As one of this bull market’s most highly anticipated projects, Monad is trying to unlock the scalability requirements that crypto has long been searching for. Below, I cover what makes Monad unique, how to potentially qualify for an airdrop, and more.
Key Takeaways
- Monad is an upcoming high-performance blockchain designed to support apps and infrastructure built for Ethereum.
- One of Monad’s features is parallel execution. While other blockchains have this, none are fully compatible with Ethereum, hindering their developer and user adoption.
- A private testnet version of Monad is expected soon, followed by a public testnet and mainnet, which should launch in Q4 2024 or Q1 2025.
- Participating in the public testnet should increase the likelihood of receiving an airdrop once Monad launches a token. Others are speculating that stakers of Monad’s early partners will qualify for an airdrop (e.g. W stakers, PYTH stakers).
Contents
Where Monad Fits In
Blockchains have yet to prove that they can scale. Monad is one project bringing a fresh approach to scaling efforts. In essence, it is an upcoming layer-one (L1) blockchain that leverages the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with various optimisations not available to Ethereum itself and the slew of other EVM-compatible blockchains.
One of these optimisations is known as parallel execution. While this is already a feature of some blockchains (e.g. Solana, Aptos, Sui), it is the other optimisations that further advance Monad’s parallel-execution capabilities. These optimisations include MonadDb, a custom database with minimal RAM requirements, and MonadBFT, a high-performance consensus mechanism. For more on these, watch the below presentation from last month’s TOKEN204 conference.
Another distinguishing factor for Monad is the fact it supports parallel execution while also being fully EVM-compatible at the bytecode level. This EVM-compatibility means that Ethereum-based apps and infrastructure (e.g. developer tooling, wallets, block explorers) can seamlessly transition to Monad without requiring any code changes and expensive audits.
About Monad Labs
The organisation developing Monad is Monad Labs, which was co-founded in 2022 by Keone Hon, James Hunsaker and Eunice Giarta. Its fast-growing team, which currently has 31 employees, is predominantly based in New York.
Last month, Monad Labs announced a $225M Series A round led by Paradigm and participated in by Coinbase Ventures, Electric Capital and others. As indicated by the nine technical positions that Monad Labs is hiring for, the company is using this funding to accelerate Monad’s development. (This was Monad Labs’ third funding round, having previously closed a $9M pre-seed round in May 2022 and a $10M seed round in December 2022.)
Opportunities To Get Involved
Monad will very likely launch a token within the next 12 months. Given its sizeable funding history, the token should have a fully diluted valuation in the billions upon launch. It is far too early to tell whether it will present a favourable investment opportunity, as there are too many unknown variables.
One potential way to get exposure to Monad before the token launch is to try qualifying for an airdrop. As covered in Collective Shift’s airdrops page, you ought to consider how much time and energy you are willing to spend trying to qualify for airdrops.
For those without much spare time, it can be challenging to join Monad’s community, and even more challenging to stay in it. Every Thursday, Monad conducts a ‘Purgeday’, where inactive members are booted. For those wanting to join the community, Purgeday is your opportunity to try to qualify by commenting with creative memes or other valuable content.
Alternatively, there is ongoing speculation that those staking their tokens with Monad’s partners will qualify for an airdrop. (I’d like to emphasise that this is purely speculation.) Examples here include staking W and PYTH tokens with Wormhole and Pyth Network. The former is expected to enable staking soon.
Once Monad’s public testnet is live, that will also be a way to increase your chances of qualifying for an airdrop. This is expected to go live within the next few months.
Fast-Growing Ecosystem & Community
Aside from technical development, Monad Labs is focused on fostering a vibrant ecosystem of projects that will be available on Monad. By the time mainnet goes live, there should be more than 100 protocols and dapps running on Monad.
Some familiar names are already integrated with Monad. Two of these are Wormhole (W) and LayerZero, which will allow Monad to seamlessly connect with more than 50 other blockchains. Another is Pyth Network (PYTH), which will bring enhanced price-feed data to Monad, a must-have for many DeFi projects.
As this ecosystem tracker shows, various other projects have joined the Monad ecosystem. Encouragingly, these projects span multiple functionalities and sectors—including liquidity provision (e.g. Swaap), lending and borrowing (e.g. Pike), token swaps (e.g. PancakeSwap, Balancer) and gaming (e.g. Breath of Estova). There is also a community of NFT artists forming.
It’d be remiss of me not to mention Monad’s global community, which is undoubtedly a source of competitive advantage. Rarely do you see a vibrant community form around an L1 blockchain this early in its development cycle. (While some are undoubtedly only motivated by getting a future airdrop, it’s clear that there is genuine substance to this fast-growing community.)
Risks & Considerations
One of Many Scaling Efforts
Monad is far from the only project trying to scale blockchains. For example, Jump’s Firedancer is an upcoming client expected to drastically improve Solana’s scalability, and teams like Mega Labs and Paradigm are building MegaETH and Reth, respectively, in an effort to aggressively scale Ethereum L2s. Beyond these, several other projects are using alternative techniques to scale blockchains. Time will tell whether Monad’s approach wins.
Untried & Untested
To state the obvious, Monad is not live yet! Therefore, it has not been battle-tested in the same way that competitors like Solana have. Once Monad’s mainnet is live, it will be accessible to all sorts of financially-motivated actors who are likely to use the network in ways not seen during testing.
Timing of Token Launch
From an investment standpoint, there is a timing element to Monad worth noting. If the token launches after this cycle’s top, its upside will be significantly hampered relative to if it launches before the peak of this bull market. (Many are speculating that Monad will go live on mainnet in Q4 2024 or Q1 2025. Presumably, the launch of Monad’s native token will coincide with the mainnet release.)
Recap
Monad is an upcoming blockchain designed for extreme performance. Uniquely, it will be the only blockchain that supports parallel execution while maintaining full bytecode compatibility with the EVM. Monad’s public testnet is expected in the next few months. Based on industry trends, active testnet users should qualify for an eventual airdrop once Monad lands on mainnet in Q4 2024 or Q1 2025.