Monad raised $225 million in April of this year. It is the single-largest round in crypto for all of 2024. What made investors bet big on it in a year when countless L2s were launched? We have been thinking of this quite a bit— internally. Two weeks ago, we wrote an explainer on how Monad’s parallelisation of transactions works.
Today, we follow it up with an hour-long podcast with Monad’s founder - Keone Hon.
Keone was a quant working on high-frequency trading for close to a decade. In 2021, he joined Jump’s crypto division with a focus on Solana-based DeFi. Given his background, it became quite apparent that most blockchains are not optimized for the speed at which traditional markets execute and settle orders. And that is how Monad came to be.
Think of it as infrastructure that can scale to the needs of NASDAQ-level transaction frequency without fees surging.
That sounds like a distant dream, right? We have heard that pitch a few times over the past years. Our conversation with Keone goes specifically into what Monad is doing to make it happen. For instance, part of what makes Monad unique is that they have come up with their own custom state database called MonadDb.
They have also come up with a high performance consensus mechanism that is proprietary to them named MonadBFT, which is an improvement upon Tendermint’s consensus mechanism.
Separating consensus from execution allows Monad to cut down on precious block times. As Keone puts it, all these improvements and more make Monad feel “as if Ethereum and Solana had a baby.”
That sounds fairly technical, we’re aware. Which is why much of the conversation involves us asking Keone to break it down for amateurs like me. Tune in for some alpha on what could be built on Monad, fundraising tips from Keone, and what it takes to make 10,000 TPS possible on a blockchain.
Exploring Bitcoin L2s,
Saurabh
Podcast Episode: Keone From Monad