Do We Need Another L1? - Inside Monad’s Parallel EVM

This episode dissects Monad's high-stakes bet on re-engineering the EVM from the ground up, arguing that a massively parallelized Layer 1 can deliver superior performance and decentralization without compromising compatibility.

Do We Need Another L1? Monad's Thesis

Keone, a founder of Monad, opens by addressing the critical question of whether the crypto ecosystem needs another general-purpose Layer 1. He frames Monad not as just another chain, but as a significant engineering effort to prove that deep software architecture improvements can make a decentralized EVM far more powerful and performant. The project is grounded in years of research aimed at pushing the boundaries of what is possible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

"Monad is an effort that is really grounded in research and engineering... to deliver a really powerful experience for the EVM and to make the EVM more powerful and more performant in a highly decentralized way."

Why an L1, Not an L2? The Importance of Consensus

While many scaling solutions focus on Layer 2s, Keone explains that Monad was intentionally built as a Layer 1 to innovate on both execution and consensus. He argues that Layer 2s primarily address the execution layer, but consensus—the mechanism by which a distributed network agrees on the state of the ledger—is the foundation of a blockchain's decentralization and borderless nature. Monad's team saw the interaction between consensus and execution as a critical and underexplored area for optimization.

Defining Decentralization: Technical and Social Layers

Keone offers a two-part definition of decentralization:

• Technically, it means control is distributed across many independent nodes that hold each other accountable, enforcing the rules of the system purely through code. This creates a trustless foundation for building applications.
• Socially, it involves a large and diverse community of contributors, developers, and observers who act as "watchdogs" and "white blood cells," ensuring the health and integrity of the network.

Hardware Requirements: The "Consumer-Grade" Constraint

A core tenet of Monad's design is accessibility. Keone emphasizes that from day one, the project was constrained by the requirement that anyone must be able to run a node on consumer-grade hardware, explicitly avoiding the "data center chain" model.

• Hardware Specifications: 32 GB of RAM, a 2 TB SSD, a standard CPU, and 100 Mbps bandwidth (300 Mbps for a validator).
• Strategic Implication: This commitment to low hardware requirements is a key differentiator from competitors like Solana. For investors, this signals a focus on a potentially more resilient and geographically distributed validator set, which is crucial for long-term network security.

The Purpose of a Blockchain: Monad's Vision

According to Keone, the fundamental purpose of a blockchain is to provide a shared global state for coordination, value transfer, and asset issuance. He stresses the importance of self-verifiability, where any user or business can run their own node to confirm transactions without relying on a third party. While general-purpose, Monad's immediate focus is on finance, aiming to build a highly performant and permissionless layer to unlock greater efficiency and opportunity for users worldwide.

The Six Core Optimizations of Monad's Parallel EVM

Keone outlines the six foundational improvements, built from the ground up, that enable Monad's high performance. These innovations stack on top of each other to achieve a target of over 10,000 transactions per second (TPS).

1. MonadBFT: A new, high-performance consensus mechanism that uses pipelining—a technique where multiple stages of a process run concurrently—to improve efficiency.
2. Asynchronous Execution: This decouples consensus from execution, allowing the two processes to run in parallel. In most blockchains, consensus must wait for execution to finish, creating a major bottleneck that Monad eliminates.
3. Parallel Execution: Monad optimistically executes thousands of transactions simultaneously. It then validates and commits the results in their original serial order, re-executing only the small fraction of transactions with dependencies.
4. Just-in-Time (JIT) Compilation: This feature compiles EVM bytecode—the language of smart contracts—into more efficient, native machine code during runtime, significantly speeding up execution.
5. MonadDB: A custom-built database specifically designed to store the Ethereum state tree (Merkle tree) on solid-state drives (SSDs). This allows the chain to scale to massive state sizes (e.g., 30+ TB) without requiring prohibitively expensive RAM.
6. RaptorQ: An efficient block propagation protocol that ensures large blocks of transactions can be communicated quickly across the global network of nodes.

Monad vs. Solana: The EVM's Answer?

Keone positions Monad as "the EVM's answer to Solana" in its ambition for high performance. However, he highlights a fundamental difference in philosophy: Solana's design assumes that hardware will continuously improve, justifying its high requirements and status as a "data center chain." In contrast, Monad is engineered to extract maximum performance from accessible, consumer-grade hardware, prioritizing decentralization alongside speed.

Monad vs. Ethereum: Different Paths to Scaling

While expressing respect for Ethereum's ZK-rollup-centric roadmap, Keone argues that Monad's approach can achieve far greater performance on a single, integrated layer. Monad's optimization for cheap SSD storage over expensive RAM is a key architectural choice designed for massive on-chain state growth. He also notes that Monad's open-source code can serve as a real-world testbed for concepts like asynchronous execution, which could potentially benefit Ethereum in the future.

