Original | Odaily Planet Daily

Author | Azuma

The highly anticipated Layer1 newcomer Monad is really coming.

Earlier this month, Monad, which focuses on "Parallel EVM," announced the upcoming launch of its internal testnet. Subsequently, the official Monad team also disclosed the configuration requirements for the full nodes of this network on the X platform.

The Expansion Ideal of the Former "Brain" of Jump

In April 2022, Keone Hon, the research head of the market-making giant Jump Trading, announced his departure and the founding of Monad. Different from the mainstream Layer2 expansion strategies on the market, Monad's vision is to significantly improve the execution efficiency of EVM on Layer1 through "parallel processing," thereby unlocking the potential of the EVM ecosystem.

Keone believed that due to Ethereum's extensive user education, EVM has almost become a "standard" choice in the web2 world, similar to JavaScript. However, the current expansion path taken by Ethereum has certain issues. The layered strategy of Layer1 + Layer2 will divide the blockchain into independent execution environments, thus disrupting the composability on-chain. Therefore, there is a need to build a lower-level network with higher performance.

At that time, Keone estimated that Monad's performance could reach more than 1000 times that of Ethereum and could support more complex application types, thereby achieving broader adoption.

In February 2023, Monad announced the completion of a $19 million financing round, led by Dragonfly Capital, with Placeholder Capital, Lemniscap, Shima Capital, Finality Capital, Naval Ravikant, Cobie, and Hasu participating.

In December 2023, Georgios Konstantopoulos, the Chief Technology Officer of the top VC Paradigm, gave high praise when discussing the prospects of "parallel EVM." Georgios believed that 2024 would be the year for the concept of "parallel EVM," and when listing representative projects, he first mentioned Monad, which has been cultivating this concept for the longest time.

How to Understand "Parallel EVM"?

"Parallel EVM" is essentially a reform of the transaction execution order 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, the later transactions will only begin processing after the earlier ones are confirmed). We can temporarily refer to this execution mechanism as "single-line EVM."

The design of "single-line EVM" ensures that transactions and smart contracts can be executed in a deterministic order, making it easier to manage and predict the state of the blockchain, which helps ensure network security. However, it also limits the transaction execution efficiency of the network and constrains the operational space for achieving expansion on Layer1.

The "parallel EVM" proposed by Monad hopes to break this constraint. This mechanism will partition or group all transactions to be executed and rely on scheduling algorithms to effectively manage the synchronous processing of transactions in each partition or group. The ultimate goal is to allow multiple independent transactions to be executed in parallel, thereby significantly improving the transaction execution efficiency on Layer1.

The Monad team has provided many vivid examples of the differences between "parallel EVM" and "single-line EVM," such as the laundry case in the image below.

Suppose someone has four piles of laundry to wash, and each pile requires four steps from being thrown into the washing machine to being put into the closet: washing, drying, folding, and storing.

Under the "single-line EVM" mechanism, since each step (corresponding to each transaction) needs to be executed in sequence, the four piles of laundry need to go through the four steps one by one, totaling 16 time units.

Under the "parallel EVM" mechanism, since each independent step (corresponding to each independent transaction) can be executed simultaneously, when one pile of laundry enters the next step, the next pile of laundry can immediately enter the previous step, totaling only 7 time units, an efficiency improvement of more than 1 time.

Another Marketing Genius?

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

Every morning, the Monad team will use various methods to post gmonad (Monad community exclusive gm) on the X platform.

The team also held a meme contest on X, collecting various eccentric memes about Monad from the community. Currently, this event has reached its 17th week. If you come across some strange purple animals on X, it is most likely the "spiritual transmission" being carried out by the Monad community.

This marketing style is reminiscent of Solana, which is also adept at meme dissemination strategies and has attracted a large number of highly loyal community users.

Considering that Monad, like Solana, is a staunch advocate of Layer1 single-layer expansion, whether it can replicate the legendary development path of its predecessor is also a unique expectation of the Monad community.

Token Information & Interaction Strategy

Regarding the future token of Monad, the official team has not yet disclosed much information.

In September 2023, Monad briefly released the technical documentation for its upcoming PoS chain, which also mentioned that its native token would be named MON and could be used to pay gas fees on the Monad chain. However, this information was soon removed from the document.

Since Monad has not yet launched its mainnet or testnet, ordinary users currently have limited interactive content. It is recommended that interested users join the official Discord channel as early as possible and wait for testnet-related updates.

At the end of last year, Keone stated on the X platform that nearly 60 projects had confirmed that they would be built on Monad. It is expected that when the testnet goes live, a batch of projects will simultaneously launch for user interaction.

It is worth mentioning that there are many phishing imitators in the social media activities related to Monad. The Monad team has also issued multiple risk warnings (such as never asking users to connect their wallets temporarily). Please remember to remain vigilant.

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