The long-awaited airdrop of Monad is causing a stir in the crypto community, but behind the hype lies an ambitious engineering effort for the blockchain. Ahead of the highly anticipated token release and mainnet launch, CoinDesk explored how the team’s reimagined virtual machine combined with its faster execution could position Monad to compete with some of the fastest layer-1s ever.
As it prepares to go head-to-head with competitors like Solana or Aptos in the race for speed and scalability, Monad is betting that its technological breakthroughs could bring new applications and use cases to on-chain finance.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
CoinDesk: Building Layer 1 is an uphill battle these days, so why take on that challenge, and what makes Monad any different from those already established?
Kevin McCordick, head of development at the Monad Foundation: There are really interesting applications and things you can do on high-performance blockchains.
But basically, like you have Solana, which is a very high performing blockchain, but a different language. Then you have Ethereum, which has a lot of collateral, a lot of users, a lot of developers who know how to build for it. There are a lot of amazing assets, resources and collateral out there for EVM, but it’s slow and expensive, right?
So I think when you look at it as the current scenario, and there is no performant-EVM design space, most of the new, interesting apps are coming to Solana more or less because of the performance, there’s clearly a market and a demand for developers to be able to build new applications that are only possible in extremely high-throughput and low fees like Solidity (the programming language) or in languages they’re accustomed to.
So if blockchain is focused on high-performance, is it being built for any specific type of application? What are they? Is it specifically for trading or gaming, or something else?
For one, there are things that currently exist that will be much better when they run on Monad versus Ethereum. It 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 were using it on Ethereum L1.
So there are existing things that people use that are much better suited for that task, and then you have new applications that haven’t been thought of yet. Now when people see what you can do when you have a lot of range (of motion), suddenly it becomes possible at first, like people weren’t even thinking about it.
So if high performance is the core of Monad’s blockchain, tell me how it works in terms of its architecture.
Monad’s founding team and early engineers looked at Ethereum and said, it has amazing network effects, and as a standard the EVM is just as good as any other virtual machine (VM). Like at the end of the day, it’s fair, it’s almost arbitrary. But, like, there are a lot of important optimizations that can be made to the VM and the blockchain itself that will really make it more efficient. You can make it very fast.
There are four major optimizations or innovations that make Monad much faster. One is parallel execution. So blockchain it’s a highway, where you have more toll booths, so you can do more at a time. He is one of them.
Asynchronous execution is another. Here, instead of having execution and consensus in the same block, split them and have consensus happening in one work stream and execution happening in the other. And when you do that, suddenly on the execution stream, you’ve freed up 99% of your execution budget. If you do this you can get much more transactions per block.
Then you have the Monad DFT, which is a very high performance consensus mechanism, it’s a very innovative design. If you’re going to do all this execution, you really need an efficient way for the nodes to talk to each other. And so the consensus mechanism is important because it allows for geographic distribution and a very high validator set.
And then last is monadDB, which is the database. Basically, if you want to do a lot of transactions per second, you need a very efficient way of reading from and writing to disk. And as most people don’t realize, but this is actually the secret sauce as to why monads are more performant. The database is 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 can be expected?
We will have a reveal on October 28th for those who want to check their exact amounts. So after the airdrop happens, and then actually the next milestone is the mainnet launch. This will happen this year.
It feels like a bigger milestone than it really should be, just because it’s close to four years of engineering problem and effort.
I imagine that everyone who originally dismissed monads from a technology standpoint will be completely taken back, because when you can see it actually happening in the real world, and you can test it yourself, and you can test it on the mainnet with real money, an application on whatever chain you’re thinking about monads on, it will just be like night and day. And I’m hoping I no longer have to answer “why does the monad need to exist?”
I think you’ll see the initial excitement for about a month. That’s just what happens with a series launch. And then after that, some of the key applications that we’re excited about, we’ll start to get real user acquisition and traction, and then it looks like that will grow over 6-18 months in terms of user acquisition.
There are a lot of conversations that are difficult to have pre-mainnet, they become more relevant once the series goes live. For example, let’s say there was a large institution that was going to launch a stablecoin for its payments rails. From a technology perspective, Monad is clearly the best place for them to do this. If the monad isn’t live, you don’t even have a seat at the table. And so with the adoption of Monad, there are a lot of new opportunities to interact 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 trying to compete for the same types of projects.
Many people who have a deep interest in crypto think about it from a technical advantage perspective. And so is layer-2 the best way to scale a blockchain, or is it the best way to achieve faster layer-1 scale?
And so obviously Solana is like, you say Solana is obviously in a camp where they say a very fast chain is best. Ethereum is in the second camp, where they have plans for general purpose L2 scaling.
Monad, I think will bring a lot of speed and reliability to Fast Single, will do everything in the L1 camp. And so I think, like, Monad and Solana are very, very similar in that regard.
So I think technology-wise, I would expect the tides to shift more towards faster L1 rather than fragmented.
And probably, to give an example of this, Solana probably has the best, if not, the best technology, and they have a lot of users now. And it is very easy to say, Solana is the best distribution. Everyone uses it, and that’s their way. Like, the way they got there was 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 it. And so, like, technique is really the most important thing to increase speed. I think this is important for the monad.
I believe that Monad, when it comes to market, will be the most significant technology launch in crypto in a very long time. And I don’t think anyone looking at the crypto tech stack would disagree with that.
I also think that Monad going to market will make Ethereum better than any other technology released in crypto
A lot of people talk about the 1,000th layer-2 launch on Ethereum not actually doing that much to improve Ethereum. Monad is coming out with a new redesign of the EVM from scratch, many of the components of which can actually be implemented by Ethereum to make the chain faster. So I think it’s an environment like iron sharpening iron.
Read More: Monad Opens Airdrop Portal Ahead of Token Launch