Monad Raises $19M to Build the Fundamentally Optimized EVM
Today, Monad Labs is announcing our $19M seed round, led by Dragonfly Capital and with participation from Lemniscap, Placeholder, Shima Capital, Finality Capital, and Credibly Neutral, as well as over 70 angels, including Cobie, Hasu, 0xMaki, and a number of other leaders in the space.
This round of funding, which closed in December 2022, reflects our backers’ strong conviction in our team, our technology, and our mission of helping decentralization scale by fundamentally optimizing the EVM.
We’ll use this funding to expand our growing team of engineers, researchers, and ecosystem builders as we prepare for testnet and mainnet launches later this year.
Fundamentally optimizing the EVM
Monad Labs is fundamentally optimizing the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) so that decentralized apps reach everyday adoption. We are building Monad, a new EVM-equivalent layer-1 blockchain with foundational improvements to both consensus and execution that enable 10,000 transactions per second, i.e. 1 billion transactions per day.
Monad’s fundamental improvements enable exceptionally high throughput and low fees while preserving support for existing Ethereum smart contracts and infrastructure.
Core to Monad’s improvements are pipelined and asynchronous execution, which enable intelligent scheduling and parallel execution of transactions, and which greatly expand the computational budget by de-interleaving execution from consensus.
Monad also features an ultra-efficient consensus mechanism that is a variant of tendermint, as well as other optimizations that directly tackle existing bottlenecks in state machine replication.
Our team’s background in high-frequency trading and kernel development has given us a unique edge in developing these improvements. We look forward to sharing these with you later this year through our upcoming testnets and mainnet.
Our mission is to help decentralization scale by helping EVM scale
The Ethereum ecosystem is incredibly powerful due to its vibrant community and deep commitment to decentralization. Ethereum has most of the smart contract developers, libraries, and tooling. In DeFi, EVM is dominant, accounting for over 97% of all TVL in crypto. Moreover, much of the applied cryptography research in the space is done in the context of EVM.
There’s a lot to love about Ethereum and the EVM, and we’ve made it our mission to help make the Ethereum ecosystem more powerful and impactful by helping it scale.
The future is bright for decentralized computation. Composability in decentralized apps allows developers to stand on the shoulders of giants by reusing existing functionality. This enables rapid innovation, which is how decentralized solutions will win against centralized solutions.
Decentralization is a powerful force, but the extremely high cost of computation relative to centralized solutions imposes severe limitations on what can be built. What’s needed is an extremely efficient, extremely low cost system that reduces friction for users and developers while preserving support for all the work that’s already been done. Monad is addressing this urgent need.
Come build on Monad
In the coming months, we will release our first public testnet. What will follow is a series of testnets to harden the network, grow the validator community, and progressively test new features before mainnet launch. If you’re a builder, let’s chat!
Monad enables apps that could not be built anywhere else. If you’re a builder with ambitious plans, we would love to partner with you and see how we can support you in your goals. Please reach out at hello@monad.xyz, or DM Eunice or Keone on twitter.
Join our community
We’re extremely grateful for the support of our early community of EVM enthusiasts. If you share our vision of helping decentralization scale, please join the community:
We’re hiring
We’re also hiring across all departments.
