Original - Odaily

Author - Azuma

Monad, the much-anticipated upstart on the Layer 1 circuit, is really coming.

Earlier this month, Monad, which specializes in Parallel EVM, announced that it would soon launch an internal test network. Immediately afterwards, Monad officials also disclosed the configuration requirements for the networks full nodes on the X platform.

Jump’s predecessor’s “brain” expansion ideals

In April 2022, Keone Hon, the head of research at market-making giant Jump Trading, announced his resignation and founded Monad. Different from the mainstream Layer 2 expansion strategy on the market, Monads vision is to achieve large-scale improvements in a single layer of Layer 1 through parallel processing EVM execution efficiency, thereby unlocking the potential of the EVM ecosystem.

In Keones view, thanks to Ethereums sufficient user education, EVM has almost become the standard choice like Javascript in the web2 world. However, there are certain problems with the current expansion path taken by Ethereum, Layer1 + Layer2 The layering strategy will cause the blockchain to be divided into independent execution environments, thus destroying the composability of the chain. Therefore, it is necessary to build an underlying network with higher performance.

Keones estimate at the time was that Monads performance could reach more than 1,000 times that of Ethereum and could host more complex application types, thereby achieving wider adoption.

In February 2023, Monad announced the completion of US$19 million in financing, led by Dragonfly Capital, with participation from Placeholder Capital, Lemniscap, Shima Capital, Finality Capital, Naval Ravikant, Cobie, Hasu, etc.

In December 2023, Georgios Konstantopoulos, chief technology officer of leading VC Paradigm, spoke highly of the prospects of parallel EVM. Georgios believed that 2024 would be the year of the parallel EVM concept, and listed The representative project was the first to mention Monad, which has been working on this concept for the longest time.

How to understand parallel EVM?

Parallel EVM is essentially a reform of the transaction execution sequence in the EVM environment.

In a classic EVM environment, each transaction is executed in sequence (the most intuitive example: when a user submits multiple transactions, the later-submitted transactions will only start to be processed after the first-submitted transaction is confirmed). We can tentatively call this execution mechanism single-row EVM.

The design of single-row EVM ensures that transactions and smart contracts can be executed in a deterministic order, making it easier to manage and predict the status of the blockchain. This helps ensure the security of the network, but it also limits the transaction execution of the network. Efficiency limits the operable space for capacity expansion on a single layer of Layer 1.

The parallel EVM proposed by Monad hopes to break this shackles. This mechanism will partition or group all the transactions to be executed, and then rely on the scheduling algorithm to effectively manage the synchronization processing of each zone or each group of transactions. Its ultimate goal is Allows multiple independent transactions to be executed in parallel, thereby greatly improving transaction execution efficiency at a single layer of Layer 1.

Monad officials have given many vivid examples of the difference between parallel EVM and single-line EVM, such as the laundry case in the picture below.

Suppose someone has four piles of clothes to wash. Each pile of laundry needs to go through four steps from being thrown into the washing machine to being put into the closet: washing clothes, drying, folding, and storing.

Under the single row EVM mechanism, since each operation (corresponding to each transaction) needs to be executed in sequence, four piles of clothes must go through four steps in sequence, requiring a total of 16 time units.

Under the parallel EVM mechanism, since each independent operation (corresponding to each independent transaction) can be executed simultaneously, when a certain pile of clothes enters the next operation, the next pile of clothes can immediately enter the previous operation, and the total only needs 7 time units, the performance is more than doubled.

Another marketing genius?

Different from some teams with relatively rigorous styles, the Monad team has always been very down-to-earth or magic in its marketing strategies.

Every morning, the Monad team will publish gmonad (Monad community exclusive gm) on the X platform in different ways.

The team also held a meme contest on X to collect various magical emoticons about Monad from the community. This contest is currently in its 17th week. If you encounter some weird purple animals on X, then there is a high probability that the Monad community is conducting spiritual transmission.

This marketing style is hard not to remind people of Solana, who is also proficient in meme communication strategies and has attracted a large number of highly loyal community users.

Considering that Monad, like Solana, is a believer in Layer 1 single-layer expansion, whether it can replicate the legendary development path of its predecessors is also a unique expectation of the Monad community.

Token information interaction strategy

Regarding Monad’s future tokens, officials have not disclosed much yet.

In September 2023, Monad briefly released the technical documentation of its upcoming PoS chain, which also mentioned that its native token will be named MON and can be used to pay gas fees on the Monad chain, but this part of the information was not released soon. and was removed from the document.

Since Monad has not been launched on the mainnet or testnet yet, there is actually not much interactable content for ordinary users. It is recommended that users who intend to ambush join the official Discord channel as soon as possible and wait for relevant developments on the testnet.

At the end of last year, Keone stated on the X platform that nearly 60 projects have been confirmed to be built based on Monad. It is expected that when the testnet is launched, a batch of projects will be logged in simultaneously for user interaction.

It is worth mentioning that there are currently a large number of phishing fake accounts under the social media updates related to Monad. Monad officials have also issued risk warnings many times (for example, users will never be asked to connect their wallets for the time being). Please remember to stay vigilant.