The art of weighing trade-offs, Monad is imperfect, all by design.

Author: Thogard

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow

Recently, I have been in discussions with many VCs, and I found that their conversations always start with some form of the same question:

"Why Monad?"

Many seem genuinely surprised to discover that I am building a blockchain known for its blue animal mascot and radical airdrop players. These VCs might know me through my MEV (Maximum Extractable Value) related work on other chains, research on application-specific ordering, academic papers, podcast appearances, or conference talks. Or perhaps they remember me for my outspoken analytical style on Twitter/X…

Because they know me, they find it strange that I haven't directed the same blunt criticism at this project, which many see as "just another new L1." The fact that I have chosen to build on Monad seems to short-circuit the part of their brains responsible for pattern matching.

After all, they know I am more likely to mock airdrop players than to become one; they know that based on the structure of my company's equity, I should be more inclined to support Solana rather than Monad; they also know that our application-specific orderer recently found product-market fit (PMF) and is experiencing exponential momentum and revenue growth. They are aware that I am not in a desperate situation and have no direct economic incentive to invest so much time and resources into an L1 that is still in the testnet phase.

So… why Monad?

After all, the Monad blockchain has not achieved any single 10x improvement over existing technologies:

• Solana offers higher throughput

• L2 gives applications more control and enhances user experience (UX)

• Cosmos chains provide single-slot finality (Monad has double-slot finality, and the practical differences in interoperability and composability are vast)

• Ethereum has a more mature ecosystem (and my reputation in the Ethereum community has more market value)

• Berachain has better incentive mechanisms and stronger community support

• Hyperliquid is a hub for all new activities and users

And these ecosystems are already live and operational.

Meanwhile, Monad's application testnet has not even utilized the MonadBFT consensus protocol yet. Nevertheless, it has raised substantial funds, and more than a year has passed since the initially set mainnet launch date.

The VCs I have interacted with are aware of these facts, and they know me. To them, it simply doesn't add up.

They have also done their homework—they know I didn't have any close friends working at Monad Labs before. I did have a brief encounter with Keone when I was still operating my MEV bot, but I wouldn't say we were close. They also know I haven't invested in Monad as an angel investor—I have no economic ties to this blockchain or its team.

These VCs know I am married and have a child. While I am not struggling financially, I am still renting and have not bought a house—and I certainly have not reached a stage in life where I can afford to take reckless risks and burn money. They also know that neither I nor anyone at FastLane has sold any equity through OTC transactions; our goal is long-term growth (so why chase short-term airdrops?). Moreover, I am betting not just my future on Monad, but the future of all FastLane members. This is a huge responsibility… and for many outsiders, this bet makes no sense.

More importantly, the VCs know that the Monad ecosystem team has not publicly promoted my company (or any LST), has not shared our content, and has not provided any token incentives. There has been no co-marketing. I haven't even participated in any podcasts organized by Monad. Sometimes, the Monad ecosystem team has even politely declined to join the Telegram group I created for them to meet applications or validators that requested my introduction. This situation has burned quite a few bridges for me. It has severed many of my relationships.

The VCs know that many ecosystems have "courted" me… but Monad is not one of them. No one on the Monad team has asked us to build here. I am quite sure many of them see my willingness to speak bluntly about what others dare not say as a risk. So far, this tweet has confirmed their concerns. It is time to address this.

"Why Monad?"

It's really simple; there is no other way.

Monad is a project with serious flaws. But it is the only project in all of DeFi built with wisdom, foresight, and self-awareness, acknowledging that a perfect Layer 1 ecosystem cannot be created, and instead building in a way that makes flaws a deliberate trade-off while maintaining efficiency.

This is the essence of the Monad blockchain, its community, and its developers.

