Monad: The Blockchain Rising Star to Watch in 2024

In 2024, a blockchain project named Monad attracted widespread attention in the industry. The project is positioned as a "high-performance blockchain fully compatible with EVM" and has secured $225 million in funding, with a valuation exceeding $2 billion. Monad's public testnet launched on February 19, 2025, covering 8.8 million Ethereum addresses, showcasing strong technological capabilities. This article will delve into Monad's technological innovations, testnet data, and market competitiveness.

1. Technological Innovation: Building High-Performance Advantages from Four Dimensions

Monad aims to achieve a performance leap through four major technological innovations, addressing the scalability issues of the Ethereum network while maintaining EVM compatibility.

1. Monad BFT Consensus Mechanism

• Adopt a BFT consensus mechanism based on the HotStuff algorithm
• Pipeline BFT: Parallelizing the three stages of traditional BFT, compressing block confirmation time to 0.8 seconds.
• Dynamic Validator Set: Initially 100 nodes, dynamically adjusted through reputation scoring.
• Anti-witch design: Introduces hardware fingerprint authentication to limit single entity control.

2. Execution Layer Revolution

• Dependency Graph: Build a DAG to automatically identify parallel transaction bundles
• Conflict resolution mechanism: establish a "dispute buffer zone" to handle conflicting transactions
• Gas Optimizer: Reconstructing the Gas computation model for parallel environments

3. Storage Innovation

• Innovative MonadDB state database, using SSD-HDD hybrid storage solution
• Three-tier storage architecture: Memory, SSD, and HDD store different types of data respectively.
• Status proof lightweight: using zk-STARK to generate storage proof

4. EVM Compatibility

• Fully support the opcode and precompiled contracts after the Ethereum Shanghai upgrade
• Innovative "state sharding precompiled" technology, reducing Gas consumption for complex contracts.
• Provides EVM+ developer suite, supporting one-click migration of smart contracts.

II. Testnet Data Reveals Monad's Potential

The launch of Monad's testnet has set multiple industry milestones:

• Completed an airdrop of 8.8 million addresses within 30 minutes, with a peak TPS of 5,200.
• 334 million RPC requests processed within 12 hours, API response time stabilized within 80ms.
• The integration level of the developer toolchain reaches 92%, seamlessly connecting with mainstream frameworks.

3. Market Competition and Ecological Potential

Monad is designed by drawing on the experiences of mainstream blockchains, aiming to balance security, decentralization, and high performance. Its high performance and EVM compatibility make it suitable for various application scenarios, including decentralized finance ( DeFi ), non-fungible tokens ( NFT ), blockchain gaming, and supply chain management.

4. Security Considerations

Although Monad demonstrates strong technical capabilities, there are still some potential security risks:

Consensus Layer Challenges

• Initial Validator Set Centralization Risk
• The staking economic model has not been clearly defined, and there may be a witch attack vulnerability.

Execution Layer Risks

• Parallel transaction dependency detection needs further verification.
• EVM compatibility may lead to the re-emergence of historical vulnerabilities

Storage Layer Test

• SSD data verification mechanism needs to guard against "false state proof" attacks
• There is a small probability of state loss risk when the node is restarted.

User Protection Recommendations

• Prefer DApps that have undergone multiple audits
• Avoid using production environment private keys during the testnet phase.
• Enable wallet transaction dependency detection feature
• Large transaction cooling period
• Treat unverified contracts with caution

V. Conclusion

The technological innovation of Monad reflects how the blockchain industry is shifting from singular feature breakthroughs to system-level architectural innovation. While maintaining the inheritability of the EVM ecosystem, it has achieved significant performance improvements. However, the real challenges will arise after the mainnet launch, including tests of attack resistance, execution efficiency, and storage reliability.

The next 18 months will be a critical period to observe the development of Monad. Metrics such as the pressure test data after the mainnet launch, the migration ratio of mainstream Ethereum protocols, and the distribution of validator nodes will become important references for evaluating its success or failure. Although Monad has a technical advantage, the ultimate competition in the blockchain world still lies in the ability to capture ecological value.