Monad’s long-awaited airdrop has the crypto community buzzing, but beneath the hype lies an ambitious engineering effort for the blockchain. Ahead of the much anticipated token release and the mainnet launch, CoinDesk explored how the team’s reimagined virtual machine combined with its fast execution could set up Monad to compete with some of the fastest layer-1s.
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 technical breakthroughs can bring in new applications and use cases for on-chain finance.
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 the ones that are already established?
Kevin McCordic, Head of Growth at the Monad Foundation: There are really interesting applications and things that you can do on blockchains that have high performance.
But basically, like you have Solana, which is this very performant blockchain, but is a different language. Then you have Ethereum, which has a ton of collateral, a ton of users, a ton of developers that know how to build for it. There are a lot of amazing properties and resources and collateral that exist for the EVM, but it’s slow and expensive, right?
So I think when you look at that as the current landscape, and there is no performant-EVM design space, the majority of new, interesting apps are more or less coming out on Solana because of the performance, 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 like solidity (programing language) or like in the languages that they are used to.
So if the blockchain is focused on high-performance, is it being created for a specific type of application? What are those? Is it specifically for trading or gaming, or anything else?
For one, are things that currently exist and are just going to be much better when they run 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’re using 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 have not been thought of yet. Now that people see what you can do when you have much, much higher limits (of speed), all of a sudden it becomes feasible when in the first place, like people weren’t even thinking about it.
So if high performance is the core of Monad’s blockchain, explain to me how that works in terms of its architecture.
The founding team and the initial engineers at Monad looked at Ethereum and said, this has amazing network effects, and like the EVM as a standard is just as good as any other Virtual Machine (VM). Like at the end of the day, it’s just, it’s almost arbitrary. But there’s, like, a lot of key optimizations that can be made to the VM and to the blockchain itself that will actually make it much more efficient. You can make it much faster.
There are four key optimizations or innovations that make Monad much faster. One is parallel execution. So the blockchain it’s a highway, where you have more tollbooths, so you can do more things at one time. That is one of them.
Asynchronous execution is the second. 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 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 a lot more transactions per block if you do that.
Then you have monad DFT, which is a very high performance consensus mechanism, it’s a very innovative design. If you’re going to have all this execution happening, you need a really efficient way for nodes to talk to each other. And so the consensus mechanism is key because it allows for geographical distribution and a very high validator set.
And then the final one is monadDB, which is the database. Basically, if you’re going to have way more transactions happening per second, you need a very efficient way to read and write from disk. And so like most people don’t realize, but this is actually the secret sauce in why Monad is much more performant. The database is kind 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 be expected?
We’ll have a reveal on October 28 for anyone interested in checking out their exact amounts. So after the airdrop happens, and then really the next milestone is 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 everyone that has basically written off Monad from a technology standpoint, will completely backtrack, because when you can see this actually happening in the real-world, and you can check for yourself, and you can test on mainnet with real money, an application on whatever chain you’re thinking of versus Monad, it will just be like night and day. And I’m looking forward to not having to answer “why does Monad need to exist” anymore.
I think that you’re going to see an 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 that looks like 6-18 months of just growth on the user acquisition side.
There’s a lot of conversations that are tough to have pre-mainnet, that just become much more relevant once the chain itself is live. For example, say there was a large institution that was going to launch a stablecoin for their payment rails. Monad, from a technology standpoint, is clearly the best place for them to do this. If monad is not live, then you don’t even have a seat at the table. And so there’s a lot of new opportunities for gaining adoption of Monad, for having conversations with people that are excited about the tech.
How do you sort of see Monad fitting into this crowded field of layer-1 blockchains where everyone is sort of trying to compete for a lot of the same type of projects.
A lot of people who are deep in 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 usage at scale?
And so like Solana is obviously, you say Solana is obviously in one camp, they say one very fast chain is the best. Ethereum is in the other camp, where general purpose l2 is their plan for scaling.
Monad, I think will put a lot of momentum and credibility into the fast single, do everything on the l1 camp. And so I think, like, Monad and Solana are very, very similar in that regard.
So I think tech-wise, I would expect the tides 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’s very easy to say, Solana is the best distribution. Everyone uses it, and that’s their mode. Like, the way that they got there was they were faster and cheaper than everyone. They had the best platform to build things, 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 tech actually is the most important thing to build momentum. I think that that is key for Monad.
I believe that Monad, when it goes to market, it will be the most important tech launch in crypto in a very long time. And I don’t think anyone who looks at crypto tech stacks would disagree with that.
I also think that Monad going to market will make Ethereum better than any other piece of tech that has ever been released in crypto
A lot of people talk about the 1,000th layer-2 that launches on Ethereum, which is not really doing that much to make Ethereum better. Monad is coming with a new redesign from scratch of the EVM, of which a lot of components can actually be implemented by Ethereum to make the chain itself faster. So I think it’s an iron sharpens iron type environment.
Read more: Monad Opens Airdrop Portal Ahead of Token Launch
