Key Takeaways:
- Monad Testnet is Live – As of Q1 2025, the Monad public testnet is operational, allowing developers and users to explore its capabilities.
- High-Performance EVM-Compatible Blockchain – Monad integrates parallel execution, significantly increasing transaction speeds (10,000 TPS) compared to Ethereum and Binance Chain, while maintaining full Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility for seamless app migration.
- Strong Community & Major Funding – Monad has built a passionate online community, leveraging 𝕏 and Discord to drive engagement. Backed by $225M in Series A funding, Monad is positioning itself as a high-performance alternative to Ethereum.
By now, you’ve likely come across Monad, the high-performance blockchain making waves in the crypto space.
At its core, Monad reengineers blockchain technology for speed and efficiency, delivering faster, more reliable transactions—an essential upgrade for enterprise applications and financial services.
In this guide, we’ll break down Monad’s origins, its cutting-edge tech, and why it matters.
What is Monad?
Monad is a next-generation Layer 1 blockchain designed to be fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)—the core software that powers Ethereum and all networks built on it. This compatibility allows developers to seamlessly deploy existing Ethereum smart contracts and applications on Monad without any modifications, eliminating interoperability barriers and simplifying migration.
However, Monad isn't just another EVM-compatible chain. It is being rebuilt from the ground up to overcome the scalability, performance, and cost limitations that have plagued Ethereum. While Ethereum processes around 10 transactions per second (TPS) and the fastest EVM chain, Binance Chain, manages approximately 200 TPS, these figures pale in comparison to networks like Solana, which utilizes parallel execution for dramatically higher throughput.
Monad supports 10,000 transactions per second, significantly increasing throughput capabilities and opening doors for distributed applications--even those with greater complexity and higher usage--to run in a decentralized manner.
Monad
The key bottleneck for traditional EVM chains is sequential execution, which slows down transaction processing. Monad Labs is taking inspiration from Solana, integrating parallel execution to unlock vastly improved transaction speeds. This innovation aims to make high-performance, consumer-grade decentralized applications (dApps) a reality, bringing the power of Ethereum’s ecosystem into a faster, more scalable environment.
Can I buy Monad crypto?
We know this is the main question on your mind. At this time you can only claim MON Test Tokens through the following faucets. Be aware that due to high demand the main faucet may experience latency.
- Main faucet
- Gas.zip: Requires several transactions to be conducted.
- ThirdWeb: Offers small claims every 24 hours.
- OKX: Another source for obtaining test tokens.
- Haha Wallet Discord: Engage with the community for token claims.
- Owlto: Provides additional options for acquiring tokens.
Monad origin story
Monad is the brainchild of Keone Hon, James Hunsaker and Eunice Giarta (CEO, CTO and COO respectively). Both Keone Hon and James Hunsaker left longtime technical roles at Jump Trading/Jump Crypto to focus on building their 'Ethereum killer' blockchain, Monad. Eunice Garta operated as a product manager in the trad tech world before aligning with crypto.
Building of the new L1 blockchain officially kicked off in February 2022 and the team has at least 30+ disclosed members working full time on the engineering end.
Together, we are solving the unsolved and building towards a more performant future in blockchain technology.
Monad Labs Team
Monad milestones
Although New York City headquartered Monad began building in February 2022, the world was largely introduced to Monad (Monad Labs) on the back of a $19M investment round announcement in February 2023.
70+ backers including Dragonfly Capital, Placeholder Capital and Lemniscap aligned with the Monad mission to build an EVM-compatible lightning fast blockchain.
More recently Monad announced a Series A investment round which secured another $225M.
- February 2022 | Monad is founded
- February 2023 | Monad raises $19M in seed round
- September 2023 | Monad releases technical documents
- Q2 2024 | Monad closed testnet launch
- April 2024 | Monad raises $225M in Series A round
- February 2025 | Monad public testnet launch
- TBD | Monad Mainnet launch
Monad Community: Nads on Top
A strong online community is a key asset in any go-to-market strategy, and Monad Labs is executing this playbook to perfection. By leveraging platforms like 𝕏 and Discord, the team is fostering deep engagement, real-time feedback, and organic growth—creating a vibrant ecosystem of developers and users.
