Monad: What a Team of Enthusiasts Is Building with $19 Million

For $19 million, you can acquire a 7-bedroom, 11,885 SQFT mansion with up to 9 baths in the heart of San Diego, California. On top of that, you can expand your collection with five 2023 Porsche 911s and another five Tesla Model Xs comfortably. And still have enough to throw luxury parties on yachts. Living like a superstar— who wouldn't enjoy that?

Well, some folks just like to do things differently. Such is the Monad team, a group of enthusiasts seeking to allocate $19 million for a unique cause.

In February 2023, Monad secured $19 million in seed funding, led by Dragonfly Capital.

The aim of this funding? To build an EVM-compatible smart contract platform capable of handling a billion transactions per day and up to 10,000 transactions per second (TPS), a significant contrast when compared to Ethereum's current capabilities.

But why is this ever significant?

Ethereum-Compatibility

The Ethereum blockchain has proven to be the most secure over the years. It is easily a top choice for developers, boasting over 98% of smart contract developers in the entire blockchain ecosystem, with over 44 million smart contracts deployed on the network. Writing Solidity seems to be a walk in the park (you didn't hear it from me).

Ethereum, however, does not provide the best user experience. It processes no more than 25 transactions per second (TPS) and often experiences periods during which the cost of a transaction can skyrocket to thousands of dollars for a simple on-chain swap. This is in no way sustainable.

Fortunately, the blockchain space isn't short of innovators. Currently, there are a good number of teams that have developed solutions to scale Ethereum, making it faster and more cost-effective. Some teams have ventured to build entirely new blockchain networks that are fundamentally different from Ethereum (Layer 1 networks), while others have based their solutions on Ethereum security to create what is now known as Layer 2 blockchains.

Many Layer 1 networks, despite achieving scalability, lack Ethereum-level security and are yet to garner sufficient developer activity. Layer 2s are also only addressing a portion of the puzzle and do not ultimately pass as a one-size-fits-all solution.

Conversely, Monad is building a fully compatible EVM network from the ground up, with scalability of up to 10,000 TPS. This is equivalent to building with the same code as a developer would on Ethereum but with a more scalable opportunity. This provides room to develop more sophisticated decentralized applications, especially ones that require high transaction throughput.

Monad isn't the first EVM-compatible chain. How is it different?

Because it's a big, fiery, purple frog - that's different!

Okay….time for some focus.
 
A simple answer would be that Monad's development is entirely from scratch - different from any other EVM-compatible network.

Other known EVM-compatible networks simply leverage the existing Ethereum EVM setup to build their own network and scalability solution, which means they have still failed to tackle all of Ethereum’s underlying shortcomings. 

Monad, however, takes this a step further, achieving a better balance between decentralization, scalability, and security. Monad is designed to leverage Ethereum’s level of decentralization and security while introducing a proper scalability support system. It is a distinct network that functions similarly to the Ethereum network. Remember how Tom Holland is a feature-rich version of Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man? This is precisely how Monad is to the Ethereum network.

Other important aspects of Monad include:

Portability: Sometimes, blockchain networks that claim to be EVM-compatible require developers to familiarize themselves with the new chain in terms of architecture, features, and programming language to successfully and consistently deploy contracts. Monad, however, takes a different approach, as it is designed to make it possible to port existing EVM-based code into the Monad network. This allows dApps to work seamlessly, just as they would in the natural environment for which they were written.

Parallel execution: What most blockchains do is chronologically verify transactions as they occur. In this case, event A will be processed before B, as you might have guessed, in a queue. Ultimately, event B can only be processed once A has been confirmed. The Monad model, however, splits transactions into multiple parts with the ability to process more than one transaction at a time. Multiple transactions are processed simultaneously and are registered on the blockchain in their chronological order. From a user point of view, all of this happens behind the scenes, and transactions are still represented as being processed chronologically, providing an excellent user experience even at peak times. From a developmental point of view, the blockchain ultimately uses fewer resources. Efficiency is the name of the game, baby!

Fun fact: You'll be able to use your current Ethereum and BSC wallet address for Monad too. You can even use a dApp like Uniswap and check transaction counts on Etherscan without even knowing it. Not a big deal, only a bit of the perks that a fully EVM-compatible Monad network gifts you. (Okay, it's a big deal!)

We could stop here, and you’d still have known the central idea of what Monad is truly all about. And since my goal isn’t to bore you with boring blockchain stuff, we’ll just stick to the fun part.

But hey, Monad isn’t live yet, and you just aren’t able to explore all of its beautiful features yet. But it’ll be up on testnet in a few months and we can test it all we want. But I can do something for you pending that time; I’ll bring you Monad-related articles and anything I find in their community shortly. Keep an eye out for this!

Anyways, do you agree this is a well-spent $19 million?

You can tell the team at Monad what your views are via any of these official links and get familiar with what they are building too: Doc | Website | Twitter | Discord