Ex-Jump Trading engineers raise $19 million for Monad blockchain

Founded by former Jump Trading developers, the startup Monad Labs raised $19 million in a funding round led by Dragonfly Capital.

Former employees of the TradFi giant @jumptrading founded a tech startup @monad_xyz, which raised $19 million in seed investment to create a new blockchain that addresses problems with existing Layer 1 protocols. Reports @congoserrehttps://t.co/MjuPOIfIWV

— CoinDesk (@CoinDesk) February 14, 2023

Among other investors are venture firms Placeholder Capital, Lemniscap, Shima Capital, as well as angel investors Naval Ravikant, Cobie, and Hasu. In total, the project has been backed by more than 70 market participants.

Monad is building an EVM-compatible layer-one blockchain designed to improve the entire Ethereum ecosystem.

“We are building a new Ethereum Virtual Machine from scratch. It will have high performance,” said co-founder James Hansaker.

The basis of the new blockchain will be the Proof-of-Stake algorithm. The project team promises that the system will be able to process 10,000 transactions per second.

The testnet and mainnet launches are expected to take place this year.

Over the next six months, Monad Labs plans to double its staff—from 12 to 24. Earlier in the autumn of last year, Mysten Labs, founded by former Meta employees, raised $300 million to build the Sui ecosystem and advance the blockchain.