With $225 million in financing, can the “King of Parallelism” Monad lead the L1 expansion narrative?

Original | Odaily Planet Daily

Author | Azuma

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

As the most anticipated project on the Layer 1 track, Monad, which focuses on the concept of "Parallel EVM", hopes to introduce a "parallel processing" execution layer expansion solution that is 100% compatible with all byte characters of EVM. Under the premise of greatly improving network execution efficiency.

Jump’s former “brain” expansion ideal

In April 2022, Keone Hon, the head of research at market-making giant Jump Trading, announced his resignation and founded Monad .

As mentioned above, different from the mainstream Layer 2 expansion strategies on the market, Monad’s vision is to improve the execution efficiency of EVM on a large scale in a single layer of Layer 1 through “parallel processing”. thereby unleashing the potential of the EVM ecosystem.

In Keone’s view, thanks to Ethereum’s sufficient user education, EVM has almost become a “standard” choice like Javascript in the web2 world. However, the current path of Ethereum However, there are certain problems in the expansion path. The layering strategy of Layer1 and Layer2 will cause the blockchain to be divided into independent execution environments, thus destroying the composability on the chain. Therefore, it is necessary to build a higher-performance underlying network.

Keone’s estimate at the time was that Monad’s performance could reach more than 1,000 times that of Ethereum and could host more complex application types, thereby achieving wider adoption.

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

In December 2023, Georgios Konstantopoulos, the chief technology officer of VCParadigm, made a very high evaluation when talking about the prospects of "parallel EVM". Georgios believes that 2024 will be the year of the "parallel EVM" concept. year, and when listing representative projects, he was the first to mention Monad, which has been working on this concept for the longest time.

How to understand "parallel EVM"?

"Parallel EVM" is essentially a reform of the transaction execution sequence in the EVM environment.

In the classic EVM environment, each transaction is executed in sequence (the most intuitive example: when a user submits multiple transactions, only after the transaction submitted first is confirmed, the transaction submitted later will be start to be processed). We can tentatively call this execution mechanism "single-row EVM".

The design of "Single Row EVM" ensures that transactions and smart contracts can be executed in a deterministic sequence, making it easier to manage and predict the status of the blockchain, which helps ensure the security of the network, but at the same time This limits the transaction execution efficiency of the network and restricts the operational space for capacity expansion at Layer 1.

The "parallel EVM" proposed by Monad hopes to break this shackles. This mechanism will partition or group all pending transactions, and then rely on the scheduling algorithm to effectively manage each zone or each group of transactions. The ultimate purpose of synchronization processing is to allow multiple independent transactions to be executed in parallel, thereby greatly improving the execution efficiency of transactions at the Layer 1 single layer.

Monad officials have given many vivid examples of the difference between "parallel EVM" and "single-line EVM", such as the laundry case in the picture below.

Suppose someone has four piles of clothes to wash. Each pile of laundry needs to go through four steps from throwing it into the washing machine to putting it into the closet: washing clothes and drying , folding and storage.

Under the "single row EVM" mechanism, since each operation (corresponding to each transaction) needs to be executed in order, four piles of clothes must go through four steps in sequence, requiring a total of 16 time units.

Under the "parallel EVM" mechanism, since each independent operation (corresponding to each independent transaction) can be executed simultaneously, when a certain pile of clothes enters the next operation, the next pile of clothes can Immediately enter the previous operation, which takes only 7 time units in total, and the performance is more than doubled.

Another marketing genius?

Different from some teams with relatively rigorous styles, the Monad team has always been very "down-to-earth" or "magic" in its marketing strategies.

Every morning, the Monad team will release gmonad (Monad community exclusive gm) on the X platform in different ways.

The team also held a meme contest on X to collect various magical emoticons about Monad from the community. This competition is currently in its 27th week. If you encounter some weird purple animals on X, then there is a high probability that the Monad community is carrying out "spiritual spreading."

This marketing style is hard not to think of Solana. The predecessor is also proficient in meme communication strategies and has attracted a large number of highly loyal community users.

Considering that Monad, like Solana, is a believer in Layer 1 single-layer expansion, whether it can replicate the legendary development path of its predecessors is also a unique expectation of the Monad community.

Token Information & Interaction Strategy

Regarding Monad’s future tokens, the official has not disclosed much yet.

In September 2023, Monad briefly released the technical documentation of its upcoming PoS chain, which also mentioned that its native token will be named MON and can be used to pay gas fees on the Monad chain, but That part of the information was later removed from the document.

Since Monad is currently only online on the devnet, which is not open to the public, and neither the mainnet nor the testnet is online, ordinary users do not have much substantive interactive content at the moment, so it is recommended to intentionally ambush Users join the official Discord channel as soon as possible and wait for relevant news on the test network. It is worth mentioning that At the end of last year, Keone stated on the X platform that nearly 60 projects have been determined to be built based on Monad. It is expected that when the testnet is launched, a batch of projects will be logged in simultaneously for user interaction.

For users who intend to ambush Monad airdrops as early as possible, there are currently two feasible strategies.

The first strategy is more clear - Stay active in Discord and actively help others to win the role status of nads, localnoads and other representative contributors. However, there is no clear mechanism for obtaining these roles, so users can only increase their presence by being as active as possible.

The second strategy is actually just a guess, Since Wormhole, another major project directly related to Jump, has previously airdropped W to Monad’s nads identity holders (think about it, Monad doesn’t even have a testnet for the time being) , there is no substantive integration between the two projects for the time being...), so it is not ruled out that Monad will "give back" in potential airdrops in the future. After the staking function of W is opened, you may be able to expect a first-hand Monad by staking W. airdrop.

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