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Monad Labs
Our mission is to build a secure and scalable EVM-compatible L1 blockchain to deliver the promises of blockchain technology.
Monad Labs
Built by the best
Our collective experience in low-latency programming and distributed systems design runs deep, with decades under our belt building performant systems for high-frequency trading, kernel device drivers, and fintech.
The Co-Founders
Keone is a software developer and blockchain researcher. Prior to Monad, he spent eight years at Jump Trading, where he led an HFT team. In 2021, Keone joined Jump’s crypto division and led a team of engineers focused on blockchain research and dapp development.
James is an expert at systems engineering and low-latency optimizations. Prior to Monad, he spent eight years at Jump Trading where he built an ultra-low-latency trading system responsible for tens of billions of notional daily volume in major futures markets.
Eunice is a product and tech leader, with a background in traditional finance and fintech. With a CS degree from MIT, she was previously in trading at BofA Merrill Lynch, and led product teams building enterprise trading systems at Broadway Technology and payments and licensing infra team at Shutterstock.
Monad was founded in April 2022 by Eunice Giarta, Keone Hon, and James Hunsaker.
Our origin story traces back to 2014 when James and Keone began working together on High-Frequency Trading (HFT) at Jump Trading. Their team of 10, with Keone as quant/team lead and James as tech lead, built their own ultra-low-latency trading stack, with sub-microsecond tick-to-trade times, and became one of the top HFT teams in the world, trading $20-50B average daily notional across traditional futures and cash markets.
In 2020 their team began trading crypto, and in 2021 merged into Jump Crypto where they worked primarily on Solana DeFi before leaving in early 2022 to start Monad with Eunice.
James and Keone’s HFT experience, combined with Eunice’s 10 years of fintech product management and tech leadership, gave us the conviction that much higher performance for the EVM was both needed and possible, but that it would require a substantial rewrite of the execution and consensus stacks. In particular, we knew that it would require building a custom database (now known as MonadDb) for storing Ethereum state efficiently while supporting parallel access.
Our prior experience architecting new HFT systems and knowledge of Solana and Ethereum give us the insights we need to develop the most performant EVM-compatible layer 1 blockchain in the world.
Our Investors
Monad Labs is proud to be backed by leading institutional investors, having completed a $225M raise led by Paradigm. This funding milestone gives us ample resources to continue scaling our team and to bring Monad to production.
Together, we are solving the unsolved and building towards a more performant future in blockchain technology.
Build on the fastest EVM-compatible layer 1 blockchain.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Is Monad truly 100% EVM-compatible without code changes?
Yes! The Monad blockchain is 100% EVM compatible at the bytecode level — meaning contracts from ETH mainnet, or other fully EVM compatible networks will work out-of-the-box without requiring any code changes.
Simply deploy your EVM smart contracts on the Monad blockchain to experience game-changing cost reduction and performance.
How is MonadDB different from other databases?
MonadDb is the world’s first database purpose-built for the EVM. The EVM requires data to be stored in a special cryptographic data structure, known as a Merkel Patricia Trie (MPT), which allows for succinct verification of blockchain data.
MonadDb leverages the latest advancements in Linux kernel technology to support parallel state access, greatly reducing the overhead of database access and allowing system resources to be used elsewhere during parallel execution.
In contrast, off-the-shelf databases are largely suboptimal for storing MPT data, which may result in applications downloading significantly more data for verification, or otherwise pose significant challenges to blockchain scalability.
In what language is the Monad client developed?
The Monad client is built with a modular software architecture, separating the tasks of consensus and execution between two software modules: the consensus client and execution client respectively.
The consensus client is written in Rust which is a memory-safe language that allows for low-level optimizations. The execution client is written in C/C++, well-established and battle-tested languages for developing low-level system critical code.
Why is the Monad blockchain developed as a L1?
The Monad network is a full stack solution for developers, allowing access to a highly composable ecosystem without compromising on real-time censorship resistance.
While L2 solutions may offer one way to compress data stored on the base layer, the Monad blockchain is a scalable base layer for the EVM itself at it's most fundamental layer.
A highly-performant base layer gives application developers the best of both worlds, with a high degree of composability and real-time censorship resistance in the name of scalability.