Monad Labs, led by Keone Hon, leverages high-frequency trading (HFT) expertise to revolutionize Ethereum scalability.
Monad Labs, led by Keone Hon, leverages high-frequency trading (HFT) expertise to revolutionize Ethereum scalability. Here’s why its layer-1 chain Monad is so heavily hyped and shaping up to have one of the biggest launches in 2025.
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Introduction
Monad, founded in April 2022, is one of the most promising new blockchains out there right now, thanks to its strong team and powerful technical prowess, which has been backed by a massive $225 million funding raise.
Monad labels itself as the “most performant” EVM-compatible blockchain, and with good reason. It is expected to be a major force in 2025 once it launches its mainnet in Q1 if all goes to plan.
Monad (which means “a single, indivisible unit”) is a powerful layer-1 chain that can achieve 10,000 TPS, 1-second block times, and a single-slot finality without the need for expensive hardware.
How? Well, the simple answer is that it uses frontline blockchain technology like parallelization and asynchronous execution, as well as a unique consensus mechanism called Monad BFT which uses a combination of optimistic responsiveness and linear communication. If that doesn’t work, when 33+1% of nodes can’t reach consensus, a fail-safe kicks in through quadratic computation.
Got it? Didn’t think so! Yes, it’s a mouthful for the non-techies among us, so during Token2049 Singapore, I sat down with co-founder Keone Hon from Monad Labs to learn more about him, what makes Monad tick, the problems they’re solving, and why their expected mainnet launch in 2025 is expected to be one of the biggest events of next year.
What is your background in the financial industry?
Keone: I've been working in the financial industry for about 12-13 years now. The first decade of my career was spent in high-frequency trading (HFT) as a quantitative analyst, or quant. High-frequency trading is a unique environment where small teams build their own trading systems from scratch and compete against each other for performance.
Most of my career was spent in New York, with about two years in Chicago. I spent eight years at Jump Trading, primarily working in traditional markets. However, in 2020, our team expanded into cryptocurrency trading. By 2021, we had merged into the broader Jump Crypto team and established a new sub-team focused on Random Number Generation (RNG), specifically within the Solana ecosystem.
I was part of a team of around 10 people, which created a really exciting and dynamic work environment. In this setting, we had control over the entire technology stack, which allowed us to focus intensely on maximizing the system's performance. The industry is incredibly competitive and efficient. To give you an idea of the speed we're talking about, we needed to make trading decisions in less than a microsecond after receiving market data packets.
Why did you move from high-frequency trading to blockchain technology?
Keone: After spending about six months with Jump Crypto, I left to co-found Monad in early 2022. During my time at Jump Crypto, I gained a deeper understanding of the blockchain landscape, particularly in Solana and Ethereum.
What became clear to me was that while there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), it was widely perceived as inherently inefficient. This presented a significant opportunity to enhance the EVM's performance.
At the end of the day, almost all capital on-chain, over 95% of all TVL, is in EVM smart contracts. There's a substantial network effect, so many libraries, so many existing apps, but the EVM itself is just really not performant right now due to different architectural decisions that can be improved upon.
So myself and two other co-founders started Monad in the beginning of 2022 with a focus on introducing parallel execution, high-performance database, asynchronous execution, and an ultra-performing consensus mechanism to deliver multiple architectural improvements stacked on top of each other.
What is Monad, and what problem is it trying to solve?
Keone: Monad Labs is a U.S.-based software development company, and I think there are a lot of benefits to being in New York, in the city with so much talent. You know, good startup culture.
Monad is our blockchain project that primarily focuses on addressing the scalability issues faced by Ethereum and other EVM-compatible blockchains.
To put the problem into perspective, Ethereum can process about a million transactions per day, which is a very low number, considering that the purpose of Ethereum is to be the world computer where everyone can submit their transactions and have them processed through this distributed, global network. We need much more performance than a million transactions per day, even to support a single app that hits mass user adoption with a million to 10 million DAUs.
How is Monad approaching this scalability problem?
Keone: Monad is implementing several architectural improvements to address these scalability issues:
1. Parallel Execution: We're transitioning the EVM from single-threaded to multithreaded computation. This allows multiple transactions to be processed simultaneously, significantly increasing throughput.
2. High-Performance Database: We're addressing what's known as the "state access problem" in cryptocurrency, which is actually the biggest bottleneck for execution in many blockchain systems.
3. Asynchronous Execution: We're separating consensus and execution into different "swim lanes," allowing them to operate independently rather than being interleaved as they are in most current blockchain architectures.
