The long-awaited Monad airdrop has the crypto community buzzing, but behind the hype lies an ambitious engineering effort for the blockchain. Ahead of the token’s highly anticipated release and mainnet launch, CoinDesk explored how the team’s reimagined virtual machine, combined with its rapid execution, could allow Monad to compete with some of the fastest Layer 1s.
As it prepares to take on competitors like Solana or Aptos in the race for speed and scalability, Monad is betting that its technical advances can bring 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 the challenge, and what makes Monad different from those already established?
Kevin McCordic, Head of Growth at the Monad Foundation: There are some really cool applications and things you can do on high-performance blockchains.
But basically, like you have Solana, which is this very capable blockchain, but it’s a different language. Then you have Ethereum, which has a ton of collateral, a ton of users, a ton of developers who know how to build for it. There are many amazing properties, resources and guarantees for EVM, but it’s slow and expensive, right?
So I think when you look at this in today’s landscape, and there is no high-performance EVM design space, the majority of interesting new applications are coming out more or less on Solana because of the performance, there is clearly a market and demand for developers to be able to create new applications that are only possible with extremely high throughput and low overhead in a similar solidity (programming language) or in the languages that they are used to it.
So if blockchain is focused on high performance, is it created for a specific type of application? What is this ? Is it specifically for trading, gaming, or something else?
On the one hand, there are things that currently exist that will be much better when running on Monad compared to 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 use it on Ethereum L1.
So there are current things that people are using much better for this function, and then you have new applications that haven’t been thought of yet. Now that people see what you can do when you have much higher (speed) limits, all of a sudden it becomes achievable where initially, like people weren’t even thinking about it.
So if high performance is at the heart of the Monad blockchain, explain to me how it works in terms of its architecture.
The founding team and early engineers at Monad looked at Ethereum and said it had amazing network effects and, like EVM as a standard, was just as good as any other virtual machine (VM). In the end, it’s just, it’s almost arbitrary. But there are, for example, many key optimizations that can be made to the VM and the blockchain itself that will actually make it much more efficient. You can do it much faster.
There are four key optimizations or innovations that make Monad much faster. One is parallel execution. Blockchain is therefore a highway, on which there are more tolls, which allows you to do more things at the same time. This is one.
Asynchronous execution is second. Here, instead of having execution and consensus in the same block, split them up and have consensus happen in one workflow and execution in another. And when you do that, all of a sudden, on the execution flow, you’ve just freed up 99% of your execution budget. You can get a lot more transactions per block if you do this.
Then you have monad DFT, which is a very capable consensus mechanism, it’s a very innovative design. If you want all this execution to happen, you need a truly efficient way for the nodes to communicate with each other. The consensus mechanism is therefore essential because it allows geographical distribution and a very high set of validators.
And then the last one is monadDB, which is the database. Basically, if you want to do many more transactions per second, you need a very efficient way to read and write from disk. And as most people don’t realize, this is actually the secret sauce as to why Monad performs so much better. The database is somehow the most important part of the stack.
In terms of roadmap, the airdrop portal has opened and will close in early November. What else can we expect?
We will have a reveal on October 28 for anyone interested in verifying their exact amounts. So after the airdrop, the next step is really the mainnet launch. It will happen this year.
This seems like a bigger step than it really should be, simply because it represents a problem and engineering effort that took almost four years to complete.
I imagine everyone who basically wrote off Monad from a technology standpoint will completely backtrack, because when you can see this actually happening in the real world, and you can verify it for yourself, and you can test on mainnet with real money, an app on any chain you can think of versus Monad, it will be like night and day. And I can’t wait to no longer have to answer “why does Monad need to exist”.
I think you will see initial enthusiasm for about a month. This is exactly what happens with on-chain launches. 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 that looks like 6 to 18 months of growth just on the user acquisition side.
There are a lot of difficult conversations to have before the mainnet, which become much more relevant once the channel itself is live. For example, let’s say a large institution was going to launch a stablecoin for their payment rails. Monad, from a technological point of view, is clearly the best place to achieve this. If monad is not live, then you don’t even have a seat at the table. So there are many new opportunities to adopt Monad and have conversations with people who are passionate about this technology.
How do you see Monad fitting into this crowded field of layer 1 blockchains where everyone is sort of trying to compete for a lot of projects of the same type.
Many people who are interested in crypto think about it from the perspective of technological advantage. So are Layer 2s the best way to scale a blockchain, or is a fast Layer 1 the best way to get use at scale?
And so, like Solana obviously is, you say Solana is obviously in one camp, they say a very fast chain is best. Ethereum is in the other camp, where general purpose l2 is their scaling plan.
Monad, I think, will put a lot of momentum and credibility into the quick single, make it all about the L1 camp. And so I think Monad and Solana are very, very similar in that regard.
So I think in terms of technology, I would expect the tides to move more towards a fast L1 instead of being fragmented.
And maybe, to give an example of this, Solana has maybe the best, if not the best technology, and now they have a ton of users. And it’s very simple to say, Solana is the best distribution. Everyone uses it, and it’s their fashion. Like, the way they got there was they were faster and cheaper than everyone else. They had the best platform for building things, and it was so good that people were willing to chew glass and learn new languages to build on it. And so, technology is actually the most important thing in creating momentum. I think that’s the key for Monad.
I think Monad, when it comes to market, will be the most important technology launch in crypto in a very long time. And I don’t think anyone looking at crypto tech stacks would disagree with that.
I also believe that the commercialization of Monad will make Ethereum better than any other technology ever released in crypto.
A lot of people are talking about the 1000th layer 2 launched on Ethereum, which doesn’t really do much to improve Ethereum. Monad comes with a new from-scratch redesign of the EVM, many components of which can actually be implemented by Ethereum to make the chain itself faster. So I think it’s a sharp iron type environment.
Read more: Monad opens Airdrop portal ahead of token launch
