Author: David C, Bankless; Translated by: Deng Tong, Golden Finance
We are slowly but surely moving towards one of the most anticipated releases of this cycle – Monad.
The parallelized, EVM-compatible L1, which received $225 million in funding from Coinbase, Electric Capital, and Paradigm, has been running in testnets since March. The chain has already hit 10,000 transactions per second, an achievement that has fueled hype about the chain’s potential to enhance DeFi.
As the chain continues to gain popularity, more and more teams are building on top of it, giving us an early look at how the Monad DeFi landscape will take shape. Let’s take a closer look at some of the early projects that are getting hyped.
BetSwap
TayaSwap is Monad’s DeFi hub, which aims to bring mature features such as centralized liquidity pools and dynamic liquidity pools to the ecosystem, and enable customizable transactions through its Dapp as a Service (DaaS) platform.
Focused liquidity pools allow liquidity providers to concentrate assets within a specific price range, thereby improving capital efficiency, and Monad's high throughput and low transaction costs further enhance this advantage. On the other hand, dynamic liquidity pools automatically adjust positions based on market conditions, reducing the need for manual management and maintaining liquidity optimization during price fluctuations.
Together, these form the foundation for Monad’s DeFi ecosystem, which Tayaswap hopes to expand through its DaaS platform, a no-code terminal for designing custom dapps. Anyone can create and deploy a dapp with custom liquidity pools, trading pairs, and fee structures.
Kintsu
Kintsu is a liquidity staking protocol that will be launched on Monad soon. The team aims to ensure that liquidity staking is prioritized early in Monad’s history.
The team believes that liquidity staking not only improves the security of the network by incentivizing staking participation, but is also a key catalyst for the growth of DeFi on Monad. New L1s like Monad may face a cold start problem where liquidity is initially scarce and native staking gas tokens are locked, making it impossible to contribute to an early vibrant DeFi ecosystem.
Kintsu is enhancing Monad’s security and liquidity by integrating liquid staking from the outset, an effort the team believes is laying the foundation for the network’s success.
Whom
Kuru is a Monad DEX that leverages a central limit order book (CLOB) instead of the widely used automated market makers (AMMs) to offer tighter spreads.
This model is closer to the traditional market system of centralized exchanges, allowing market makers to provide users with better prices. Kuru aims to completely replace AMM, support a variety of assets and simplify the process of providing liquidity, ensuring that even inexperienced market makers can participate effectively without actively managing positions, unlike AMM.
In addition to supporting CLOBs, Kuru aims to simplify the user experience by integrating discovery, research, and trading into a single interface.
aPriori
aPriori is another upcoming liquid staking protocol from Monad that increases staking rewards through MEV — miners or validators can earn extra profit by determining the order of transactions in a block.
aPriori introduces a dedicated MEV infrastructure designed specifically for Monad. It optimizes the way Monad processes transactions, allowing the protocol to make intelligent guesses about the best way to organize transactions and generate additional value that aPriori can use to increase staking rewards. aPriori uses these profits to increase staking returns.
By aiming to increase staking participation through higher yields, aPriori may further strengthen the overall security of the Monad. Higher staking rates contribute to stronger network consensus, ensuring the long-term resilience and security of the network.
Summarize
Led by Kuru, TayaSwap, Kintsu, and aPriori, Monad is showing early signs that it has attracted a diverse range of projects to join its emerging DeFi ecosystem.
These pioneers highlight Monad’s speed and transaction cost potential to deliver efficient DeFi products, from Kuru’s CLOB-based DEX to TayaSwap’s advanced liquidity pools and DApp creation tools, from Kintsu’s liquidity staking to aPriori’s MEV optimization.
As anticipation for the Monad mainnet grows, a number of other EVM-based protocols, such as Curvance and Nostra, are also preparing to deploy on-chain, suggesting that this new L1 may have some promising early protocols to attract new users when it launches.
