Monad Labs, the team supporting the high-performance Monad blockchain, announced the closing of a $19 million seed funding round led by Dragonfly Capital. The round saw additional participation from 70 investors, including Placeholder Capital, Lemniscap, Shima Capital, Finality Capital, as well as notable angel investors in the space such as Naval Ravikant, Cobie, and Hasu – amongst others.
Founded in 2022, Monad Labs is an early-stage, venture-backed tech startup, whose team brings with them over seven years of experience in building low-latency, high-frequency-trading systems at Jump Trading. Currently, the growth of decentralized finance (DeFi) on Ethereum-compatible platforms is hampered by the inefficiency of existing Layer1 protocols, which offer limited throughput at a high cost. These factors limit the functionality of decentralized applications (Dapps) and make it difficult for them to scale for mass adoption. Monad Labs addresses all these issues through its Monad blockchain, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible Layer1 smart contract platform designed to provide many multiples of the throughput offered by Ethereum.
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“Monad Labs is building the smart contract platform with the performance needed to truly unlock the transformative power of decentralized computation,” said Keone Hon, Co-Founder & CEO of Monad Labs. “The Monad blockchain will set the industry standards for the speed, transparency, security and scalability that all Layer1 protocols should have, and its true impact will be felt across both the Web2 and Web3 ecosystems. This successful seed round demonstrates the need for Monad in the marketplace and the shared commitment from all to advance the industry. We are excited to work alongside our investors to bring Monad to market, build out its capabilities and show the world exactly what blockchains can do.”
Through this investment, Monad Labs will be able to further its commitment to building the next level of Layer1 smart contract platforms with Monad. The Monad blockchain operates on a Proof of Stake consensus protocol and, by design, is set to process a total of 10,000 transactions per second. Monad achieves this by making several key improvements to the EVM standard including parallel and asynchronous execution of transactions.
James Hunsaker, Co-Founder & CTO of Monad Labs, added, “The capabilities of any Dapp are in part determined by the power of the blockchain on which it is built. The high cost of computation on existing blockchains significantly limits what can be built on-chain, and forces developers to choose between security and computation efficiency, ultimately leading to security issues. At Monad Labs we are creating a blockchain that addresses these issues, creating the potential for rapid innovation in the decentralized landscape.”
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Monad offers a high-performance environment that empowers developers to build the next level of highly complex and scalable Dapps. Monad is compatible with all other EVM-based smart contracts and will be going live on a testnet in the coming months with the mainnet launch occurring later this year.
Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly Capital, commented on the raise: “We’re excited to lead Monad’s seed round. Monad is a truly unique and exciting project that will have the level of throughput needed for wide-scale adoption of decentralized finance. Keone and James have the subject matter expertise and technical skills needed to deliver on a high-throughput Layer1 blockchain that will set new standards for how blockchains will operate moving forward.”
Chris Burniske, Partner at Placeholder Capital, commented on the raise: “With a founding team that originated from Jump, Monad Labs understands the need for speed. The team is in the midst of parallelizing the EVM, creating a blockchain network and EVM-environment that rivals the performance of traditional tech & finance. In conversations with their leadership, it’s also clear Monad is working to anticipate developer tooling and harness technological convergences that will be needed when crypto is no longer niche, but at scale within society. Though there are already a few established leaders in Layer1 smart contract protocols, Monad has a differentiated, innovative, and ethical approach that will be worth keeping an eye on.”
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