Every other project in the crypto space believes it can achieve perfection, but it is precisely this hubris that ultimately leads them to encounter bottlenecks. They realize too late that they cannot have it all… and so they accept inefficiencies, destructive flaws, and unexpected defects, coping with a grotesque "temporary solution." Their communities are all too eager, because "the solution is coming soon!"

• "We will decentralize the orderer later!"

• "Runtime 2.0 will support partial rollbacks!"

• "The atomic composability between application chains is enough to build a harmonious ecosystem!"

• "Once proof times are reduced, scalability issues will be resolved!"

• "Incentives controlled by governance won't stifle ecosystem growth once the whitelist is removed!"

• "Soon we will only need to wait 2 seconds to transfer funds from perpetual exchanges to L1 via insecure bridging!"

All these statements are the result of self-soothing. They stem from these ecosystems' lack of foresight and failure to understand the trade-offs that must be made and the flaws that will be inherent in the design.

Do you know what the common coping mechanism in the Monad community is?

None.

The many flaws of Monad are all by design, stemming from thoughtful trade-offs. These flaws will not disappear in the short term because removing them would create even bigger problems.

"But Alex, isn't it just another EVM L1? How can it be so different?"

The reason Monad is the only trustworthy blockchain is not that the team conjured up some magical engineering solution out of thin air. It does not have a single feature that makes it stand out.

Monad is the only trustworthy blockchain because it has been designed and planned so comprehensively that there are no fatal flaws. For example:

L2 cannot survive under regulatory pressure. Even if it can survive, using the abundant block space on a fast L1 for application-specific sequencing can build a faster, less centralized, and better user experience application.

An L1 like Monad. Frankly, if you still think L2 offers anything novel beyond delayed finality, you may not have truly grasped the powerful capabilities of application-specific sequencing.

When it comes to executing application control, partial rollbacks cannot be achieved on Solana (i.e., on-chain call error capture/handling). This directly undermines the potential for atomic composability between adversarial counterparts, which is the main new use case of DeFi compared to traditional finance (TradFi). Of course, you can handle matching using off-chain infrastructure and hope that validators respect the order you send, artificially recreating some of the same functionality, but adding another layer of infrastructure between the blockchain and users will only slow the chain down.

I think Jito's BAM (Block Auction Market) is a remarkable attempt, and I fully support it—the team is fantastic. But BAM is an optional infrastructure layer for validators, so it can never achieve 100% uptime, which undermines the demand for ACE (Application Controlled Execution)/ASS (Application-Specific Sequencing) for most high-value use cases.

This is not Jito's fault—Solana was designed for high TPS (transactions per second). Just like a driver who, in pursuit of speed, removes the airbags from their car and then subconsciously drives slower due to increased risk, Solana has removed the ability for transactions to self-repair mid-execution, thus having to send more transactions. The result is that it simply does not support the functionalities used by FastLane.

So, no matter how great the Jito team is, their TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) infrastructure layer can never be as fast or have the same uptime as application-specific sequencing on the Monad native chain… because our latency is zero, and uptime is 100%. Long live smart contracts!

I really admire the Cosmos team and sincerely believe their composability solutions are years ahead of their time… but perhaps they should first focus on creating an ecosystem willing to collaborate. If isolated applications can seamlessly interoperate but have no incentive to cooperate, what is the point?

Ecosystem management is an extremely complex topic, and I am certainly not an expert in this area, but the Monad team has been very pragmatic in their strategy. There is a range of trade-offs when creating an ecosystem: on one end is a system of completely free competition where any application can win based on its own strengths; on the other end, certain applications receive enough support that they need not worry about local users and can almost focus solely on bringing new users to the ecosystem.

Like other aspects of Monad, their ecosystem team has not leaned too far toward either end but has tried to manage the ecosystem in the most efficient way possible. For applications, this ecosystem is both fair (but not a completely equal competitive environment) and supportive (but not a "kingmaker" ecosystem like megaeth or berachain—this type of ecosystem is more appealing to developers like me who prefer to win through market allocation and showcase the best technology, as success does not rely on the support of any angel investor).