Lessons from High-Frequency Trading at Jump

Keone draws on his eight years at Jump Trading, where his team built and optimized high-frequency trading (HFT) systems. This experience, which involved reducing system latency from tens of microseconds to sub-microsecond levels, instilled a deep understanding of performance engineering, iterative development, and risk management that directly informs Monad's architecture.

Performance Metrics at Launch: Throughput and Finality

Keone provides the key performance benchmarks for Monad's mainnet launch:

• Throughput: 10,000 TPS (for a standard 50,000 gas transaction), equivalent to 500 million gas per second.
• Block Times: 400 milliseconds.
• Finality: 800 milliseconds (2 blocks). Finality is the guarantee that a transaction is irreversible.
• Actionable Data: These metrics are critical for investors and researchers to benchmark Monad against other high-performance L1s and L2s, providing a clear measure of its capabilities in a live environment.

Latency vs. Decentralization: Vitalik's Critique and Monad's Stance

Addressing Vitalik Buterin's concern that chasing low latency leads to centralization, Keone agrees that decentralization must be the "north star." He argues that Monad's 400ms block time hits a strategic balance: it is nearly imperceptible to human users while being slow enough to accommodate a globally distributed validator set, respecting the physical speed-of-light limitations of data transfer.

"My line is wherever there is a compromise on decentralization... it is literally impossible to have 100 millisecond block times while still preserving that property."

Monad's Approach to MEV

Keone identifies toxic MEV (Maximal Extractable Value)—such as front-running and sandwich attacks—as a critical industry problem. He suggests Monad's asynchronous execution model may naturally reduce some MEV opportunities, as block producers build on a slightly delayed state of the world. However, he believes the ultimate solution is pre-trade privacy, where transaction contents are encrypted until after a block is finalized, preventing malicious reordering.

Monolithic vs. Modular: Monad's Philosophy

Monad represents a strong bet on the integrated (or monolithic) blockchain design. Keone champions the value of a single, shared global state with atomic composability, where all applications interact seamlessly on one layer. This stands in contrast to the modular thesis of Ethereum and its L2s, where execution, data, and settlement are handled by separate, interconnected layers.

Decentralization at Launch: No Kill Switches

Keone confirms Monad will launch as a fully decentralized network with no admin keys, kill switches, or team-controlled multi-sigs. The system's integrity will be enforced entirely by its code and the consensus of its distributed validator set from day one.

The Launch Ecosystem and Tooling

Monad is engineered for full backward compatibility with the EVM. This ensures that essential developer tools, infrastructure, and wallets—including MetaMask, Chainlink, and major stablecoins—will work seamlessly at launch, lowering the barrier to entry for developers and users from the Ethereum ecosystem.

The MON Token and Coinbase Token Sale

Monad is the first project to launch on Coinbase's new token sale platform. Keone explains this decision was driven by a desire for broader and fairer token distribution compared to airdrops, which are often dominated by bots. He views it as a more mature launch process with stringent disclosures, fitting for a mainnet-ready project.

Tokenomics: Issuance, Staking, and Valuation

• Utility: The MON token is used for gas fees and securing the network through staking.
• Staking: In a unique design choice, locked insider tokens are ineligible for staking rewards. This directs the entirety of staking yield to publicly held tokens.
• Issuance: The network has a fixed issuance of 2 billion MON per year on a total supply of 100 billion, creating an initial inflation rate of ~2% that declines over time. This low rate is intended to minimize dilution for token holders who use their assets in DeFi instead of staking.

Monad vs. MegaETH: A Comparison

When compared to MegaETH, another high-performance EVM solution, Keone distinguishes Monad by its unwavering focus on low hardware requirements. While both aim for high throughput, he positions Monad as a chain for everyone to participate in, contrasting with what he suggests is MegaETH's reliance on high-end hardware, similar to the L2's approach of outsourcing decentralization to Ethereum.

The Vision for 2030 and Potential Failure Modes

• Success Scenario: By 2030, Monad powers breakout decentralized applications used globally, providing widespread access to competitive financial tools like dollar-based assets and yield markets.
• Failure Scenario: The primary risk is that the market ultimately decides it does not value the properties Monad champions—namely, the combination of high performance and deep decentralization within a single, integrated architecture.

Conclusion

Monad's launch tests the thesis that a re-engineered, parallelized EVM can deliver elite performance while upholding decentralization on consumer hardware. Investors should monitor its ability to attract liquidity and developers from both the modular L2 ecosystem and competing high-performance L1s to validate this integrated scaling approach.