Monad Labs is announcing their $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 their backers’ strong conviction in our team, our technology, and our mission of helping decentralization scale by fundamentally optimizing the EVM.”
Monad will use the proceeds from the investment round “to expand their growing team of engineers, researchers, and ecosystem builders as they prepare for testnet and mainnet launches later this year.”
Monad Labs is “fundamentally optimizing the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) so that decentralized apps reach everyday adoption.”
They 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.”
Their team’s background “in high-frequency trading and kernel development has given us a unique edge in developing these improvements.” They look forward “to sharing these with you later this year through our upcoming testnets and mainnet.”
Their 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 they’ve made it their 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.”
The team concluded:
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.”