Original author: Grapefruit, ChainCatcher

Original translation: Marco, ChainCatcher

On July 25, three Monad ecosystem projects announced that they had received financing of over one million US dollars.

Among them, the MEV infrastructure and liquidity staking platform aPriori received an $8 million seed round of financing led by Pantera Capital. It is reported that this round of financing has brought the valuation of aPriori tokens to at least $100 million; the liquidity staking agreement Kintsu completed $4 million in financing; the on-chain order platform Kuru received $2 million in financing led by Electric Capital.

The investment lineup participating in this Monad ecological project is very luxurious. In addition to Pantera and Electric star investment institutions, there are also many well-known people in the industry such as Lido's Marin Tvrdic and Wormhole founder.

Since Monad completed a $225 million financing with a valuation of $3 billion in April this year, recent ecological projects have successively announced support from top capitals, which has further increased the popularity of the network.

Crypto KOL AB Kuai.Dong posted on social media that Monad is different in that many public chains have strong funding, but the applications on them are not very popular. In contrast, Monad has its own applications under construction, which have also received investment from well-known institutions, such as Kintsu, Kuru, Monad Pad, and aPriori.

As the testnet launch approaches, the Monad ecosystem has become a new gold-digging opportunity for the crypto community.

Why does capital prefer the Monad ecosystem?

Monad is a high-performance Layer 1 network dedicated to solving the scalability problems of traditional EVM. It focuses on the concept of "Parallel EVM" and hopes to improve and enhance the execution efficiency of EVM in the Layer 1 network by introducing "parallel processing" and pipeline architecture in the execution layer.

Most of the founding team members come from the market-making giant Jump Trading. Among them, the founder Keone Hon was the head of research at Jump Trading and worked in the company for 8 years. Another co-founder James Hunsaker is a senior software engineer at Jump Trading and a core maintainer of Pyth Network. James Hunsaker was also the whistleblower of Jump Trading’s manipulation of Terra (UST) last year.

Since Monad announced in April that it had completed a $225 million financing at a valuation of $3 billion, led by Paradigm and participated by many well-known institutions such as Electric Capital, Amber Group, Animoca Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and Wintermute Ventures, every move of the official has attracted much attention from the crypto community.

Currently, the Monad testnet is still in the internal testing phase and is not fully open to the public. According to Monad officials’ recent statement on the X platform, the testnet will be launched soon and is reportedly expected to be released in Q3.

According to a public interview with founder Keone, the mainnet is expected to be launched in mid-2024.

Regarding the development of the Monad ecosystem, CMS Holdings partner Matuszewski said in a recent public interview that in the past few months, more and more Monad projects have raised funds. From now until autumn, these projects will be publicly listed one after another, and another wave of Monad-based projects will appear before the mainnet is launched.

Why do venture capital institutions prefer Monad and its ecological projects? Many participating investors said that they are very optimistic about the prospects of Monad, especially the high transaction volume per second and compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine EVM. Parallel execution supports the Monad network to process multiple transactions at the same time, which improves throughput compared to traditional sequential methods.

Among them, Monad's parallel execution and potential throughput of up to 10,000 transactions per second can unlock many on-chain activities that were previously impossible to achieve, and build social, gaming, DeFi, payment, DePIN, etc. based on the Solana ecosystem; on the other hand, EVM compatibility allows developers to use the Solidity they are familiar with and develop projects on Monad without making any changes.

Some believe that the launch of Monad will compete with Solana.

AB Kuai.Dong once posted on social media that Monad is like a representative of the Ethereum system that is directly competing with Solana. Whether from the node configuration requirements in the white paper or the narrative direction of high performance, it is being compared with Solana, which is also a Layer 1. In addition, investors who have not invested in the Solana system before have also collectively appeared on the list of investors of Monad and its ecological projects.

Aric Chang, partner at Manifold Ventures and an investor in aPriori, said Monad’s growth trajectory has the potential to go beyond Solana, attracting a diverse ecosystem of DeFi and consumer-facing applications.

Regarding the relationship between Monad, Ethereum and Solana, in fact, founder Keone once said in a public interview that Monad is more like the child of the combination of Ethereum and Solana.

Monad focuses on full compatibility with Ethereum, ensuring bytecode EVM compatibility and Ethereum RPC compatibility, reducing the difficulty of developer migration; it is similar to Solana in terms of high performance and optimization, although there are differences in execution parallelization, transaction format, etc.

Monad combines the compatibility of Ethereum and the high performance of Solana to create its own unique advantages.

What are the Monad ecosystem opportunities and ways to participate?

According to the crypto data RootData platform, there are 22 Monad ecosystem projects included, covering DeFi, NFT, oracles, etc.