Hyperliquid's blocks are only 2 million gas. This perpetual contract exchange isn't even directly integrated into L1… you can bridge funds from Ethereum to Arbitrum via Across faster than transferring from HypeEVM to Hypercore.

I really cannot understand why all validators run on AWS Tokyo data centers, yet the block size is only 2 million. Ethereum has now reached 45 million. Sometimes, I genuinely feel like the entire Hyperliquid ecosystem is a carefully designed joke, and everyone is just playing with me.

Ethereum's claims about the ZK proof scaling path may be correct… but at this point, the blockchain is already overwhelmed by entrenched intermediaries and third parties. These mechanisms look great in theory, but every infrastructure intermediary that appears between the user and the blockchain adds latency and has a motivation to extract rent.

The bigger problem is that removing these intermediaries will be very difficult, especially with political resistance… However, I also know that if anyone can do it, it would be Tomasz. He is absolutely legendary—choosing him as a leader is a radical yet extremely smart decision, and I never thought Ethereum would make such a choice.

But perhaps they can succeed? I wouldn't bet on them doing it— even if they solve the problem, there is still a long way to go to reach the level of a modern L1—but I still cheer for them.

I have no bad comments about SUI; it's just that its virtual machine has much less support compared to EVM or SVM. If it could launch some tools earlier, allowing its development toolchain to be established before all the new AI agent coding tools start learning EVM and SVM and take over a lot of work, then perhaps I would choose to develop on SUI.

Of course, if Monad did not exist, SUI might be my final choice. But the fact is, Monad does exist.

I am a developer, and I like to plan products before I start building. I also deeply realize how painful it can be to change the fundamentals midway through the development cycle.

"Why choose Monad?"

In my view, it is obvious that there is only one blockchain designed based on real-world trade-offs, rather than naive ideals or principles.

In my view, it is obvious that there is only one blockchain with a solid enough foundation that does not need to rely on large-scale destructive changes to remain relevant.

In my view, it is obvious that there is only one blockchain built to support the actual use cases of end users, rather than to cater to the engineering slogans or mechanism designs of the founding team.

In my view, it is obvious that there is only one blockchain whose ecosystem strategy acknowledges its own strengths while understanding that fair use will reduce overall impact and strives to seek balance within that. While no founder will celebrate all the decisions of the Monad ecosystem—after all, we are all selfish beings—we all respect the rationale behind those decisions.

In my view, it is obvious that there is only one blockchain that does not force application developers to sacrifice their core principles. We all entered DeFi for a reason; let’s not deceive ourselves into forgetting our original intentions.

Monad is not the most decentralized L1. Monad does not have single-slot finality. Monad also does not have the highest throughput. But Monad is decentralized, Monad does have fast finality, and Monad's throughput is also high. Every so-called "defect" is acceptable. None are fatal, and none will force me to compromise my values.

In my view, Monad took a long time to launch their Layer-1… but they were very thorough. That’s also why it has all these amazing features and why all the trade-offs are so well thought out. Developers do not have a magic bullet. Monad is the best blockchain because of the team's hard work, rich experience, and meticulous analysis.

It is these subtleties that converge into truly extraordinary results. If you read the code of the consensus engine, you would tell me it is not impressive.

In my view, there is only one blockchain for serious developers to choose.

"Why Monad?"

Because in my view, there is no other choice.

I also know that soon, everything I say will become obvious to you as well.

If you are lucky enough, perhaps those strange purple animals will also start to make sense to you. By the way, they are called "Monanimals."

Unfortunately, when VCs or other interested parties ask me "Why Monad?" I usually don't have twenty minutes to explain it to them. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this question, but I have always struggled to express it more concisely. Thank you for taking the time to read these lengthy thoughts—even if you disagree or are not persuaded by my views, considering my perspective means a lot to me.

See you on-chain!

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