Securing $225 million in funding, can "the king of parallelism" Monad lead the L1 scaling narrative?

Original | Odaily Planet Daily

Author | Azuma

On the evening of April 9, Beijing time, Monad Labs announced the completion of a $225 million financing round, led by Paradigm, with participation from Electric Capital, Greenoaks, and others.

As one of the most notable projects in the Layer 1 space, Monad, which focuses on the concept of "Parallel EVM," aims to introduce a "parallel processing" execution layer scaling solution that significantly improves network execution efficiency while being 100% compatible with all bytecodes of the EVM.

The Scaling Ideal of Jump's Former "Brain"

In April 2022, Keone Hon, the head of research at market-making giant Jump Trading, announced his departure to establish Monad.

As mentioned earlier, unlike the mainstream Layer 2 scaling strategies on the market, Monad's vision is to significantly improve the execution efficiency of the EVM at the Layer 1 level through "parallel processing," thereby unlocking the potential of the EVM ecosystem.

In Keone's view, thanks to Ethereum's extensive user education, the EVM has almost become a "standard" choice in the web2 world, similar to Javascript. However, the current scaling path taken by Ethereum has certain issues; the Layer 1 + Layer 2 hierarchical strategy can lead to the blockchain being divided into independent execution environments, thereby undermining composability on-chain. Therefore, a higher-performance underlying network needs to be built.

Keone estimated at that time that Monad's performance could exceed Ethereum's by more than 1000 times and could support more complex application types, leading to broader adoption.

In February 2023, Monad announced its first round of financing of $19 million, led by Dragonfly Capital, with participation from Placeholder Capital, Lemniscap, Shima Capital, Finality Capital, Naval Ravikant, Cobie, Hasu, and others.

In December 2023, Georgios Konstantopoulos, the Chief Technology Officer of leading VC Paradigm, gave high praise to the prospects of "Parallel EVM," stating that 2024 would be the year of the "Parallel EVM" concept, and he first mentioned Monad, which has been cultivating this concept the longest, when listing representative projects.

How to Understand "Parallel EVM"?

"Parallel EVM" is essentially a reform of the transaction execution order within the EVM environment.

In a classic EVM environment, each transaction is executed in sequence (the most intuitive example: when a user submits multiple transactions, the subsequent transactions will only begin processing after the earlier submitted transactions are confirmed). We can temporarily refer to this execution mechanism as "Single-line EVM."

The design of "Single-line EVM" ensures that transactions and smart contracts can be executed in a deterministic order, making it easier to manage and predict the state of the blockchain, which helps ensure the security of the network. However, it also limits the transaction execution efficiency of the network, constraining the operational space for scaling at the Layer 1 level.

The "Parallel EVM" proposed by Monad aims to break this constraint. This mechanism partitions or groups all pending transactions and relies on scheduling algorithms to effectively manage the synchronous processing of each partition or group of transactions. The ultimate goal is to allow multiple independent transactions to execute in parallel, thereby significantly improving transaction execution efficiency at the Layer 1 level.

Monad has previously provided many vivid examples to illustrate the difference between "Parallel EVM" and "Single-line EVM," such as the laundry case shown below.

Suppose someone has four piles of clothes to wash, and each pile requires four steps from being put into the washing machine to being stored in the wardrobe: washing, drying, folding, and storing.

Under the "Single-line EVM" mechanism, since each step (corresponding to each transaction) must be executed in sequence, all four piles of clothes must go through the four steps one after another, totaling 16 time units.

In contrast, under the "Parallel EVM" mechanism, since each independent operation (corresponding to each independent transaction) can be executed simultaneously, when one pile of clothes enters the next operation, the next pile can immediately enter the previous operation, totaling only 7 time units, achieving more than a 1x improvement in efficiency.

Another Marketing Genius?

Unlike some teams with a relatively rigorous style, the Monad team has consistently demonstrated a very "down-to-earth" or "quirky" approach in its marketing strategy.

Every morning, the Monad team posts gmonad (Monad community's exclusive gm) in various ways on the X platform.

The team also held a meme contest on X, collecting various quirky memes about Monad from the community. This event has now entered its 27th week. If you come across some strange purple animals on X, it's likely the Monad community engaging in "spiritual propagation."

This marketing style is hard not to remind one of Solana, which also excels in meme propagation strategies and has attracted a large number of highly loyal community users.

Considering that Monad, like Solana, is a "dedicated" believer in Layer 1 scaling, whether it can replicate the legendary development path of its predecessor is a unique expectation of the Monad community.

Token Information & Interaction Strategy

Regarding Monad's future token, the official team has not disclosed much information yet.

In September 2023, Monad briefly released technical documentation for its upcoming PoS chain, which mentioned that its native token would be named MON and could be used to pay gas fees on the Monad chain, but this information was soon removed from the documentation.

As Monad currently only has a devnet that is not open to the public, with neither the mainnet nor the testnet launched, ordinary users do not have much substantial interactive content at the moment. It is recommended that interested users join the official Discord channel early to await updates on the testnet. Notably, at the end of last year, Keone mentioned on the X platform that nearly 60 projects had confirmed they would build on Monad, and it is expected that when the testnet goes live, a batch of projects will also launch for user interaction.

For users interested in early positioning for Monad airdrops, there are currently two feasible strategies.

The first strategy is more straightforward ------ stay active in Discord, help others, and strive to earn roles like nads, localnoads, etc., which represent contributors. However, there is no clear mechanism for obtaining these roles, so users can only try to be as active as possible to increase their presence.

The second strategy is more speculative. Since Jump's other major project, Wormhole, previously airdropped W to Monad's nads role holders (considering Monad currently doesn't even have a testnet, and the two projects have no substantial integration yet…), it is possible that Monad may "return the favor" in future potential airdrops. Once the staking function for W is opened, it might be possible to expect a first-hand Monad airdrop by staking W.