On April 9, Layer 1 blockchain Monad Labs completed a $225 million financing round. This round of financing was led by Paradigm. Other investors included Electric Capital, Castle Island Ventures, Greenoaks, eGirl Capital, Amber Group, Animoca Ventures, Archetype, Bankless Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, Bodhi Ventures, Breed, Caladan, CMS Holdings, Coinbase Ventures, CoinFund, DBA, Figment Capital, Flow Traders, Galaxy, GSR Ventures, Hailstone Labs, Hermeneutic Investments, HTX Ventures, IOSG Ventures, Makers Fund, Manifold Trading, Merit Circle, Mirana Ventures, Nascent, Presto Labs, Rebirth Ventures, Robot Ventures, SevenX Ventures, Superscrypt, Wintermute Ventures, etc.
Angel investors include Inversebrah, Ansem, Hsaka, punk6529, Saquon Barkley, Eric Wall, Rune Christensen, Bryan Pellegrino, Robinson Burkey, Luca Netz, Mert Mumtaz, Shoku, etc.
This will be the largest cryptocurrency financing so far in 2024. Together with the previous $19 million, the total financing will be as high as $244 million. It is the parallel EVM project with the highest financing and valuation. So why has this project won the favor of many top capitals?
Project Description
Monad is building a high-performance layer 1 blockchain for the next generation of decentralized applications. Its mission is to accelerate the disruptive force of decentralization by building a blockchain that is 100x to 1000x faster than the closest competitor, alleviating severe bottlenecks of existing blockchains and enabling more sophisticated applications and broader adoption.
Marketing genius
Different from some teams with relatively rigorous styles, the Monad team has always been very "down-to-earth" or "magical" in its marketing strategy.
Every morning, the Monad team will release gmonad (Monad community exclusive gm) on the X platform in different ways.
The team also held a meme contest on X, collecting various magical emoticons about Monad from the community. This competition has now entered its 27th week. If you see some strange purple animals on X, it is likely that the Monad community is spreading the spirit.
This marketing style is hard not to remind people of Solana. The Sol team is also proficient in meme dissemination strategies, and has attracted a large number of highly loyal community users.
Considering that Monad, like Solana, is a believer in Layer 1 single-layer expansion, whether it can replicate Sol’s legendary development path is also a unique expectation of the Monad community.
Project Highlights
Monad represents a blockchain with very high long-term potential. Combining decentralization, extreme scalability, and compatibility with Ethereum, it is a disruptor in the blockchain space. Specifically, its parallel execution and superscalar pipeline framework, as well as other cutting-edge innovations, put Monad in a favorable position technologically.
Monad’s ability to reach 10,000 transactions per second is an extremely strong benchmark compared to many currently existing chains. Because 10,000 transactions per second is the starting point for the network, Monad can theoretically scale to hundreds of thousands of TPS in the coming years.
Monad has already established solid foundational partnerships with strong partners such as LayerZero, Pyth Network, Wormhole, etc., which shows that its 80+ ecosystem will grow significantly over time, and it is expected that 150 projects will be built on the platform at the launch of the mainnet.
It’s clear that Monad has the potential to be an industry-changing blockchain for creating decentralized, high-performance trading platforms, transaction systems, and a variety of utilities.
project team
Keone Hon is the co-founder and CEO of Monad and previously led a high-frequency trading department at Jump Trading. He graduated from MIT.
James Hunsaker is the co-founder of Monad Labs. Previously he was a senior software engineer at Jump Trading and graduated from the University of Iowa.
Eunice Giarta is the co-founder and COO of Monad and has extensive experience in traditional fintech. Eunice worked in the payment and infrastructure licensing department of Shutterstock and led the development team to build enterprise trading systems at Broadway Technology.
Investment lineup and financing
On February 14, 2023, Monad Labs, an EVM-compatible blockchain project founded by Keone Hon, former head of research at Jump Trading, completed a $19 million seed round of financing, led by Dragonfly Capital, with participation from Placeholder Capital, Lemniscap, Shima Capital, Finality Capital, angel investors Naval Ravikant, Cobie and Hasu.
On April 9, 2024, Layer 1 blockchain Monad Labs completed a $225 million financing round. This round of financing was led by Paradigm. Other investors included Electric Capital, Castle Island Ventures, Greenoaks, eGirl Capital, Amber Group, Animoca Ventures, Archetype, Bankless Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, Bodhi Ventures, Breed, Caladan, CMS Holdings, Coinbase Ventures, CoinFund, DBA, Figment Capital, Flow Traders, Galaxy, GSR Ventures, Hailstone Labs, Hermeneutic Investments, HTX Ventures, IOSG Ventures, Makers Fund, Manifold Trading, Merit Circle, Mirana Ventures, Nascent, Presto Labs, Rebirth Ventures, Robot Ventures, SevenX Ventures, Superscrypt, Wintermute Ventures, etc.
Project popularity
Twitter followers: 275,000
DIS fans: 28.4W
As expected
BN is expected to be launched in the third quarter
Project Summary
Monad Labs is clearly seeing opportunities in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, specifically building a layer 1 blockchain. This means they are developing a new blockchain protocol rather than building on top of an existing platform like Ethereum or Solana. This approach helps address some of the challenges of existing blockchain platforms, such as scalability and performance issues.
Paradigm's leading investment in such a large amount of financing shows that they are confident in the future of Monad Labs, and may also mean that they see the potential value of this project. This capital injection will enable Monad Labs to accelerate product development, expand the team, and enhance marketing and promotion efforts to stand out in the highly competitive blockchain market.
For the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry, the emergence of innovative projects is always exciting. If Monad Labs' layer 1 blockchain can successfully solve some of the problems in the industry and be competitive in terms of performance, security, and scalability, it has the potential to become one of the important players in the field. Therefore, its future potential is comparable to SOL.
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