The long-awaited Monad airdrop has the crypto community excited, but behind all the hype lies an ambitious blockchain engineering effort. Ahead of the long-awaited token launch and mainnet launch, CoinDesk explored how the team’s reimagined virtual machine combined with its fast execution could set Monad up 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 generate 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 sets Monad apart from those already established?
Kevin McCordic, Chief Growth Officer, Monad Foundation: There are really cool applications and things you can do on blockchains that have high performance.
But basically, like you have Solana, which is this very high-performance blockchain, but it’s a different language. Then you have Ethereum, which has a lot of collateral, a lot of users, a lot of developers who know how to build for it. There are many amazing features, features and guarantees for the EVM, but it is slow and expensive, right?
So I think when you look at the current landscape, and there is no high-performance EVM design space, most of the new and interesting 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 performance and low fees on a similar robustness (programming language) or in the languages ​​they are used to.
So if the blockchain is focused on high performance, is it being built for a specific type of application? What are those? Is it specifically for trading or gaming, or anything else?
On the one hand, these are things that currently exist and will be much better when running on Monad vs. Ethereum. This would be something like Curve or Uniswap. It’s exactly the same code, but only 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 where people use it much better for that 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, it suddenly becomes doable when in the first place, like people weren’t even thinking about it.
So if high performance is the core of the Monad blockchain, please explain to me how it works in terms of its architecture.
Monad’s founding team and initial engineers looked at Ethereum and said it has amazing network effects and, like EVM, as a standard, is as good as any other virtual machine (VM). At the end of the day, it’s almost arbitrary. But there are 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. So the blockchain is a highway, where you have more toll booths, so you can do more things at once. That’s one of them.
Asynchronous execution is the second. Here, instead of having execution and consensus in the same block, split them up and have consensus occur in one workflow and execution in another. And when you do that, suddenly in the execution flow, you free up 99% of your execution budget. You can get a lot more transactions per block if you do that.
Then you have the DFT monad, which is a very high-performance consensus mechanism, it’s a very innovative design. If you’re going to do all this running, you need a really efficient way for nodes to talk to each other. Therefore, the consensus mechanism is key 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 are going to have 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 why Monad is so much more effective. The database is the most important part of the stack.
In terms of the roadmap, the airdrop portal has opened and will close in early November. What more can you expect?
We will have a reveal on October 28th for anyone interested in checking their exact amounts. So after the airdrop happens, the next milestone is the mainnet launch. It will happen this year.
It seems like a bigger milestone than it really should be, simply because it’s been close to being a four-year problem and engineering effort.
I imagine that everyone who has basically written off Monad from a technological standpoint will completely back off, because when you can see this actually happening in the real world, and you can see it for yourself, and you can test it on the mainnet with real money, an app on whatever chain you’re thinking about versus Monad, it’s going to be like night and day. And I hope I never have to answer “why does Monad need to exist?” again.
I think you’ll see initial enthusiasm for about a month. That’s exactly what happens with chain throws. And after that, some of the key apps that we’re excited about, we’ll start to get some real user acquisition and traction, and then that looks like 6 to 18 months of growth on the user acquisition side.
There are many conversations that are difficult to have before the mainnet, but become much more relevant once the mainnet is active. For example, let’s say there is a large institution that is going to launch a stablecoin for its payment methods. Monad, from a technological point of view, is clearly the best place to do this. If the monad is not active, then you don’t even have a seat at the table. So there are a lot of new opportunities to get Monad adopted, to have conversations with people who are excited about the technology.
How do you see Monad fitting into this crowded field of layer 1 blockchains where everyone is trying to compete for many projects of the same type?
Many people who are deeply interested in cryptocurrencies think about it from the point of view of technological advantage. So are Layer 2s the best way to scale a blockchain, or is a fast Layer 1 the best way to achieve scaled usage?
And obviously, since it’s Solana, you say that Solana is obviously in a field, they say that a very fast chain is the best. Ethereum is in the other camp, where the general purpose l2 is its scaling plan.
Monad, I think will give a lot of momentum and credibility to the fast single, he will do everything in the l1 field. So I think Monad and Solana are very, very similar in that sense.
So I think technologically I would expect the tides to shift more towards fast l1 rather than fragmented.
And maybe, to give an example of this, Solana has maybe the best, if not the best technology, and now it has a ton of users. And it’s very easy to say that Solana is the best distribution. Everyone uses it and that is their way. The way they got there was that they were faster and cheaper than everyone. They had the best platform to build things and it was so cool that people were willing to chew glass and learn new languages ​​to build on it. And so technology is actually the most important thing to create momentum. I think that’s key for Monad.
I think Monad, when it comes to market, will be the biggest tech launch in crypto in a long time. And I don’t think anyone who looks at cryptographic technology stacks would disagree with that.
I also believe that Monad coming to market will make Ethereum better than any other piece of technology that has ever been released in crypto.
A lot of people talk about the 1000th layer 2 being released on Ethereum, which isn’t actually doing much to improve Ethereum. Monad comes with a new ground-up redesign of the EVM, of which Ethereum can implement many components to make the chain faster. So I think it’s an iron type environment that sharpens the iron.
Read More: Monad Opens Airdrop Portal Ahead of Token Launch
