Monad Labs CEO Keone Hon on building a 10,000 TPS Ethereum-compatible blockchain for high-fidelity finance
Nov 18, 2025 with Keone Hon
Key Points
- Monad Labs claims 10,000 transactions per second on an Ethereum-compatible chain, a 1,000x improvement over Ethereum's throughput, through parallel execution and a custom database designed to eliminate disk-state access bottlenecks.
- The project raised $120 million toward a $187 million target through Coinbase's token sales platform, with Keone Hon citing broad retail distribution and Dogecoin-style community building as core motivations for the partnership.
- Hon, a former Jump Trading executive, argues most competing chains fail to help developers distinguish between incentive-driven yield farming and genuine product-market fit, positioning Monad's builder support model as focused on user acquisition fundamentals instead.
Summary
Monad is positioning itself as a high-performance, Ethereum-compatible blockchain targeting what founder Keone Hon frames as a gap between throughput and decentralization. The chain claims 10,000 transactions per second, a 1,000x improvement over Ethereum's roughly 10 TPS, achieved through a stack of compounding optimizations including parallel execution, a new consensus mechanism, and a purpose-built database designed to eliminate the primary bottleneck in blockchain execution, inefficient disk-state access.
Full backward compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine is a deliberate strategic choice. Existing EVM applications can migrate without rewriting code, libraries, or tooling, lowering the activation energy for developer adoption. Hon identifies two near-term adoption vectors: existing DeFi applications migrating for lower user fees, and enterprises using the chain for stablecoin settlement and permissionless dollar payments.
Hon spent eight years at Jump Trading leading a futures-focused trading team before co-founding Monad roughly three and a half years ago. His HFT background directly informs the chain's design philosophy around latency and execution performance.
On token distribution, Monad became the first token launched on Coinbase's new token sales platform. As of the interview date of November 18, 2025, the project had raised approximately $120 million toward a $187 million target, with the sale window closing Saturday, November 22 at 9:00 p.m. Eastern. Hon cited broad retail distribution as a core motivation for the Coinbase partnership, drawing an explicit parallel to Dogecoin's early community-building mechanics as a model for building durable token mindshare beyond crypto-native audiences.
Hon's sharpest critique of competing chains centers on a signal-to-noise problem in user acquisition. Incentive-driven yield farmers inflate early activity metrics while obscuring genuine product-market fit, and Hon argues most challenger chains fail to help their developer ecosystems distinguish between the two. Monad's stated response is to invest directly in builder support, focusing early-stage teams on user acquisition fundamentals and PMF identification rather than token incentive engineering.