What is Monad? Block times, EVM and DeFi explained

Monad, a Layer 1 blockchain, processes 10,000 transactions per second while keeping full EVM compatibility, which lets apps built for Ethereum deploy on it.

On November 24, 2025, a team of former high-frequency trading engineers from Jump Trading shipped what they'd been building for three years. Monad's mainnet went live alongside an airdrop to 76,000 wallets and a token sale that pulled in $269 million on Coinbase. Within its first week, DeFi protocols like Uniswap and Morpho deployed on the chain. Total value locked crossed $150 million within four days, and DefiLlama put it at about $1.03 billion on 29 September 2026.

The thesis that attracted $225 million in venture capital from Paradigm was simple: make Ethereum fast without breaking Ethereum's compatibility.

That's a harder problem than it sounds. Plenty of blockchains are fast. Plenty are EVM-compatible. Monad tries to be both at once, hitting 10,000 transactions per second with full Solidity compatibility. For developers, that means deploying existing Ethereum contracts on Monad without changing a line of code. For users, it means sub-second transactions at a fraction of the cost.

Here's how the technology works, what's building on it, and how to put capital to work on the network.

The founders: from HFT to Layer 1

Monad was co-founded by Keone Hon (CEO), Eunice Giarta (COO), and James Hunsaker (CTO, now heading Category Labs). Hon and Hunsaker spent eight years at Jump Trading, one of the largest proprietary trading firms in the world, building the kind of low-latency systems that process millions of trades per second on traditional exchanges. Giarta brings enterprise infrastructure experience from Broadway Technology and Shutterstock, plus rates derivatives trading at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

That background matters. The bottlenecks in blockchain performance (transaction ordering, database reads, execution speed) are the same problems high-frequency trading firms have been solving for decades. The founding team started from systems engineering, then asked: why can't a blockchain process transactions the way a trading engine does? Hon and Giarta now lead the Monad Foundation (ecosystem, governance, adoption), while Hunsaker heads Category Labs (core protocol development).

Monad raised a $19 million seed in 2023, then closed a $225 million Series A led by Paradigm in April 2024, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Electric Capital, and Greenoaks. It was the largest crypto fundraise of 2024.

How Monad works: parallel execution on the EVM

Ethereum processes transactions one at a time. Transaction A finishes, then Transaction B starts. If you're swapping tokens on Uniswap while someone else is minting an NFT, those two completely unrelated operations still wait in the same line.

Monad's core insight was to break that line apart through parallel execution.

The core innovation is optimistic parallel execution. Monad runs multiple transactions simultaneously across different threads, assuming they won't conflict with each other. When two transactions do touch the same state (say, both trying to update the same token balance), the system detects the conflict and re-executes just that transaction with the correct data. The final result matches what you'd get from serial execution, but the throughput jumps dramatically.

Think of it like a restaurant kitchen. Ethereum is one chef cooking dishes in order. Monad is a kitchen with multiple chefs working different stations at the same time, with a head chef checking that nothing went wrong before plates go out.

Three technical components make this possible.

MonadBFT (consensus)

MonadBFT is a custom Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus protocol derived from HotStuff. It pipelines block agreement so the network can vote on a new block while still finalizing the previous one. Monad's docs list 300-millisecond block times and 600-millisecond transaction finality. By comparison, Ethereum finalizes transactions in about 12 minutes.

Asynchronous execution

Most blockchains tie consensus and execution together. Validators agree on a block of transactions, execute them, then move to the next block. Monad separates these steps. Validators agree on transaction ordering through MonadBFT, then execute those transactions in a separate pipeline. A slow, computationally heavy transaction doesn't stall the entire chain. Consensus keeps moving while execution catches up.

MonadDB (custom database)

Ethereum stores its state in a Merkle Patricia Trie, typically layered on top of a general-purpose database like LevelDB. Monad built MonadDB from scratch: a custom asynchronous database designed specifically for Merkle Trie storage. It runs on SSDs instead of RAM, supports parallel disk reads and writes so multiple virtual machines can access state simultaneously, and strips away the overhead that comes from shoehorning blockchain data into a database that wasn't designed for it.

