Monad’s long-awaited airdrop has the crypto community buzzing, but beneath the hype lies an ambitious blockchain engineering effort. Ahead of the much-anticipated token release and mainnet launch, CoinDesk explored how the team’s reimagined virtual machine, combined with its fast execution, could set Monad up to compete with some of the fastest layer-1s.
As Monad prepares to go head-to-head with competitors like Solana or Aptos in the race for speed and scalability, Monad is betting that its technical breakthrough can bring new applications and use cases for on-chain financing.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
CoinDesk: Building a layer 1 is an uphill battle these days, so why take on that challenge and what makes Monad different from those already established?
Kevin McCordic, Head of Growth at Monad Foundation: There are really interesting applications and things you can do on blockchains that are high performance.
But basically, like you have Solana, which is this very efficient blockchain, but it’s a different language. Then you have Ethereum, which has a ton of security, a ton of users, a ton of developers who know how to build for it. There are a lot of great features and resources and collateral that exist for EVM, but it’s slow and expensive, right?
So I think when you look at it as the current landscape and there is no performant EVM design space, the majority of new, interesting apps more or less come out on Solana because of the performance, that there is clearly a market and demand for developers to be able to build new applications that are only possible with extremely high throughput and low fees in e.g. solidity (programming language) or as in the languages they are used to.
So if blockchain is focused on high performance, is it being created for a specific type of application? What is it? Is it specifically for trading or gaming or something else?
First is stuff that currently exists and will just get a lot better when running on Monad versus Ethereum. This would be something like Curve or Uniswap. It’s the exact same code, but just because it’s faster and cheaper, and the user experience will be much better than if you use it on Ethereum L1.
So there are current things that people use it for that function much better, and then you have new applications that haven’t been thought of yet. Now that people see what you can do when you have much, much higher limits (of speed), suddenly it becomes possible, when at first, it’s like people didn’t even think about it.
So if high performance is at the core of Monad’s blockchain, explain to me how it works in terms of its architecture.
The founding team and initial engineers at Monad looked at Ethereum and said that this has great network effects and like EVM by default is as good as any other virtual machine (VM). Like at the end of the day it’s just, it’s almost arbitrary. But there are, like, a lot of important optimizations that can be made to the VM and to the blockchain itself that will actually make it much more efficient. You can do it much faster.
There are four key optimizations or innovations that make Monad much faster. One is parallel execution. So the blockchain is a highway where you have multiple payment systems so you can do multiple things at once. It is one of them.
Asynchronous execution is the other. Here, instead of having execution and consensus in the same block, split them up and have consensus happen in one workflow and execution happen in another. And when you do that, all of a sudden on the execution stream, you just freed up 99% of your execution budget. You can get many more transactions per block if you do.
Then you have monad DFT, which is a very high performance consensus mechanism, it’s a very innovative design. To have all this execution happen, you need a really efficient way for nodes to talk to each other. And so the consensus mechanism is key because it allows for geographic distribution and a very high validator set.
And then the last one is monadDB, which is the database. Basically, if you need to have far more transactions happening per second, you need a very efficient way to read and write from disk. And as most people don’t realize, this is actually the secret sauce of why Monad is much more performant. The database is sort of the most important part of the stack.
In terms of the roadmap, the airdrop portal has opened and will close in early November. What else is there to expect?
We will reveal on October 28th for anyone interested to check their exact amount. So after the airdrop happens and then the next milestone is really the mainnet launch. It will happen this year.
It seems like a bigger milestone than it really should, just because this has been close to a four-year engineering problem and effort.
I imagine that everybody who basically wrote Monad off from a technology standpoint is going to go all the way back because when you see this actually happening in the real world and you can check for yourself and you can test on the mainnet with real money, an application on whatever chain you’re thinking of versus Monad, it’s just going to be like night and day. And I’m looking forward to not having to answer “why should Monad exist” anymore.
I think you’re going to see some initial excitement for about a month. That’s just what happens with chain launches. And then after that, some of the key applications that we’re excited about, we’ll start to get actual user acquisition and traction, and then it’s like 6-18 months of just growth on the user acquisition side.
There are many conversations that are difficult to have before the mainnet that just become much more relevant when the chain itself is live. For example, let’s say there was a large institution that was going to launch a stablecoin for their payment rails. Monad, from a technological point of view, is clearly the best place for them to do this. If the monad isn’t alive, then you don’t even have a seat at the table. And then there are a lot of new opportunities to get Monad adopted, to have conversations with people who are excited about the technology.
How do you see Monad fitting into this crowded field of layer-1 blockchains, where everyone is sort of trying to compete for many of the same type of projects.
Many people who are deep into crypto think about it from a technological advantage point of view. And so are layer-2s the best way to scale a blockchain, or is a fast layer-1 the best way to get use at scale?
And as Solana obviously is, you say Solana is obviously in one camp, they say a very fast chain is the best. Ethereum is in the other camp, with general purpose l2 being their blueprint for scaling.
Monad I think will put a lot of momentum and credibility in the fast single, do everything in the l1 camp. And so I think, like, Monad and Solana are very, very similar in that regard.
So I guess technically I would expect the tide to shift more towards fast l1 instead of fragmented.
And maybe, to give an example of this, Solana has maybe the best, if not, up there with the best technology, and now they have a ton of users. And it is very easy to say that Solana is the best distribution. Everyone uses it and it’s their way. The way they got there was that they were faster and cheaper than everyone else. They had the best platform to build things on and it was so good that people were willing to chew glass and learn new languages to build on top of this. And so, like, the technology is actually the most important thing to create momentum. I think that is the key to Monad.
I believe that Monad, when it comes to market, will be the most important technology launch in crypto for a very long time. And I don’t think anyone looking at crypto tech stacks would disagree with that.
I also think Monad going to market will make Ethereum better than any other piece of technology ever released in crypto
Many people talk about the 1,000. layer-2 launching on Ethereum which doesn’t really do much to make Ethereum better. Monad comes with a new redesign from scratch of EVM, a lot of components of which can actually be implemented by Ethereum to make the chain itself faster. So I think it’s an environment with irons.
Read more: Monad opens Airdrop portal ahead of token launch