4. Ultra-Performing Consensus Mechanism: We've developed a consensus mechanism called Monad BFT, which uses linear communication rather than quadratic communication, allowing it to scale much more efficiently as the network grows.
Why has parallel chain technology (eg. Celestia and Sei) been heavily hyped this year?
Keone: I think one of the reasons why parallel execution became really popular six months or so ago is that that was when we were completing our fundraise. Inherently, the discourse tends to bias toward whatever is going on in the private markets. But at the end of the day, I think there will be a renewed interest when Monad mainnet goes live and significant performance improvements are delivered.
Monad has been working on several architectural improvements, including parallel execution, since 2022. It takes time to build a really performant system, but Monad is building for what we think is needed to address the scaling problems, rather than purely building for a narrative.
Can you elaborate on the benefits of asynchronous execution?
Keone: The best analogy I like to use is from the movie "Limitless," where the protagonist takes a pill that allows him to use 100% of his brain instead of the 10%. In most current blockchain architectures, execution is interleaved with consensus, which means that only a small fraction of the total block time is actually available for executing transactions.
For example, in Ethereum, which has 12-second blocks, the budget for execution is only about 100 milliseconds—that's just 1% of the total block time. The rest is consumed by consensus. By separating execution and consensus, we can dramatically increase the time available for transaction processing, effectively allowing the blockchain to use much more of its potential "brain power."
How does Monad's consensus mechanism differ from others?
Keone: Monad EFT, our consensus mechanism, uses what we call linear communication. This means that there's direct communication between the leader node (the one proposing a new block) and all other nodes participating in consensus.
This is in contrast to mechanisms like Tendermint, which use quadratic communication where every node has to communicate with every other node. The problem with quadratic communication is that as the network grows, the number of messages that need to be sent grows exponentially, which can quickly overwhelm the network.
With linear communication, the network can scale to many more nodes without this communication overhead, allowing for greater decentralization without sacrificing performance.
What were the biggest challenges in building Monad?
Keone: Like with any startup, a lot of the challenges revolve around learning to be really efficient, communicating well, setting clear expectations within the team, hiring the right people, and being able to correct course quickly when we make mistakes.
But I have to say, we feel incredibly supported by our community. Their enthusiasm really puts the wind in our sails and is now helping a lot of individual builders within the Monad ecosystem to gain momentum.
Monad has a strong community. How did you approach building it?
Keone: I think there's a temptation to take shortcuts and use questing platforms, or give homework assignments for community members like "write a thread about why X is so great," and then you just end up with a whole bunch of low-quality threads. Asking the community to do work that is not actually very valuable creates a huge problem in terms of expectations and frustration.
Our strong community is the result of individual community members who have contributed greatly and set high standards. From our side, we've focused on discouraging behaviors that don't add real value, like farming (accumulating tokens or rewards through minimal effort) or using bots. Instead, we've tried to create an environment where real people can make meaningful contributions.
Tell us about Monad’s support around the globe.
Keone: We've been fortunate to see strong regional communities develop in many areas. For example, we have active communities in Indonesia, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Turkey, and many other places. Each of these regional groups brings its own energy and perspective to the project. The French community is really small and tight-knit, but really passionate. The Nigerian community is very much a force of nature, a couple thousand strong. Shoutout to all these Monad communities, you’re very much appreciated.
We've also prioritized in-person meetups when possible. For instance, we had an amazing community meetup in Bali with about 300 people, and another in Istanbul with around 70 attendees. These events, often aligned with conferences but sometimes standalone, help to strengthen the bonds within the community.
What's your vision for Monad in the coming years?
Keone: We want Monad to be a significant research-based contributor to Ethereum scaling research. We aim for Monad Labs to contribute through Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) and other forms of participation in the broader Ethereum community.
Our goal isn't just to build a separate, faster blockchain, but to advance the entire ecosystem. We believe that by pushing the boundaries of what's possible with EVM-compatible systems, we can help drive innovation across the entire space.
Any predictions for trends in the blockchain space over the next year?
Keone: I think there's still a strong desire for novel applications in the crypto space. Teams that are very focused on user acquisition and delivering great user experiences will gain a lot of momentum and recognition.
We're already seeing this with projects like Polymarket, which is having its moment in the sun right now. I think we'll see an environment that's increasingly friendly to application builders, partly because the community is really hungry for exciting new use cases for blockchain technology.
Overall, I'm optimistic about the potential for innovation in the space, particularly as we and others work to solve the fundamental scalability issues that have been holding back mass adoption of blockchain technology.
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