Monad has embraced meme culture as one of the most important pillars to scale a web3 business. They have hired a team of personalities focused solely on creating an interconnected community who believe in the Monad mission.
Meme after meme, Monad Monday after Monad Monday, we grew as a community, and waited patiently for the smallest whiff of an update from the engineering team. And then we watched protocols begin to take notice, and new projects joined the ecosystem; slowly at first, and now all at once.
It goes beyond a parallelized EVM, beyond the promise of a globally scalable EVM chain. It goes beyond the legendary memes and lore, into the heart of crypto twitter, where the infectious community vibes are now starting to fully take over.
Danny Pipelines (Ecosystem Growth at Monad)
These efforts have fueled one of the most passionate developer ecosystems in crypto, driving excitement across 𝕏 and beyond. As anticipation builds for Monad’s mainnet, the community—aka "Nads"—is proving to be a force multiplier for adoption and growth.
How does Monad work?
Monad operates in a similar fashion to Ethereum. You will be able to interact with the new blockchain using established Ethereum wallets, explorers, etc.
Once Monad is live, developers will be able to port existing Ethereum apps to Monad and users will be able to interact with those dApps.
Monad has focused on four major areas of improvement to scale EVM blockchain transactions:
- MonadBFT
- Deferred Execution
- Parallel Execution
- MonadDb
MonadBFT
MonadBFT is the consensus mechanism which ensures the integrity of the blockchain by validating transactions and synchronizing validator nodes.
It's framework allows the consensus mechanism to quickly verify transactions even if it detects faulty or malicious validator nodes.
MonadBFT is a high-performance consensus mechanism for achieving agreement about the transaction ordering under partially synchronous conditions in the presence of Byzantine actors.
It is a derivative of HotStuff with the improvement proposed in Jolteon/DiemBFT/Fast-HotStuff which is the reduction from three rounds to two rounds by utilizing quadratic communication complexity in the event of leader timeout.
MonadBFT Docs
Deferred execution & parallel execution
The Monad BFT consensus mechanism operates differently than established blockchain practices by "decoupling" the execution from consensus. With Monad, nodes reach agreement about transactions without a validating node executing the transaction.
The leader proposes an ordering without yet knowing the resultant state root, and the validating nodes vote on block validity without knowing (for example) whether all of the transactions in the block execute without reverting.
Monad Docs
Monad removes the requirement that nodes execute prior to consensus.
They call this "optimistic execution" meaning that Monad will begin to execute transactions before earlier transactions in the block have been completed.
MonadDb (Monad Database)
Monad departs from traditional Ethereum platforms with their parallel execution architecture. This design requires brief storage of data points when there is a delay between transactions being read and the operation completing. Simply put, MonadDb is a bespoke database used for storing blockchain state with simultaneous support for input and output data.
When one transaction needs to read state from disk, one should not block waiting for that operation to complete - instead one should initiate the read and then start working on another transaction in the meantime.
Therefore the problem needs asynchronous i/o (async i/o) for the database. The above mentioned key-value databases lack proper async i/o support (although there are some efforts to improve in this area).
MonadDb fully utilizes the latest kernel support for async i/o (on Linux this is io_uring). This avoids needing to spawn a large number of kernel threads to handle pending i/o requests in an attempt to perform work asynchronously.
Monad Docs
How To Run A Monad Validator Node
The requirements to run a Monad validator node are estimated to be:
- CPU: 16 core CPU
- Memory: 32 GB RAM
- Storage: 2 TB NVMe SSD
- Bandwidth: 100 Mb/s
The hardware requirements to operate a Monad validator node are relatively inexpensive and convenient to acquire (e.g. many off the shelf computers from big box stores exceed these specifications).
Although the Monad Testnet is up and running, they have not released the infrastructure needed for individuals to set up and operate validator nodes.
Has Monad crypto launched?
As of February 19th, 2025 Monad public testnet is live. There is currently no date set for mainnet launch.
How to get started with Monad using Backpack
To stay ahead and be ready for all the action, download the Backpack wallet extension or app today, explore the Monad testnet ecosystem and ensure you don’t miss a beat when Monad goes live.
Learn more about Backpack
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