Preface:
The battle for public chains continues, Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos or others, do we need so many L1 and L2 public chains?
As a new POS and fully compatible with EVM, what innovations does Monad have? Can it achieve or improve the performance bottleneck of Ethereum?
Let’s talk about it today.
Project Description :
Monad is a new Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible layer 1 blockchain that aims to improve the entire Ethereum ecosystem; as well as a decentralized computing platform.
Monad provides a throughput several orders of magnitude higher than any existing smart contract blockchain, supporting 10,000 smart contract transactions per second (tps) through algorithmic improvements to virtual machine design and Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanism.
Technological innovation:
Monad Client is built with performance in mind and is written from scratch in C++ and Rust.
ETH’s current performance bottleneck
Ethereum’s current execution limits, such as the 1.25 million Gas per second limit, are conservatively set for a number of reasons:
Inefficient storage access patterns
Ethereum's state is stored on the blockchain, which is slow compared to traditional databases due to its distributed nature. Accessing and modifying this state (e.g., reading or writing smart contracts) can be inefficient, especially if storage access patterns are not optimized. This inefficiency is a key reason to keep the gas limit conservative, as it can cause network congestion if there are too many state accesses in a short period of time.
Single thread execution
Currently, Ethereum uses a single-threaded execution model, meaning that transactions are processed one by one. This serial processing can become a bottleneck for system throughput. Parallel execution may increase throughput, but it introduces complexity in transaction ordering and execution consistency, making it a difficult feature to implement and optimize.
Very limited implementation budget
The execution of smart contracts and the processing of transactions require computing resources. Consensus mechanisms (particularly in proof of work, and to some extent in proof of stake) require nodes to agree on the state of the network. This process cannot proceed without execution, as consensus is fundamental to the proper functioning of the network.
Concerns about state growth and the impact of state growth on future state access costs
As the network is used and smart contracts increase, the size of Ethereum's state continues to grow. The larger the state, the higher the cost of node synchronization and maintenance of the state. In addition, the growth of the state may also affect the cost of accessing the state in the future, because a large amount of data may lead to an increase in the time to retrieve and process data. Therefore, the conservative setting of the Gas limit is also to control the speed of state growth to ensure the long-term sustainability and performance of the network.
Monad Optimization
Monad introduces optimizations in four main areas that enable blockchain throughput of 10,000 transactions per second (tps):
Monad provides 1 second block times and 1 second finality. To achieve this, Monad makes some key changes to the consensus layer and execution layer (the two main mechanisms of the blockchain), preserving seamless compatibility for application developers (full EVM bytecode compatibility) and users (Ethereum RPC API compatibility).
“Monad redesigned the EVM execution system from the ground up to allow non-overlapping transactions to run in parallel,” said Eunice Giarta, co-founder and COO of Monad Labs. She noted that the team also reshaped the integration system between the two mechanisms to allow the blockchain’s execution layer to run in parallel with consensus.
“The Monad Blockchain will set the industry standard for the speed, transparency, security, and scalability that all layer 1 protocols should possess,” said Keone Hon, co-founder and CEO of Monad Lab, in the statement.
Why choose L1 instead of Rollup?
Decentralization:
The first reason is decentralization. Rollup currently lacks a mechanism for decentralized block production. Decentralized block production is essential for censorship-resistance and achieving true decentralization. Rollups have limitations in this regard because they typically rely on a few operators to package and submit transactions, which can lead to centralization risks and censorship risks.
Performance:
The second reason is performance. The Monad team is building a system that is as efficient and cost-effective as possible. Being built as a Rollup will impose limitations on Monad's scalability. While Rollups can provide higher throughput when processing transactions, they are often limited by the data throughput and computing power of the underlying blockchain (such as Ethereum). In contrast, as an independent first-layer blockchain, Monad is able to achieve deeper optimizations and performance improvements.
Focus:
The last reason is focus. The Monad team believes that a high-performance EVM execution environment that anyone can run is the key to significantly increasing the scope and utility of decentralized computing. The Monad team is deeply focused on achieving this vision and contributing to the crypto space. While there are opportunities to combine certain Monad improvements with the Rollup mechanism in the future, the team's focus is clear at the moment - to build a high-performance, fully decentralized, and scalable first-layer blockchain.
project team:
Tech startup Monad Labs was founded by the former team of traditional finance (TradFi) giant Jump Trading.
Monad CEO：Keone Hon
Keone 是一名软件开发人员和区块链研究员。在加入 Monad 之前，他在 Jump Trading 工作了八年，领导高频交易团队。2021 年，Keone 加入了 Jump 的加密部门，并领导了一个专注于区块链研究和 dapp 开发的工程师团队。
Monad CTO：James Hunsaker
James is an expert in systems engineering and low latency optimization. Prior to joining Monad, he spent eight years at Jump Trading, building an ultra-low latency trading system responsible for tens of billions in notional daily volume across major futures markets.
Monad COO：Eunice Giarta
Eunice is a product and technology leader with a background in traditional finance and fintech. She holds a degree in computer science from MIT and previously worked in trading at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, led product teams building enterprise trading systems at Broadway Technology, and led payments and licensing infrastructure teams at Shutterstock.
project financing:
Raised $19 million in December 2022
Monad’s funding round was led by crypto venture capital firm Dragonfly Capital, with participation from 70 other investors, including Placeholder Capital, Lemniscap, Shima Capital, Finality Capital, and angel investors in the digital asset space, including Naval Ravikant, Cobie, and Hasu.
Development process:
The project has not yet released a testnet. It has announced its cooperation with Layerzero and Wormhole on Twitter. What you can do now is to be active in the community or on Twitter or create some content to contribute to obtain the corresponding DC role. For more contribution content, please refer to the document: https://monad-xyz.notion.site/Monad-Community-Home-f2c19b349bfa474aa131fee69d42f34e
Project Ecology:
Ecosystem website navigation: https://www.rootdata.com/EcosystemMap/list/295?n=Monad
DEX：
TayaSwap (testnet): TayaSwap is a decentralized exchange on monad that allows assets to be traded without traditional order books or intermediaries.
Cross-chain bridge:
Layerzero: Twitter announces joining the ecosystem
Wormhole: Twitter announces joining the ecosystem
Summarize:
Monad is a first-layer public chain built by the former Jump trading team based on the POS mechanism and equivalent to EVM. The core personnel of the team have the advantage in trading and the resources are also relatively good. However, as an L1, how to stand out in the public chain war is a big problem.
Those once-so-called "Ethereum killers" have long since declined, and many chains have become forks of Ethereum. The innovations proposed by Monad, the improvement of the consensus mechanism, and the tens of thousands of transactions and block confirmations in seconds brought about by parallel transactions still have to be tested in practice. After all, many blockchains that claimed to have high performance and high TPS have undergone an "inscription test" some time ago. They have to be tested to see if they are good or not.
The project testnet has not yet been launched, but the project has received a lot of attention. Monad has also announced that layerzero will support the Monad ecosystem. It is still in its early stages, so please continue to pay attention.
Related Links:
Official website: https://www.monad.xyz/
blog：https://monadlabs.substack.com/
Documentation: https://docs.monad.xyz/
Twitter：https://twitter.com/monad_xyz
Discord：https://discord.com/invite/monad
Monad Community: https://monad-xyz.notion.site/Monad-Community-Home-f2c19b349bfa474aa131fee69d42f34e
