CoinW Research Institute Popular Science: What is Monad?

1. Project Overview

Monad is a high-performance Layer 1 public chain that is fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Its core goal is to allow Ethereum developers to deploy their applications in a faster, cheaper, and lower-latency environment without modifying their code.

Technically, Monad's innovations mainly lie in the combination of parallel processing and EVM compatibility:

1. Parallel Execution: Changes the way Ethereum processes transactions sequentially, allowing multiple transactions to be processed simultaneously like a multi-core CPU, greatly enhancing throughput.

2. MonadDb: A next-generation state database designed specifically for parallelization, optimizing data storage and retrieval efficiency.

3. Asynchronous I/O: Separates computation from data read and write operations, avoiding mutual waiting and fully releasing hardware performance.

4. Delayed Execution: Optimizes the consensus and execution process, achieving faster transaction finality.

This combination of "Ethereum's ecosystem, Solana's speed" theoretically places Monad in an excellent market position. Currently, its testnet performance data shows a TPS (transactions per second) of about 10,000, with a block time of only 0.8 seconds. The network is supported by 174 validators spread across 25 countries, and over 300 projects have already been deployed in its ecosystem.

2. Market Dynamics

Monad is the first token project launched after the new public fundraising platform by Coinbase, with participation available in over 80 countries/regions worldwide, including Hong Kong, China. Therefore, this sale is widely seen as Coinbase's first move to restart "public, transparent, compliant issuance," attracting significant industry attention. During the public offering, which started on November 17, the market experienced a notable correction, with Bitcoin prices dropping to around $90,000, leading to a clear contraction in overall market risk appetite. Additionally, the pricing of Monad's public offering was not low ($0.025, with a fully diluted valuation of about $2.5 billion), resulting in a subscription rate of only 45% in the first 6 hours before the sale. The pre-market trading price also fell from $0.07 to $0.04, reflecting a weakening of short-term market sentiment. However, as more users participated, the total subscription scale has now exceeded $100 million. This phenomenon indicates that even in an overall weak market environment, there remains enthusiasm for participation in projects of this iconic significance.

On one hand, as a public fundraising project from a top exchange, Monad naturally attracts market focus, and having previously secured over $200 million in funding further heightened interest; on the other hand, this public offering is also seen as an important experiment for Coinbase's first attempt to restart the public fundraising mechanism in the U.S. after many years, its significance transcending the project itself and symbolizing a key signal of whether "compliant public issuance can return to the mainstream stage." Many participants believe this is similar to the logic of CoinList gradually gaining popularity during the bear market, with a general consensus that "initial projects + new public fundraising platform = potential for the next wave of wealth effect."

3. Team Background

The core team background of Monad is arguably its greatest asset, with members primarily coming from the top institution in traditional high-frequency trading, Jump Trading, possessing deep experience in developing financial-grade low-latency systems. Industry insiders generally believe that Monad's true advantage lies not only in its impressive performance metrics on paper but also in the fact that its team has built real financial-grade infrastructure. This has led many observers to anticipate that if the next batch of high-performance Layer 1 public chains emerges between 2025 and 2027, the teams behind them are likely to come from traditional system development fields.

Co-founder introductions:

• Keone Hon (MIT): Over 10 years of low-latency system experience, former head of high-frequency trading infrastructure at Jump Trading.

• James Hunsaker: Former senior engineer at Jump Trading, previously worked at JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs.

• Eunice Giarta (MIT): Previously built enterprise-level trading systems at Broadway Technology and worked in the payment system at Shutterstock.

In terms of financing, Monad has successfully completed two major rounds of funding, totaling over $244 million, demonstrating top-tier capital's high recognition of its technological path and team capabilities:

• Seed round in 2023: $19 million (Dragonfly);

• April 2024: $225 million in significant funding (led by Paradigm, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and others).

4. Competitive Landscape

In the face of competition from existing high-performance public chains like Solana, Sui, and Aptos, Monad's path to breakthrough will focus on the following core aspects:

Opportunities and Advantages:

Performance and Compatibility: Monad directly competes with high-performance chains like Solana, Aptos, and Sui, with its uniqueness lying in maintaining EVM bytecode-level compatibility while achieving tens of thousands of TPS, making it extremely friendly to Ethereum's vast developer community.

Top Team and Capital: The engineering team from Jump Trading and ample funding provide strong support for its technological implementation.

Compliant Issuance Narrative: As the first public offering project from Coinbase, it carries built-in traffic and compliance trust advantages.

Risks and Challenges:

Mainnet Performance Yet to be Verified: While the testnet data is impressive, whether it can maintain high performance and stability in a real and complex environment after the mainnet launch is its biggest test.

Intense Ecological Competition: The high-performance public chain space is already very crowded. Monad needs to attract genuine "killer applications" and users to establish a prosperous ecosystem and sufficient Total Value Locked (TVL) to stand out.

Token Release Pressure: Although the team and investors have strict lock-up agreements, the large total token supply and linear unlocking may still pose potential pressure on the secondary market in the long run.

Outlook:

Monad has undoubtedly become a focal point in the new round of public chain competition due to its team, technology, and financing. Its short-term success depends on whether the mainnet can reliably deliver on its performance promises; long-term value will depend on whether its ecosystem can truly thrive. If both points can be achieved, Monad is expected to become a leader in the "high-performance EVM" space, competing vigorously with Solana and others.