Lower hardware costs for node operators also mean more validators can participate. That's good for decentralization.

EVM compatibility: why it matters

Raw throughput alone doesn't determine where developers build. Solana processes thousands of transactions per second, but it uses a completely different programming model (Rust/Anchor, Sealevel VM), which means developers building on Solana write everything from scratch.

Monad is EVM-compatible at the bytecode level. Solidity contracts, Ethereum addresses, MetaMask wallets, Hardhat, Foundry, and the entire ecosystem of Ethereum tooling work out of the box. A team with an existing Ethereum dApp can deploy it on Monad by changing the RPC endpoint. The development language, testing frameworks, and audit toolkits stay the same.

For the Ethereum ecosystem, that's a big deal. Developers don't have to choose between speed and the tools they already know. And users don't need to learn a new wallet or address format.

The practical effect shows up in how quickly Monad's DeFi ecosystem materialized. Blue-chip protocols (Uniswap, Morpho, Curve) deployed their existing contracts within days of mainnet.

The Monad DeFi ecosystem

Monad's TVL crossed $350 million in April 2026 and reached about $1.03 billion by 29 September 2026, according to DefiLlama. Some of the protocols driving that growth are familiar Ethereum names. Others are Monad-native.

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The speed of ecosystem development reinforces why EVM compatibility matters so much. Protocols that already exist on Ethereum can deploy on Monad in days, bringing their liquidity strategies, audited codebases, and user interfaces with them. New Monad-native protocols (Curvance, Kuru, Kintsu) build on the same Solidity foundations, drawing from the largest developer talent pool in crypto.

The MON token

MON is Monad's native token. Total supply is 100 billion. At launch, 10.8% entered circulation: 3.3% through an airdrop to 76,000 wallets and 7.5% through a public token sale on Coinbase that raised $269 million.

The remaining supply breaks down as:

• 38.5% allocated to ecosystem development

• 27% to the Monad team

• 19.7% to investors

• 4% to treasury

MON is used for gas fees on the network, staking with validators, and governance. Team and investor allocations sit behind a one-year cliff that ends on 24 November 2026, one year after mainnet, and then vest over several years.

How to earn yield on Monad

A fast blockchain with growing DeFi creates yield opportunities, but navigating them across lending protocols, DEXs, and staking platforms takes time and expertise. Vault infrastructure solves this by packaging multiple strategies into a single deposit.

earnAUSD is a yield-bearing stablecoin vault on Monad, built on Upshift's vault infrastructure. It accepts deposits of AUSD (Agora's dollar-backed stablecoin) and systematically allocates across Monad's DeFi protocols: lending on Morpho, liquidity provision, and other yield sources. Professional curators manage the strategy. Depositors deposit, and the vault handles monitoring positions, rebalancing and moving between protocols.

earnAUSD peaked at about $80.6 million in TVL in January 2026, when it was the largest yield token on the chain. That growth came from the vault acting as an anchor for Monad's stablecoin liquidity: AUSD flows in, the vault distributes it across the ecosystem, and Monad's DeFi protocols get the deposits they need to function. Depositors earn yield while the ecosystem receives the liquidity it needs to grow, creating a reinforcing cycle between vault infrastructure and chain adoption.

Upshift also launched earnMON, a companion vault for the native MON token that deploys across staking and DeFi strategies on Monad.

The ability to deploy vault infrastructure on Monad the same day it went live reflects something broader about Upshift's multi-chain architecture. The same vault contracts, curator workflows, and risk management framework that run on Ethereum, Arbitrum, and 30+ other chains extended to Monad without rebuilding. EVM compatibility made the chain accessible. Vault infrastructure made the yield accessible.

Risks and considerations

Monad shipped working technology and attracted significant capital quickly, though as a new chain it carries specific risks.

Network maturity. Monad launched in November 2025. It hasn't faced the years of adversarial stress-testing that Ethereum has. Bugs, congestion events, or edge cases in the parallel execution model could surface as usage scales. The chain's active validator set is capped at 200, far fewer than the hundreds of thousands of validators securing Ethereum.

