Crypto Startup Monad Labs Aims to Create Next ‘Ethereum Killer’ After Raising $19M in Seed Round

Tech startup Monad Labs, founded by the former team from TradFi giant Jump Trading, raised $19 million in seed funding to develop a new blockchain that aims to improve the problems faced by current Layer 1 protocols.

The Monad blockchain will launch on a testnet in the coming months with mainnet deployment planned for later this year, according to a statement. The blockchain will use the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and will be Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible. As such, projects on Monad will be able to interact with the EVM software platform, where developers from many other blockchain projects are also creating interoperable decentralized applications on the Ethereum network.

“The Monad blockchain will set the industry standards for the speed, transparency, security and scalability that all Layer 1 protocols should have,” Keone Hon, co-founder and CEO of Monad Lab, said in the statement.

The financing round for Monad was led by crypto venture capital firm Dragonfly Capital with the participation of 70 other investors, including Placeholder Capital, Lemniscap, Shima Capital, Finality Capital, as well as angel investors in the digital asset space such as Naval Ravikant, Cobie, and Hasu, the statement said.

In just a few years, developers in the area have often been held back by high costs and low rewards on many Layer 1 blockchains. This in turn affects innovation and mass adoption of the decentralized applications (Dapps) by the developers.

Monad plans to address these issues through its new Layer 1 protocol, which it claims will be able to process a total of 10,000 transactions per second. To do so, Monad made some important changes to the consensus and execution layers – two main mechanisms in a blockchain.

“We redesigned the EVM execution system from the ground up to allow non-overlapping transactions to run in parallel,” said Eunice Giarta, co-founder and COO of Monad Labs. The team also rebuilt the integration system between the two mechanisms to allow the blockchain’s execution layer to run in parallel with consensus, she noted.

“Together, these improvements significantly improve system throughput, allowing the system to scale to many more users and applications,” Giarta added.

Ethereum, the original smart contract blockchain, still holds the majority of market share among Layer 1 projects. However, there have been several new blockchains – dubbed “Ethereum Killers” – looking to improve Ethereum’s processing time, fees and scalability. Some of the more popular Layer 1 blockchains include Cardano (ADA), Solana (SOL), Avalanche (AVAX), Algorand (ALGO), and Internet Computer (ICP).

As more traditional financial entities enter the space, the focus is increasingly turning to the scalability and speed of blockchains. Monad’s team seeks to capture this opportunity to build an improved version of the Layer 1 blockchain.

“With a founding team originating from Jump, Monad Labs understands the need for speed,” Chris Burniske, partner at Placeholder Capital, said in the statement. “The [Monad] team is in the midst of parallelizing EVM, creating a blockchain network and EVM environment that rivals the performance of traditional technology and finance,” he added.