Monad Labs has successfully closed a $225 million funding round to develop a competitor to Solana and Ethereum, as reported by Fortune.
Paradigm led the investment, with participation from Electric Capital and Greenoaks. In February, the project attracted $19 million from Dragonfly Capital, Placeholder Capital, Lemniscap, Shima Capital, and several angel investors.
Monad’s founder, Keone Hon, who spent eight years at Jump Trading, stated that the project’s innovations are based on rebuilding the Ethereum blockchain from scratch. The EVM-compatible protocol aims to speed up transaction execution and reduce user costs.
“It’s been about two years since development began. While much of the research community focused on data availability and other scaling directions, Monad has primarily delved into pure execution,” Hon added.
The project’s founder highlighted the need for a high-performance blockchain. However, for unclear reasons, no one is currently creating such a platform, he noted.
Monad fully supports EVM bytecode—a standard many developers use when creating decentralized applications. Hon described the technology as the equivalent of JavaScript for Web3. It is used in Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, BNB Chain, and Optimism:
“Anyone who has created an application for any of these blockchains will be able to port it to Monad without any changes.”
The project team plans to launch the mainnet by the end of the year, with a test network expected in the coming months. Hon also mentioned the potential launch of a native token.
“If we want the scale of an exchange like Nasdaq or CME to be possible on the blockchain, we need a much more performant protocol than those that exist now,” emphasized Monad’s founder.
Earlier, developers of the L1 blockchain Berachain, focused on DeFi, raised $69 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion.
In the first quarter, investment in crypto startups increased by 38% to $2 billion, breaking a two-year downward trend.