Layer 1 blockchain Monad Labs announced the completion of a $225 million financing led by Paradigm, with participation from Electric Capital, SevenX Ventures, IOSG Ventures and Greenoaks. The project intends to challenge competitors such as Solana and Sui. It is reported that this transaction is the largest cryptocurrency financing so far in 2024.
In this regard, Monad founder Keone Hon said that Monad's innovation comes from rebuilding Ethereum's blockchain from scratch, maintaining the ability to execute smart contracts while completing transactions at a faster speed, higher capacity and lower cost. Monad will fully support EVM.
Shortly thereafter, HTX Ventures announced a strategic investment in Monad Labs, and the collaboration between the two parties will drive innovation in the Web3 ecosystem.
The following article will give readers a comprehensive introduction to the Monad project.
Focusing on the performance pain points of EVM, Monad has achieved 10,000+ TPS and has outstanding advantages in scalability
EVM has been a pioneer in blockchain virtual machines and has become the most commonly used virtual machine over the years, witnessing famous innovations such as Curve, Uniswap, and Maker. Despite the dominance of EVM, performance deficiencies have led to the rise of AltVM (alternative virtual machines). Among AltVMs, Monad's advantages include 10,000 TPS on its mainnet and a strong community consensus culture.
According to reports, Monad will be officially launched later this year, and its goal is to become a highly scalable single large L1 blockchain. It is compatible with EVM and can handle more than 10,000 transactions per second with a block time of 1 second. This scalable performance is due to technologies such as parallel execution and Monad DB.
Monad achieves security and decentralization, and has raised $19 million in a seed round led by Dragonfly, with participation from Placeholder, Shima Capital, Lemniscap, Cobie, and others.
Understand the parallelization technology logic of Monad and gain insights into the future evolution direction of the EVM L1 track
Monad is building a parallel EVM L1 with full bytecode compatibility. What makes Monad unique is not only its parallel engine, but also the optimization engine they built at the bottom. Monad takes a unique holistic design approach, combining several key features such as pipelining, asynchronous I/O, consensus execution separation, and MonadDB.
A key innovation in the design of monads is pipelining with a slight offset. The offset allows more processes to be parallelized by running multiple instances simultaneously. As a result, pipelining is used to optimize many functions such as state access pipelining, transaction execution pipelining, consensus and execution internal pipelining, and pipelining within the consensus mechanism itself.
Schematic diagram of parallel technology operation
Next, we will look specifically at the parallelization part of Monad, which is also the technical core of the project.
In Monad, transactions are ordered linearly within a block, but the goal is to reach the final state faster by leveraging parallel execution. Monad's execution engine is designed with an optimistic parallel algorithm. Monad's engine processes transactions simultaneously and then performs analysis to ensure that the same results would be achieved if the transactions were executed one after another.
If there are any conflicts, then re-execution is required. The parallel execution here is a relatively simple algorithm, but combining it with the other key innovations of Monads is what makes this approach novel. One thing to note here is that even if re-execution occurs, it is usually cheap because the inputs required by the invalid transaction are almost always kept in cache, so it will be a simple cache lookup. The re-execution is guaranteed to succeed because you have already executed the previous transactions in the block.
Monads also improve performance by separating execution and consensus (similar to Solana and Sei) and delaying execution. The idea is that if you relax the execution conditions so that execution is completed before consensus is reached, you can run execution and consensus in parallel, adding extra time to both. Of course, Monad handles this situation using a deterministic algorithm to ensure that one of them doesn't run too far and get out of control.
It has been in development for two years and will be launched later this year. The story of the Monad team is also worth reading
Monad has been in development for about two years and was founded by Keone Hon, James Hunsaker and Eunice Giarta. Keone and James are the two technical co-founders who worked together at Jump Trading for eight years.
Sitting on the same high frequency trading desk, competing with 20 other teams inside Jump, Keone and James were able to come out on top for years, facilitating over $10 trillion in notional volume per year and performing thousands of trades per second. At this level of volume, Keone and James experienced first-hand the difference microseconds can make in execution.
After entering the crypto space, Keone worked on Solana DeFi, while James built Pyth. They began building Monad in 2022 after realizing that it was possible to implement a series of fundamental optimizations to the EVM that have become standard in high-performance computer science over the past 20 years but have not yet been applied to the EVM. By introducing these components, a higher-performance EVM can be created that solves many current expansion bottlenecks.