1. IDO Platform Monad Pad

Monad Pad is a token and NFT launch platform built on Monad, which supports project parties or developers to launch early fundraising for tokens or NFTs in the form of pre-sales or public sales. The project announced on July 5 that it had completed a $945,000 seed round of financing, with participating institutions including CMS, Sneaky Ventures, etc.

Currently, Monad Pad has issued its own original NFT series Purple Frens, which is a PFP NFT series with the image of a purple frog, with a total circulation of 3,333 pieces and an initial selling price of $500 for each NFT. In addition, 20% of the revenue of the Monad Pad platform will be distributed to the holders of this NFT series.

MPAD is the native token of the Monad Pad platform, with a total issuance of 100 million. 10% of the total supply (10 million) will be allocated to Purple Frens NFT holders in the form of staking.

As of August 12, the NFT series Purple Frens issued by Monad Pad has not been publicly sold, and the token MPAD has not been listed. Users who want to participate in the public sale need to be on the whitelist. There are two ways to participate: first, users can participate in the lucky draw activities released by the official Twitter of Monad Pad and Purple Frens to participate in the NFT casting whitelist; second, participate in the Discord community, be more active, and obtain roles to obtain the whitelist, etc.

2. MEV infrastructure and liquidity staking platform aPriori

aPriori is the MEV infrastructure and liquidity staking platform within the Monad ecosystem. Its founder Ray once worked at high-frequency trading companies Jump Crypto and Flow Traders, and is a core contributor to Pyth Network, while CTO Olivia comes from Coinbase.

On July 25, aPriori announced that it had completed a seed round of financing of $8 million led by Pantera Capital. Together with the $2.7 million pre-seed round of financing announced in January this year, aPriori’s cumulative public financing amount reached $10.7 million. In addition, on July 30, Binance Labs announced that it would also invest in the aPriori project.

Currently, aPriori products have not been made public, and the official website only supports redirects to Twitter, Discord, and the official blog. Users can obtain special roles by participating in its Discord community activities.

3. Kintsu, a Liquidity Staking Protocol

Kintsu is a liquidity staking protocol built on ZK privacy public chain Aleph Zero and Monad, hoping to build an innovative LST product to become the basic building block of DeFi on Monad. The project was created by Stephen Novenstern, who was the strategic director of Pangolin (Chinese name Pangolin), a well-known DEX platform in the Avalanche ecosystem.

On the same day that aPriori announced its financing, Kintsu also publicly stated that it had received $4 million in financing led by Castle Island Ventures, with participation from CMT Digital, Spartan Group, Breed VC, CMS Holdings, Animoca Ventures, Lido Relations Director Marin Tvrdic and Wormhole co-founder Robinson Burkey. Its sMONAD liquidity staking token built on Monad will be launched in the first week of the Monad mainnet release.

Currently, Kintsu has launched a liquidity staking product sTZERO based on the Aleph Zero testnet. Users can stake the Aleph Zero network token TZERO to obtain liquid staking certificates sTZERO.

Additionally, users can obtain OG characters by participating in the ambassador program launched by Kintsu, or by reaching level 35 in Discord.

4. Decentralized Order Book Trading Kuru

Kuru is a decentralized order book (CLOB) exchange on the Monad ecosystem. On July 25, it announced that it had received $2 million in seed round financing led by Electric Capital, with participation from CMS Holdings, Breed VC, Monad CEO Keone Hon and others.

The day of the public financing was also the first time that Kuru officially spoke publicly. Currently, Kuru is in a very early stage, and the product has not yet been released to the public. The official website only has Discord and Twitter links, and the blog content only publishes one financing information.

Among them, the Discord community has closed the entrance for new users. According to official information, it will be reopened to users this week.

5. NFT trading platform Poply

Poply is a Monad-based NFT trading market that supports creators to issue or trade NFT works. The product is still in the early stages of development. Users who want to experience the Poply platform can first apply for the waiting list.

On August 6, Poply launched a pre-testnet bounty campaign on the task platform Galex to reward early supporters. Users can earn points or NFT rewards by completing forwarding and liking tweets and joining the Discord community.

6. Decentralized prediction market Castora

Castora is a decentralized P2P prediction market built on Monad, similar to the recently popular Polymarket. Currently, the Castora platform has opened an Ethereum price prediction pool with a betting fee of 10 USDC per time. If the price reaches the predicted price within the specified time, the bettor will receive all the funds in the betting pool.

7. Liquidity Staking Protocol Magma

Magma is a liquidity staking protocol developed by Hydrogen Labs based on Monad.

Hydrogen Labs is a Web3 infrastructure incubation platform that has developed the Fluid Protocol, a stablecoin protocol based on the modular public chain Fuel, Anzen, an optimized server based on EigenLayer AVS, and Rover, a Bitcoin liquidity staking protocol.

Currently, users who want to learn about Magma can become early participants by joining the Discord community.

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