Monad Labs CEO Keone Hon on building a 10,000 TPS Ethereum-compatible blockchain for high-fidelity finance

The AI data analyst that works for you. [music] Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. We have Kon from Monad. Welcome [music] to the show. How are you doing? Good to see you.

What's happening?

Hey, doing great. Great to be here.

Thanks so much for joining. Please,

Dude, I love it. You got the lock in. You're calling in from [laughter] the the lock in capital of the world with the mattress on the floor.

Yeah. Congratulations. Uh, please introduce yourself and uh tell us a little bit about uh the news specifically this week.

Thank you. Uh, great to be here. My name is Keani Han, co-founder of Monad. Monad is a new blockchain that is building for high fidelity finance and um is a high performance blockchain that has been building over the past three and a half years um just really delivering high performance um based on previous experience from high frequency trading.

Wait, so you were high frequency trader before this?

That's right. Yeah, I was at jump trading for about eight years. led one of the trading teams there um was very involved in the futures markets prior to monet.

What was the day-to-day like?

Um it was a lot of uh Jupyter notebook. It was a lot of um like manipulating large data sets and

making really short-term price predictions as well as building uh performance systems.

How how short- term is short-term like nanoseconds, picos seconds or like seconds, minutes? It all seems short term. Yeah, it's the predictive horizon for the kinds of strategies that I was working on were on the order of milliseconds to seconds.

Okay.

Um but the hold time for these strategies was longer than that. So that's actually one of the interesting misconceptions about HFT is that your predictive horizon is very short because you're predicting the next flip,

but then you know you can make trades that um have edge in that and can predict that flip and make a make the right action. But then you still have to hold that position for a longer period of time until um you can get another signal maybe in the opposite direction or a signal to enter an order in the opposing direction. So old times tended to be on the order of like seconds to minutes.

Interesting. I didn't know that. Thank you. That's very helpful. Um so so talk about the Oh, sure.

Yeah. I guess I guess getting into what what is uh what is success with Monad going to look like? Like who what are the different types of groups and applications that uh and and types of users that you that you that you expect to come in in the uh in the early days? Yeah. So maybe to take a step back a little bit, uh, Monad is a new blockchain that delivers the best of all worlds between decentralization, performance, and backward compatibility. Um, so it's a new blockchain. It's fully backward compatible with Ethereum. It allows developers that have built uh applications for Ethereum or the Ethereum ecosystem to reuse all of their code, all their libraries, all the tooling that's been built. um for Ethereum and more specifically the Ethereum virtual machine while getting much higher performance and um a really high degree of decentralization. Um so in particular uh Ethereum processes on the order of 10 transactions per second while Mona delivers 10,000 transactions per second and that thousandx improvement is a result of several different improvements that have kind of all been stacked on top of each other. Um, and those vary from parallel execution um to allow a bunch of transactions to all be run in parallel um as well as a new consensus mechanism, a new database um for addressing the single biggest bottleneck in blockchain execution which is um using the accessing all of the state that's on disk really efficiently. um as well as various other improvements that um just deliver the same experience but sped up significantly.

That makes sense. And so what what in your view what is the ideal kind of adoption look like?

Yeah, it's really a a mix. So I think the thing that's really valuable about decentralized blockchains is that um they deliver shared global state that is borderless um that allows people all around the world to get access to the same tools and um the same markets fundamentally. Um, I think blockchain is really a revolution about decentralizing control of financial systems and commercial systems and giving people regardless of where they are in the world um, access to the same financial opportunities. So I think a big part of the story of blockchain and the story of adoption is that developers anywhere in the world can build new applications, deploy them in the system and then users anywhere else in the world can get access. So what we're seeing in terms of adoption is um a mix of existing applications that can migrate to Monet seamlessly and get uh much lower fees for their end users as well as um enterprises that are um utilizing the power of blockchains for um stable coin settlement um to allow their users to transact in dollars or send and receive payments um really cheaply and permissionlessly. uh in your view, what what are the kind of classic mistakes that that uh other blockchains that have tried to challenge, you know, some of the more dominant chains? uh what what are the kind of classic mistakes that they make to to uh ultimately I I I feel like there's uh every single day there's somebody on X highlighting uh some blockchain that that has a multi- multi-billion dollar you know fully diluted uh value and yet has very little activity. So if you could kind of like lean in what what are the things that basically you're trying to avoid? I think one of the problems in crypto is that it can be quite hard for um so it's kind of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's um easy to get some initial users that are trying things out and giving feedback, but it can be challenging for people to sift through the um yield farmers or people that are motivated by an incentive um and really identify the users that are um that are there to because they ultimately gain value from um the application. So, one thing that we really care about a lot at Monad is um helping to helping builders that are building in the space. These are all early stage entrepreneurs that um are very talented, very ambitious. Um helping them to focus on user acquisition funnels and um just like just the fundamentals of um entrepreneurship and identifying users um and navigating the idea maze to identify PMF.

That makes sense. uh how's it how's it been bringing uh bringing the token to market with uh with Coinbase's new product? It's a certainly a wild time to be building in crypto just because of the overall uh volatility and I'm sure that's that's made it challenging, but uh you're also utilizing a new uh product line from Coinbase which uh is pretty interesting.

Yeah, I think it's extremely exciting. Um, the thing that motivated us to work with Coinbase and be the first uh token launched in their new token sales platform is the opportunity to get really broad distribution of the token. Um, I'm a big fan of Dogecoin. Um, when I first got interested in crypto, I was really interested by the um, just the story of how Dogecoin um, gained really broad distribution and mind share and the Dogecoin tipping bot on Reddit as a mechanism for um, getting a lot of people to like sort of align on um, shared interest and values that ultimately then became valuable much later. The thing that's hard about crypto is that um there's an expectations game that's being navigated and people have very high expectations of the um the value of airdrops and so on. But I think our team has done a really standup job of um delivering a great airdrop that people were really excited about and that crypton natives got really excited about. And then also um offering a way for um normal everyday people who maybe are not on crypto Twitter as much but are still very active on centralized exchanges and trading and holding um to get access to the token.

Makes a lot of sense. Uh well, how much uh how much have you raised so far? We have a gong. We have a gong here. We'd We'd love to uh hit it on on your behalf.

Thank you. Um I think we've raised about $120 million so far.

There we go.

Congratulations.

It's an honor to honor to hit the gong for you and uh excited to uh follow along.

Congratulations.

Yeah. Thank you. So, we have until um Saturday. The sales open until Saturday at 9:00 p.m. Eastern. Um, and uh, we're looking to raise $187 million total.

There you go.

Let's go.

Most of the way there.

Well, good luck. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. Have a great day.

Great to meet you.

We'll talk to you soon.

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