Token unlock pressure. Only 10.8% of MON supply was circulating at launch. Team, investor, and ecosystem allocations (totaling nearly 90%) unlock on a schedule, with the team and investor cliff ending on 24 November 2026. Large unlocks have historically created selling pressure on newer tokens.

Organic demand. Despite about $1 billion in TVL, daily onchain fees remain low, averaging about $14,700 a day in September 2026 according to DefiLlama. That gap between capital locked and fees generated raises a question: is capital flowing in because of sustainable utility, or because of incentive programs? Both are normal for new chains, but the long-term answer matters.

Competition. Monad competes with Ethereum Layer 2s (Arbitrum, Optimism, Base) that inherit Ethereum's security, and with other high-throughput Layer 1s (Solana, Sui, Aptos) that have years of mainnet history. EVM compatibility is a real advantage, but it doesn't guarantee sustained developer and user attention.

Smart contract risk. DeFi protocols on Monad carry the same smart contract risks as on any other chain. Audits reduce but don't eliminate the possibility of exploits. Newer protocols with shorter track records carry higher risk.

FAQ

What is Monad?

Monad is a Layer 1 blockchain that uses parallel execution to process up to 10,000 transactions per second while maintaining full EVM compatibility. It launched in November 2025 and uses a custom consensus mechanism (MonadBFT) and database (MonadDB) to achieve 300ms block times and 600ms finality.

Who founded Monad?

Keone Hon (CEO), Eunice Giarta (COO), and James Hunsaker (CTO) co-founded Monad. Hon and Hunsaker spent eight years at Jump Trading building low-latency, high-frequency trading systems; Giarta brings enterprise infrastructure and rates derivatives experience. Hon and Giarta now lead the Monad Foundation, while Hunsaker heads Category Labs (core protocol development).

How is Monad different from Ethereum?

Monad processes transactions in parallel rather than one-by-one, achieving roughly 700x Ethereum's throughput (10,000 TPS vs. ~15 TPS) with sub-second finality instead of 12+ minutes. Monad is fully EVM-compatible. Ethereum's tooling and smart contracts work without modification. The tradeoff: Monad is a newer network with a smaller validator set and less battle-tested security.

How is Monad different from Solana?

Both are high-throughput blockchains, but Monad is EVM-compatible and Solana is not. Developers on Monad write Solidity and use Ethereum tooling. Solana uses Rust and its own Sealevel VM. For teams with existing Ethereum codebases, Monad offers a migration path that Solana doesn't.

What is the MON token used for?

MON is Monad's native token used for paying gas fees, staking with validators, and governance. Total supply is 100 billion, with 10.8% circulating at launch. The token sale on Coinbase raised $269 million.

How can I earn yield on Monad?

You can deposit into earnAUSD, Upshift's stablecoin yield vault on Monad, which routes deposits into lending, liquidity provision, and other DeFi strategies across the ecosystem. There's also earnMON for the native token. Both are managed by professional curators through Upshift's vault infrastructure.

Is Monad safe?

Monad's technology has been tested through its devnet and testnet phases, and the mainnet has been live since November 2025. The chain uses a BFT consensus mechanism with an active set of up to 200 validators. That said, it's a young network that hasn't faced the years of real-world stress-testing that Ethereum has. As with any new blockchain, users should size positions accordingly and understand the risks of early adoption.

Keep reading

• Earning Stablecoin Yield on Monad with earnAUSD - Step-by-step walkthrough of depositing into Upshift's stablecoin vault on Monad

• What is Upshift? - How the vault infrastructure works, from deposit to strategy execution to yield distribution

• Monad Documentation - Official technical documentation covering MonadBFT, parallel execution, and MonadDB

• The Complete Guide to Monad (Ledger) - Third-party educational overview from Ledger Academy
• How blockchain ecosystems grow TVL and DeFi liquidity: how a chain bootstraps liquidity with an anchor vault.

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