Monad: The Rising Star Project Innovating the Layer 1 Competitive Landscape

In 2024, a star project valued at over $2 billion, Monad, emerged with the concept of "a high-performance blockchain fully compatible with EVM," attracting $225 million in financing. On February 19, 2025, Monad launched a public testnet covering 8.8 million Ethereum addresses, showcasing strong technical capabilities. This article will delve into Monad's technological innovations, testnet data, and market potential.

I. Technological Innovation: Building a High-Performance Moat from Four Dimensions

Monad, as a highly regarded Layer 1 blockchain project, achieves a performance leap through four major technological innovations, addressing the scalability bottleneck of the Ethereum network while maintaining EVM compatibility.

1. Monad BFT Consensus Mechanism

• Pipeline BFT: Parallelizing the traditional BFT's three phases, compressing block confirmation time to 0.8 seconds.
• Dynamic Validator Set: Initial 100 nodes, dynamically adjusted through reputation scoring.
• Anti-Witch Design: Introduce hardware fingerprint authentication to limit control rights of a single entity.

2. Execution Layer Revolution: The Multithreading of EVM

• Dependency Graph: Build a DAG to automatically identify parallel transaction packages
• Conflict resolution mechanism: Establish a "dispute buffer zone" to reduce 30% of redundant execution.
• Gas Optimizer: Restructures the Gas calculation model, saving 22% on fees for common DeFi contracts.

3. Storage Innovation: MonadDB State Database

• Three-tier storage architecture: mixed storage of memory, SSD, and HDD
• Status proof lightweight: Using zk-STARK to generate storage proofs, improving verification speed.

4. EVM Compatibility

• 100% support for the opcode and precompiled contracts after the Ethereum Shanghai upgrade.
• Innovate "state sharding pre-compilation" technology to reduce complex contract gas consumption
• Provides EVM+ developer toolkit, supports one-click migration of smart contracts

2. Testnet Data Reveals Monad's Potential

The launch of the 2025 testnet sets a milestone in the industry:

• Airdropped 8.8 million addresses in 30 minutes, peak TPS reached 5,200
• Processed 334 million RPC requests within 12 hours, with API response time stable at under 80ms.
• The integration degree of the developer toolchain reaches 92%, seamlessly connecting with mainstream frameworks.

3. Monad Market Competition and Ecological Potential

Monad draws on the experiences of mainstream public chains in its design, achieving high throughput and low latency through innovative algorithms and security upgrades while ensuring safety and decentralization. Its high performance and EVM compatibility make it suitable for various application scenarios, including DeFi, NFTs, blockchain games, and supply chain management.

4. Risk Assessment

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

Consensus Layer Challenge:

• Initial validator centralization risk
• The staking economic model has not yet been clarified.

Execution Layer Risks:

• The dependency detection for parallel trading needs further verification.
• EVM compatibility may lead to the re-emergence of historical vulnerabilities.

Storage Layer Test:

• The SSD data verification mechanism must guard against "false state proof" attacks.
• Data recovery has potential vulnerabilities

User Protection Recommendations:

• Prefer DApps that have undergone multiple audits.
• Disable production environment private keys during the testnet phase.
• Enable the wallet transaction dependency detection plugin
• Large transaction cooling period setting
• Be cautious when signing unverified contracts

V. Conclusion

The technological innovation of Monad reflects the shift in the blockchain industry from "single feature breakthroughs" to "system-level architectural innovations." It achieves significant performance improvements while maintaining the inheritance of the EVM ecosystem. However, the real challenges will arise after the mainnet launch, including the resistance of the BFT mechanism to attacks, boundary effects of parallel execution, and the reliability of storage verification.

The next 18 months will be a critical period for observing the development of Monad. Metrics such as pressure test data after the mainnet launch, the proportion of Ethereum protocol migration, and the distribution of validator nodes will become important criteria for evaluating its success or failure. Although Monad has a technical advantage, in the blockchain world, the ability to capture ecological value is the key factor that ultimately determines victory or defeat.