Bankless: Monad, the Dark Horse Revolutionizing Blockchain Performance, Could Become the Next Ethereum Killer
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Bankless: Monad, the Dark Horse Revolutionizing Blockchain Performance, Could Become the Next Ethereum Killer
Monad has unlocked the potential of the EVM through a series of innovations, creating a high-throughput L1 blockchain.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Jack Inabinet, Bankless
Translated by: Deng Tong, Jinse Finance
Non-EVM networks like Solana have recently become front and center in the crypto industry's consciousness, emerging as potential Ethereum killers. Yet even the most ardent critics of Ethereum cannot deny the powerful network effects built around the chain’s virtual machine: EVM chains account for 93% of all TVL.
Many critics of Ethereum have legitimate concerns about its rollup-centric roadmap, which tends to fragment liquidity and complicate user experience. Instead, they advocate for a holistic scaling approach that unifies the network into a single state.
While some Ethereum forks (e.g., BNB) have reduced the need for rollups and addressed EVM scalability limitations by adopting more centralized consensus mechanisms (such as Proof-of-Authority), the reality remains that the future of finance will not be built on centralized chains.
For a blockchain to stand a chance at becoming the next Ethereum killer, it must meet today’s user and developer demands while making significant technical improvements over the outdated EVM—all while preserving strong decentralization properties.
Monad is one of the most promising chains that meets these criteria. Today, we’ll outline what Monad brings to the table and discuss why it has the potential to replace Ethereum as crypto’s dominant smart contract platform.
What are Monad's key technological innovations?
Monad retains full EVM compatibility but improves upon Ethereum through four key innovations: MonadBFT, deferred execution, parallel execution, and MonadDB.
Each innovation optimizes Ethereum, and when combined, result in a sufficiently decentralized blockchain with Ethereum bytecode compatibility capable of executing up to 10,000 transactions per second, with a 1-second block time and single-slot finality.
1. MonadBFT
MonadBFT is the chain’s high-performance consensus mechanism—an optimized version of HotStuff that reduces the required communication rounds between validators and block leaders from three to two.
To reach consensus on a new block, Monad’s block leader sends proof to the network’s validators that the previous block was valid (or timed out). Validators can then approve the block by directly sending signed "yes" votes to the next block’s leader, immediately restarting the process.
If the leader times out before validators reach consensus, Monad falls back to quadratic communication—a slower alternative requiring pairwise communication among all validators.
2. Deferred Execution
On Ethereum, transactions must be executed before the network can reach consensus on the list of transactions included in a block and the resulting state.
This paradigm leaves little time for executing transactions within a given block, as most of the block time is reserved for the multiple rounds of global communication needed for consensus.
With deferred execution, Monad decouples execution from consensus, allowing the chain to agree on state before knowing whether all transactions in a block have been executed—enabling execution to continue throughout the entire block!
3. Parallel Execution
Existing EVM blockchains must execute transactions sequentially (one after another), whereas chains capable of parallel execution—like Solana—can process multiple transactions simultaneously if they have no shared dependencies, thereby increasing speed!
Blockchains that support parallel transaction processing fully leverage modern computing technology by enabling their virtual machines to run across multiple CPU cores and threads on validator nodes.
However, to enable parallel execution, a blockchain must first determine which transactions can be executed independently. Solana solves this by requiring transactions to specify the state they access during execution—but this necessitates building an entirely new virtual machine.
Instead of requiring transactions to declare state dependencies, Monad optimistically assumes every transaction can be executed in parallel and attempts to do so. When conflicts occur during initial execution, conflicting transactions are re-executed with updated data to ensure correctness.
Monad uses a static code analyzer to predict which transactions depend on each other, avoiding wasted effort trying to execute dependent transactions in parallel.
4. MonadDB
Ethereum clients use a database design different from Ethereum itself, leading to suboptimal storage solutions where one data structure is embedded within another—and such structures don’t support data rewriting while data transfers are in progress.
Since Monad executes transactions in parallel, multiple transactions need to read from and write to the database simultaneously. MonadDB is a custom-built database used on-chain to store state, enabling exactly this—delivering high-performance, asynchronous state access that allows the benefits of parallelization to shine through!
Can Monad win?
While the EVM is far from perfect, there are few current innovations that significantly improve upon Ethereum.
Through a series of innovations, Monad unlocks the full potential of the EVM, creating a high-throughput L1 blockchain without requiring dApps to further develop or audit their code to adapt to an ultra-high-throughput execution environment.
In theory, Ethereum could replicate Monad’s design choices since Monad only changes software. However, doing so would require a major system overhaul that risks exposing billions of dollars in on-chain TVL to vulnerabilities—making the implementation of such changes unlikely in the foreseeable future.
Solving interoperability between Ethereum and its Layer 2 solutions is a multi-year endeavor that has only just begun. Until these challenges are overcome, blockchains capable of handling current crypto traffic loads within a unified execution environment will offer a demonstrably superior user experience and gain a competitive edge in attracting users, developers, and capital to their ecosystem.
By giving Ethereum’s mature suite of applications access to ultra-high-performance blockspace, Monad presents a compelling combination of features that could position it as a major hub for on-chain activity.
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