artela, Neon, Eclipse, Cipherem, etc. These projects show the current climax of innovation in the encryption technology community.

Currently, we can divide existing parallel EVM networks into three categories:

Upgrades of the original EVM network: These are networks that did not initially adopt parallel execution technology, but achieved EVM parallel upgrades through subsequent technology iterations. For example, Polygon has completed the parallel EVM upgrade in 2022; Fantom's Fantom Sonic upgrade network, which is expected to be launched in April, also introduced parallel execution technology.

EVM compatible with native parallel execution technology Layer1: such as Monad, Sei V2 and Artela, these platforms are designed to support parallel execution from the beginning.

Parallel execution Layer2 networks of non-EVM Layer1 technologies: For example, representative ones are Solana Neon and Eclipse, which regard EVM as a pluggable execution module and select the best "VM execution layer" according to needs, such as Solana VM, Move VM or EVM.

Development Roadmap

Monad is expected to launch on the mainnet sometime in the third quarter of this year. The project has attracted interest from existing EVM protocols and development teams that want to build native applications on the Monad blockchain. In addition, Monad recently partnered with Layerzero, which will facilitate liquidity bridging in the ecosystem.

Given the strong community and developer interest in Monad, the excitement surrounding the project is expected to continue leading up to the public testnet and mainnet launch later this year.

Summarize

While the EVM itself is not perfect, Monad has greatly enhanced the potential of the EVM through its series of innovations, creating a high-throughput L1 blockchain and eliminating the need for dApps to redevelop or audit their code to adapt to a high-throughput execution environment.

Although Ethereum could theoretically mimic Monad’s design choices, this would require major system reforms that could put on-chain assets at risk. At the same time, solving the interoperability between Ethereum and its Layer 2 solutions is a long-term task, and being able to handle the current traffic load in a unified execution environment will provide a superior experience for users, developers, and capital.

By enabling the mature suite of Ethereum applications to achieve ultra-high performance on Monad, the platform presents an attractive combination of features and is expected to become a key hub for future crypto activity.

Berachain

Project name: Berachain
Track section: Tracks in the field of blockchain technology and encryption

Current valuation: 5 billion+

Locking mechanism: Lock 3 and release 3 (lock for three months, release in three months, release 33.33% each month)

Total amount: 500 million

Expected launch: third quarter

Project unit price: 0.5U

Official website: https://www.berachain.com/

Official Twitter: https://twitter.com/berachain