Monad Denies Plagiarism Allegations of Aptos Code

James Hunsaker, co-founder of Monad, sharply responded to claims by Aptos’ Director of Research, Alexander Shpiegelman, regarding the alleged copying of Aptos’ open-source code.

optimistic concurrency control was discovered in 1979, before your parents met each other

software transactional memory (STM) I was working on in the Haskell context while you were still wearing diapers

BlockSTM is a trivial extension of these

I’ve never looked at any Aptos… https://t.co/cYtjO0F34y

— James (@_jhunsaker) February 19, 2025

On February 19, the public testnet of Monad was launched. According to statements from the EVM-compatible L1 platform team, the network processed 334 million RPC requests in the first 12 hours. The throughput reached 5000 TPS.

In April 2024, the project raised $225 million in a round led by Paradigm.

“I really don’t understand why Monad takes so long to copy Aptos technology. It’s all open source, and there are peer-reviewed articles for everything,” wrote Shpiegelman.

He sarcastically advised competitors to “stop trying to hide” the duplication and cited Movement as an example:

“They proudly copy and succeed.”

In comments, Shpiegelman clarified that he was referring to Monad developers reproducing certain technological solutions, including a modified BlockSTM execution mechanism from Aptos.

Hunsaker responded that the underlying method of optimistic concurrency control was discovered in 1979. He had also used software transactional memory (STM) decades ago in the context of the Haskell programming language.

“BlockSTM is their trivial extension. I’ve never looked at Aptos code. In fact, I never think about Aptos, except when you publish such nonsense,” stated the Monad co-founder.

Back in 2023, the Polygon Zero team accused the developers of the L2 network ZKsync Era — Matter Labs — of stealing the project’s code.