A Deep Dive Into Monad

The blockchain industry is constantly brimming with innovative developments. Lately, Monad has brought a positive disruption to the landscape by offering a high-performance Ethereum-compatible Layer 1 (L1) blockchain that offers cutting-edge scalability while retaining seamless integration and compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

In terms of performance, Monad boasts a staggering throughput of 10,000 transactions per second (TPS), which translates to a remarkable 1 billion transactions daily. Imagine a world of near-instantaneous transactions, enabling a wider range of interactive experiences on the blockchain while lowering transaction costs

In this article, we explore the key innovations that Monad introduces, as well as its advantages and other relevant information, focusing on the implications for developers, users, and the future of blockchain technology.

Monad's Key Innovations

MonadBFT

The Monad Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) enables a high-performance and secure consensus mechanism by default. It’s built upon previous ideas such as HotStuff but improves on them by reducing the number of communication rounds needed to reach a consensus from three to two. Its partially synchronous approach is designed to handle network delays resiliently.

Deferred Execution

Traditionally, consensus and execution happen together. In Monad, they are separated, with the initial agreement happening much faster while the execution is deferred. Since execution is no longer a bottleneck during consensus, valuable time is freed up for more complex transactions to run smoothly. This design allows Monad to scale effectively, handling a larger volume of transactions to support many more users on a single-shard blockchain.

Parallel Execution

Unlike traditional blockchains that process transactions sequentially, Monad can handle them simultaneously, even though ensuring that the final state is consistent with a sequential execution. So, while it might seem like a big shift from how Ethereum works, it is really not; just a more efficient approach. So, parallel execution allows Monad to significantly increase efficiency and throughput while still maintaining the integrity and order of the blockchain’s state.

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MonadDb

MonadDb is a specialized database designed for the Monad blockchain to optimize the storage and retrieval of its state. Traditional key-value databases such as LevelDB and LMDB are used by Ethereum clients, even though Ethereum itself uses Merkle Patricia Trie (MPT). This mismatch between data structure and storage solution leads to suboptimal performance, leading Monad to introduce a custom database designed specifically to handle MPTs natively. By eliminating the need to translate between data structures, MonadDb offers significant performance improvements.

Advantages:

• Ethereum can only handle around 15 - 30 transactions per second (TPS), but Monad is designed to significantly address EVM’s scalability locations by achieving a 10,000 TPS processing capability.

• Improving the scalability of EVM-based applications would attract more developers and users to the Ethereum ecosystem, fostering further innovation and growth in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space and beyond.

• Monad uses MonadBFT, a pipelined consensus mechanism, to achieve instant finality, which means that transactions are guaranteed to be final as soon as they are included in a block. This enhances the reliability of transactions.

• Because Monad is EVM-compatible, users can interact with it using the same tools and interfaces they already use for Ethereum. This saves a lot of time and effort compared to building applications from scratch for a new platform.

• Monad users can benefit from lower fees that make the network more accessible to a wider audience, particularly in the Defi space.

How it Works

Monad is designed to be user-friendly and accessible for those already familiar with Ethereum. Existing wallets and block explorers such as MetaMask and Ethercan work efficiently with Monad, and the same applies to Ethereum dApps. Under the hood, Monad and Ethereum both use a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism as well as a linear block structure.

For all intents and purposes, much of what users and developers can achieve with Ethereum can be achieved on Monad. However, the latter promises a more efficient and scalable performance without compromising security by incorporating innovative technologies such as parallel execution.

Monad Roadmap

Monad’s devnet went live in March 2024, achieving its projected 10,000 TPS on the EVM. The launch of a testnet is expected by Q2 2024, with the mainnet planned for launch in Q4 2024.

Monad had previously mentioned the introduction of a $MON token for executing transactions on the block but later removed the information from the documents, which shows that tokenization plans have not been finalized.

Leadership Team

The leadership of Monad is composed of three co-founders with diverse backgrounds in trading and computer science. Co-founder and CEO Keone Hone holds computer science, math, and finance degrees. He previously worked as a software developer and blockchain researcher, having led the high-frequency trading (HFT) team at Jump Trading.

James Hunsaker, the CTO and a Co-Founder led system engineering at Jump Trading, previously holding Vice President roles at Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan. Co-Founder and COO Eunice Giarta is an MIT Computer Science and Engineering grad and has worked as a rate derivatives trader at Bank of America Merrill Lynch as well as in product management at Shutterstock and Broadway Technology.

Achievements

Monad Labs recently raised $225 million to support its expansion efforts. The latest funding round was led by Paradigm, with contributions from other notable firms such as Coinbase Ventures, Electric Capital, Greenoaks, GSR Ventures, and so on.

Major angel investors also participated, including Eric Wall, Rune Christensen, Inversebrah, Ansem, Luca Netx, Hsaka, etc. This follows previous $9 million and $10 million pre-seed and seed funding rounds in May 2022 and December 2022 respectively.

One of Monad’s most impressive achievements is its efforts at community building. It maintains active engagement on X (Twitter), Telegram, and Discord. There are also physical community events in various locations around the world.