I'm really surprised at the number of crypto natives that have yet to even hear of Monad. These are people who are supposed to be at the forefront of web3 investment, and Monad's not a little thing! $244 million over the course of 18 months is hard to conceal.

The phrase "ETH killer" was flagrantly thrown around last cycle; none of the candidates technically fit the bill. They all introduced some weird consensus alternative and focused on performance without addressing the loss of decentralization. Whales and smart money kept their money on Ethereum, because as it turns out, the only people interested in low fees over decentralization are the poors.

So as the money's getting sucked out of Arbitrum, Avalanche & Polygon, what's left is getting spread over an endless wave of L2s (and L3s!) and garbage airdrop campaigns like Starknet, ZKSync, Blast, Linea & Scroll (Linea and Scroll will suck eggs, you heard it here first). Everybody's got a gimmick. Communities are there for money and leave as soon as it's been distributed.

Except Monad!

Although Monad has raised a quarter billion dollars, they are the first project this cycle to actually consider using that money to build instead of just figuring out some gimmick to (not) give it away, manipulate the tokenomics and larp a userbase long enough to barely get out at a 2X.

We've already talked about community in the previous article. Today's it's about the tech.

What is Monad building that is objectively better than Ethereum?

Ground Up Rebuidl

Monad's first critical breakthrough: 100% bytecode compatibility with the EVM. Ethereum projects can port themselves directly over to Monad without changing a single line of code. Unlike Pulsechain, Richard Heart's gimmicky copy of Ethereum's outermost shell, Monad rebuilds EVM structure from the ground up. 

This isn't to say that every project should just copyport. Contracts built to navigate Ethereum's capricious fees may benefit users if optimized to Monad's low-fee (<$0.001), high TPS (>10K) infrastructure. But Solidity coders won't need to learn any new programming language, greatly improving portability. As a result, major protocols like Pendle, Pancakeswap and Phantom are incorporated into the Monad ecosystem pre-testnet.

A Truly Faster EVM

Monad looks to do >3X on Solana's TPS with 1-second finality. More transactions and less lag means greater scalability. Monad accomplishes this primarily through pipelining and asynchronous I/O. 👈🏼👈🏼👈🏼 Links to official Monad docs on the subjects. 

Here's the "explain it to me like I'm five" breakdown:

• Pipelining — A goo goo gah gah.
• Asynchronous I/O — A goooo, yes you're a good wittle baby, yes you are!

Make sense now, Mr. 35 Year Old who always says "explain it to me like I'm 5"?

Great!

(Read the docs, du fauler Wichser.)

Bottom line: Monad's using that $250M to drill down into the 0s and 1s of EVM to build a new level of performance into Monad, not run around to conventions partying and pay $600k for animated logos on Coingecko (Polkadot). What's more: Neither pipelining nor asynchronous I/O match speed against decentralization. We get Solana's performance (higher, actually) without losing Ethereum's safety.

And that's a recipe for a major capital shift. Let's talk about why.

Decentralization

The Solana and L2 maxi poors really can't fathom this: Ethereum holds >90% of all crypto TVL primarily because of its superior decentralization. Bro, the big dogs aren't worried about doing a 50x on some idiotic memecoin or Ponzi yield farm. They don't care about shaving milliseconds off execution time to snipe $Doofuscoin ahead of your bot. They are more than happy to take a safe 15% on tens of millions while they dump last year's shitcoin seed rounds on your stupid little head. All that money gets rolled back into Ethereum for that safe 15% yield.

Hacks and chain downtime are what concern these whales. Both of those situations are far less likely to occur on Ethereum than on any other chain, because Ethereum is by far the most decentralized chain outside of Bitcoin.

Monad is the first L1 to provide a bleeding edge performant blockchain without sacrificing decentralization. Node placement is set to be global from day 1 of testnet, as the Monad community includes hundreds of thousands of organic community members from every major crypto country in the world. So you get the decentralization whales love with the execution degens love.

I predict Monad starts eating away at ETH's TVL domination on Day 1 Mainnet.

Mindshare

Monad doesn't have any silly airdrop gimmicks going on — just 300k on Twitter and 300k in Discord producing real content and real conversations that will lead to real mindshare once testnet goes live. The quality of projects already partnered with Monad is mindblowing for a pre-testnet chain, and this list isn't even comprehensive. 

We know 100% that Pancakeswap will be on Monad day 1. Wormhole gave a substantial portion of its $W airdrop to Monad power users a few weeks back, so that's a no-brainer as well. 100% bytecode compatibility with the EVM ensures that established Ethereum projects will make their way to Monad sooner rather than later.

But that's not even the good stuff. You need to know about the stuff that doesn't have tokens yet so you can get in on that Monad ecosystem as a reflexive play on $MONAD itself. 

I have it on good authority that Monad will be playing host to a next-level aggregator platform that will streamline EVM defi like never before, taking full advantage of the Monad's unique ground up rebuidl, speed, decentralization and mindshare characteristics. Details are not in place fully, so stay tuned. This will be big.

One of that project's first partners should be the official-unofficial DEX, which has already secured a grant from Monad Labs. More on this soon; got to confirm a few things, like I said.

What I can tell you: Monad ecosystem cornerstones are being ensconced as we speak, and some of them are already open secrets. MonadPad will be the first launchpad on Monad, it's already raised millions to this end, and you should probably get in their Discord for tips on Monad projects further down the pipeline. We're looking at Poply as the go-to NFT marketplace; it's got first-mover advantage in tech and Monad core community integration.

This is where crypto turns around. Watch this space.

 Follow me on Twitter ❗️This project may save the 2024 cycle.