For blockchain beginners, the excitement surrounding Monad might seem surprising. To understand why Monad is generating such a buzz in the crypto world, let’s first look at why blockchain bottlenecks occur.

What is Monad?

Monad is a revolutionary Layer-1 blockchain designed for speed and interconnectivity. It is EVM-compatible and emphasizes pipelining to achieve impressive feats like 10,000 transactions per second, one-second block times, and single-slot finality. Monad combines advanced technologies like MonadBFT, Deferred Execution, Parallel Execution, and MonadDB. This makes Monad a familiar yet exciting Layer-1 blockchain. Developers can use their existing Ethereum knowledge and tools to build on Monad, while users benefit from faster transaction processing times and potentially lower fees.

Discover more about “What is Monad?“

What is Monad Labs?

Monad Labs, founded in 2022, is a venture-backed tech startup. The team at Monad Labs brings years of experience from building low-latency, high-frequency-trading systems at Jump Trading. They aim to address the limited throughput and high costs of existing Layer-1 solutions with Monad. According to Keone Hon, co-founder and CEO of Monad Labs, Monad sets the industry standard for speed, transparency, security, and scalability, unlocking the transformative potential of decentralized computation.

Why’s Monad So Popular?

Blockchain Bottlenecks and the Call for Scalability

Consider a busy road as a simplified analogy for a blockchain:

• Cars represent transaction requests.
• The number of lanes symbolizes the blockchain’s throughput capabilities.
• Traffic lights act as the consensus mechanism determining if cars can pass.

Each transaction must be verified and added to a block. Limited block space and high demand often cause congestion, leading to slow transaction times and high fees. A well-known instance of this was the CryptoKitties congestion on the Ethereum network.

Traditional blockchains use sequential processing, handling a limited number of transactions at a time. Each transaction must wait for the previous one to be validated and added to a block, creating a queue akin to cars at a traffic light. This slows the overall throughput of the network.

During high demand periods, transaction fees can skyrocket as users compete to process their transactions faster. Modern blockchains are designed with scalability in mind to offer high throughput, meeting the rising demands of Web3 users.

Monad offers rapid transaction processing while maintaining Ethereum compatibility. This allows seamless integration of the vast Ethereum developer toolkit and cryptographic research into Monad, benefiting from significantly improved throughput and scalability.

How Does Monad Work?

With over $200 million in funding from venture capitalists like Paradigm and GSR Ventures, along with angel investors like Hsaka and Ansem, Monad has garnered significant attention. Let’s explore the project’s functionality in more depth.

Monad’s EVM Compatibility

Monad achieves EVM compatibility by implementing a custom EVM within its architecture. This custom EVM aligns with the bytecode instructions used by Ethereum smart contracts. While specifics might not be publicly available, possible methods include:

• Instruction Set Matching: Monad’s EVM likely replicates the core instruction set of the Ethereum EVM, ensuring compatibility with existing smart contract code.
• State Management: Monad manages its blockchain state in a manner compatible with Ethereum smart contracts’ expectations.
• Potential Optimizations: Monad may introduce optimizations in its EVM implementation, leveraging its architecture for better performance.

Overall, Monad’s EVM compatibility strategically allows it to leverage the existing Ethereum developer ecosystem, accelerating its growth.

MonadBFT

MonadBFT underpins Monad’s fast transaction speeds. It is a custom Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanism that verifies transactions quickly, even with some faulty or malicious validator nodes. Unlike traditional BFT mechanisms, which can be slow, MonadBFT uses a two-phased approach, leveraging optimistic responsiveness with linear communication overhead in common cases.

In the event of a leader timeout, communication overhead complexity increases to be quadratic, ensuring network stability. This reduces bottlenecks within Monad, ensuring smooth transaction flow.

Deferred Execution

Deferred execution, or pipelined consensus-execution staging by Monad Labs, separates consensus and execution—both critical blockchain processes. Consensus involves all nodes agreeing on the order of transactions for the next block. Traditionally, this happens alongside transaction execution, which involves running the code within each transaction and updating the blockchain state.

Monad’s deferred execution works in a streamlined parallelized fashion. The leader node proposes a block containing the order of transactions without executing them yet. Validator nodes verify the proposed order and vote on its validity. Instead of confirming each transaction’s outcome, nodes confirm the order. After reaching consensus on the order, transaction execution occurs separately, either in parallel or shortly after. Deferred execution unlocks benefits like faster block confirmation, increased scalability, and efficient resource usage.

Optimistic Execution

Monad uses optimistic execution, allowing transactions to execute before full validation. This enables parallel execution, where multiple transactions process simultaneously, significantly boosting throughput while maintaining linear block order. Optimistic execution introduces the possibility of incorrect execution and data conflict. Monad addresses this by tracking pre-conditions each transaction relies on during execution. If a conflict is detected after the initial optimistic phase, only the problematic transaction is re-executed with the correct data. This ensures consistency and eventual data integrity within the Monad blockchain.

MonadDB

MonadDB, a proprietary database, is instrumental to Monad’s parallel execution capabilities. It specializes in storing essential blockchain state data, including accounts, balances, and smart contract code. Unlike traditional blockchains that store the entire transaction history, MonadDB focuses on the current state, optimizing for faster reads and writes during parallel execution. MonadDB supports optimistic execution by interacting with transactions during execution, providing temporary state data needed for concurrent transactions. After initial optimistic execution, MonadDB resolves conflicts between transactions modifying the same data by comparing inputs with previous transaction outputs, verifying pre-conditions.

Strengths of Monad

Monad’s innovative approach offers numerous benefits for users and developers:

• Faster Transaction Times and Lower Fees: Parallel processing allows Monad to handle a higher volume of transactions per second, resulting in quicker confirmations and a smoother user experience. As the network becomes more efficient, transaction fees are expected to decrease, making Monad more affordable for everyday transactions.
• Accelerated Ecosystem Development: Monad’s EVM compatibility enables developers familiar with Ethereum to deploy smart contracts on Monad easily. This reduces development friction and fosters a larger developer community, accelerating innovation and expanding platform applications.
• Building on Ethereum’s Foundations: Unlike fledgling non-EVM blockchains that struggle to build an ecosystem, Monad can inherit the vast Ethereum developer community and user base. This potential for mass adoption allows faster innovation and a wider range of applications on the Monad platform.

How Monad Differentiates Itself as a Layer-1 Blockchain

Monad stands out in the Layer-1 landscape by focusing on scalability, EVM compatibility, and maintaining security and decentralization. Monad’s emphasis on Layer-1 scalability sets it apart from alternatives relying on Layer-2 solutions or different consensus mechanisms.

Monad uses parallel processing and innovative mechanisms to achieve up to 10,000 transactions per second, significantly higher throughput than many existing chains. Monad prioritizes security and decentralization by keeping the main chain as the ultimate authority on truth. As Monad develops, its potential to revolutionize blockchain transactions is worth watching.

Conclusion

The cryptocurrency world is constantly evolving, and Monad is a project to watch closely. Its innovative approach to Layer-1 scalability with parallel processing could usher in a new era of faster, cheaper, and more efficient blockchain transactions. While challenges remain, Monad’s focus on interconnectivity, scalability, and community growth makes it a compelling contender in the race for blockchain supremacy.

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