Monad Ecosystem Highlights: September 2026
Monad Foundation
@monad- Published on
- · 6 min read
Open, Monad’s inaugural flagship conference, will take place in Singapore on October 6, bringing together founders, institutions, capital deployers and ecosystem teams to push open finance forward. Sign up to attend. Participants include StraitsX, Visa, Tether, Banking Circle, xStocks, and more.
The Metropolis global hackathon was announced to source the next generation of startups on Monad. There are 4 separate tracks with over $250K in prizes for builders. Submissions end on October 13th. The tracks are:
- ·Onchain Finance and Trading
- ·Consumer Products and Payments
- ·Social, Attention, and Culture
- ·Trust, Identity, and AI Infrastructure
Recent advances in quantum attack research have made Post Quantum (PQ) readiness more urgent. Monad’s PQ strategy starts with wallet protection, where the potential gains from stealing funds can justify even multimillion-dollar attacks. Category Labs’ Flexible Authentication draft is already public, and PQ consensus is being developed in parallel.
$432M+ in distributed RWA value. Stablecoin market cap above $684M.
A new governance proposal seeks to deploy Aave V4 on Monad. The deployment would include three risk-tiered markets, with USDC and USDT0 as borrowable assets.
Drake is now live. Its unique hybrid liquidity model combining vAMM & CLOB together to optimize execution pricing.
1inch is now part of the Monad ecosystem with MEV-protected, gas-free intent-based swaps, native USDC via CCTP, and more.
Glider has added support for Monad which lets users turn any assets on Monad into an index.
After driving over $1B in launchpad volume in 2 months, o1 is now live on Monad, bringing its entire exchange stack to Monad.
Moose Trade, the first fully onchain aggregator, is live. It speeds up trade execution with an aggregation system that doesn’t place a server between traders and the blockchain.
Crystal, a fully onchain launchpad and orderbook, deployed on Monad.
The Monad API Hub is now live providing a single place for developers and agents to access data, search, and AI APIs. There are no API keys or subscriptions. Users can pay per request with USDC on Monad.
MON staking is live in the Ledger Wallet app.
Ultrafuzz, a smart contract fuzzing and vulnerability scanner, has been open-sourced.
Herd has fully integrated Monad, its first new chain since launch. Herd offers agentic research and execution tools for moving digital assets.
Openreserve joined the Monad ecosystem after closing a $25M seed round led by a16z crypto. It has preliminary conditional OCC approval for a nationally chartered, blockchain-native bank.
Agora has also received preliminary conditional approval from the OCC to organize as a national trust bank. This is a key milestone on the path to a full charter for Agora and regulated stablecoin infrastructure.
The Monad Foundation team interviewed Farooq Malik, Co-Founder and CEO of Rain, to chat about the future of payments and stablecoins. The Monad network is supported by Rain, which issues cards that work anywhere Visa is accepted, powering payments in 150+ countries.
There is an increasing number of integrations joining the Monad network focused on LATAM, including:
- ·Wenia, the digital asset platform created by Grupo Cibest, one of the largest capital ecosystems in Latin America
- ·Lemon, which operates primarily in countries like Argentina and Peru, with over 4M users
- ·Vurelo, a Colombian fintech digital wallet designed to bridge the gap between digital assets and everyday financial transactions.
At Open, Category Labs plans to unveil a new way to keep sensitive activity private on Monad. This is a key unlock for institutions that need privacy solutions to move onchain.
Category Labs published a new cryptography paper: Batched and Weighted Threshold Encryption with Silent Setup. This builds on BTX to support weighted decryption, silent setup, and batch and index independence.
MIP-8 is now live on Monad mainnet. MIP-8 addresses inefficiencies in how state is stored in the EVM by assigning contiguous slots to the same disk page. This makes lookups of multiple contiguous slots significantly cheaper.
Applications are open for the DeltaV Demo Day where builders will pitch to 50+ VCs on Oct 6.
Monad is a high-performance, institutional-grade Layer 1 blockchain enabling open access to fair financial markets on neutral ground. Fully EVM-compatible, Monad delivers 10,000 TPS, 300ms block times, 600ms finality, and near-zero fees, without requiring specialized hardware. The network runs on consumer-grade machines, supporting accessible participation and decentralized network operation: ~200 independently operated validators across 30+ countries and 55+ cities secure the chain today. Get in touch with the Monad Foundation at institutions@monad.foundation.