What You Need to Know About Monad
Monad Docs Release
GM, this is your Daily Bolt briefing
Monad, an up-and-coming EVM L1, released their docs yesterday, after teasing the release earlier this week. In this edition, we’ll be briefing you with background info on the blockchain.
With some serious backing and a team with experience in high-frequency trading (HFT), it may pay off to stay current on this chain.
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Introduction To Monad
Monad is a high-performance, fully bytecode EVM-compatible layer one. He states that Monad introduces the concept of pipelining to the EVM.
Monad can process 10k TPS with 1 second block times and
Any application developed for Ethereum can be redeployed on Monad without any changes. The same bytecode from Ethereum can be redeployed on Monad without modifications.
Monad has multiple executors working in parallel, which enhances efficiency unlike the sequential processing in Ethereum.
When interacting with a smart contract on Monad, the virtual machine pulls the bytecode and associated state from disk, then steps through individual opcodes to execute the function being called.
For example, if two individuals were to deposit into a platform like Aave on Ethereum, the transactions would be ordered sequentially, one after the other. In contrast, on Monad, these transactions would essentially be processed in parallel.
Why Monad Was Created
CEO & Co-Founder Keone Hon worked in high-frequency trading, including at Jump Trading, for about 10 years.
He believes there is a need to build systems that could handle such high-frequency data scales and respond in microseconds.
Keone worked on Solana DeFi with his co-Founder James, with whom he started working in 2014. They saw a need to make the Ethereum Virtual Machine more performant.
Excited about decentralized computation, the two left Jump Trading and have been working on Monad for approximately a year and a half.
Monad’s Outlook on Blockchain
Keone Hon believes an important feature within DeFi is the composability of decentralized apps, where one can build an app, deploy it, and then others can build upon it without permissionless.
DeFi and blockchains are atomic; a function in one app can be a subroutine in another app.
Other key features of blockchains include the
instant settlement
the self-custodial nature of assets
the ability to operate without trusting centralized entities
the potential of decentralized applications to replace existing systems and eliminate middlemen, providing direct services accessible to anyone.
What is Pipelining?
Pipelining is a term from traditional computer science that references a CPU performing multiple actions in parallel.
Keone was surprised that Ethereum and other EVM-compatible blockchains are essentially single-threaded, executing transactions one after the other.
Monad introduces pipelining in four major areas to address this limitation:
State access pipelining: Enhancing the accessibility of the state in terms of reading and writing from the disk.
Parallel execution of individual transactions: Allowing multiple transactions within a block to be processed simultaneously.
Pipelining between consensus and execution: Dividing the work into stages and running consensus and execution in parallel.
Pipelining within the consensus mechanism: Multiple stages of the consensus protocol are communicated simultaneously.
Combining these pipelining techniques allows Monad to process transactions efficiently, achieving a throughput of 10,000 TPS and substantially scaling the EVM.
As the Monad team worked on improving transaction processing, they identified other bottlenecks, leading to further pipelining efforts.
Scaling With EVM Community
Keone believes Monad’s reception among the EVM Community has mostly been positive.
Monad’s innovations are orthogonal to other projects, meaning they can coexist without conflict.
In the future, roll-ups could potentially be built using Monad’s execution stack, combining the best of both worlds.
Comparing Ethereum And Monad
Ethereum is like a virtual bank, where decentralized apps can emulate traditional banking functions.
Ethereum produces blocks every 12 seconds, and uses a proof-of-stake mechanism for civil resistance, determining how nodes choose leaders and vote.
Ethereum has a gas limit of about a million gas per second, translating to roughly 10 TPS for typical transactions.
Monad is similar when it comes to block and transaction ordering. It also shares the same transaction format and address space as Ethereum, ensuring compatibility with tools like MetaMask.
However, Monad achieves finality within a second, compared to Ethereum’s 12 to 18 minutes.
Monad’s Current Positioning
In February, Monad raised a $19M seed round led by Dragonfly Capital. The raise also saw from investors including Placeholder Capital, Shima Capital, Naval Ravikant, Cobie and Hasu.
The Monad team is in active R&D and has built most of the components of the network.
A main net launch is targeted in mid-2024; the team recognizes the importance of thorough testing and ensuring the protocol’s safety and resilience against potential threats.
Monad’s full EVM compatibility also opens up doors for collaboration with other projects.
Recently, a Monad grants program was announced. The program is a tool to support developers in building apps productively and reaching many users without having to deal with bad UX, high gas fees, etc.
The blockchain wants to foster a diverse ecosystem of Defi apps, gaming, NFTs, web3 social, and other ambitious projects.
There is an emphasis on developers in the ecosystem to solve problems for non-crypto natives.
The team will be shipping the devnet, then the private testnet, and the public testnet afterwards.
The official Monad docs were recently released, with their whitepaper slated to release afterward.
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