Lesson 05: What is Monad?
Embark on your journey to building production grade apps.
Last lesson, we established something important: the infrastructure you build on determines what's possible. Centralized servers can be shut down, censored, and controlled. Distributed systems can't.
We also talked about the opportunity: Billions of dollars raised, hundreds of teams trying, and there is still no distributed app that regular people actually use outside of betting.
Monad is where we build these apps.
What Monad Is
Monad is a blockchain - which, as we covered last lesson, is a type of distributed system. It runs on hundreds of independent computers around the world. No single company owns it. No government can shut it down.
Where Monad came from
In 2009, Bitcoin proved you could transfer value without a middleman. But Bitcoin was purpose-built for one thing: moving BTC from one address to another. You couldn't build applications on it.
In 2015, Ethereum changed that. It introduced the idea of a general-purpose computer on a blockchain - one where developers could write programs, not just send money. An entire ecosystem of developers, tools, and applications was built on top of it, and the whole industry still runs on it today.
But Ethereum was designed to prove that decentralized computation works. Not to make decentralized apps feel fast.
Monad inherits everything Ethereum built, and asks the next question: what happens when decentralized apps are fast enough to feel like regular software?
Monad's Specs
Monad has:
- 10,000 transactions per second - fast enough for real consumer apps
- 800 millisecond finality - fast enough to feel instant
- Lower hardware costs - meaning more people can run nodes, making the network more decentralized
These aren't just numbers. They're the difference between an app that feels like software and one that feels like waiting in line.
Monad achieved this through innovations in its consensus and data layers: MonadBFT, RaptorCast, and MonadDB. We'll go deep on these in later tracks. For now, what matters is the result: apps on Monad feel instant and cost near-zero in fees.
Fast and Decentralized
Most high-performance blockchains get their speed by quietly sacrificing decentralization.
Monad doesn't make that tradeoff. Decentralization on Monad comes from two things: low hardware requirements and a large validator set.
Low Hardware Requirements
Running a node on most high-performance chains requires expensive, specialized hardware, which means only those who are well-funded can participate. Ideally, running a node should be cheap enough that anyone can do it.
Monad is designed to run on consumer-grade hardware, so anyone can run a node. The more people running nodes, the more distributed control becomes, and the harder it is for any single entity to influence the network.
A Large Validator Set
To be decentralized, you need a large number of people running independent validators in the real world. Most high-performance consensus mechanisms can't support this. They rely on all-to-all communication between validators, meaning every validator has to talk to every other validator. As the validator set grows, communication overhead grows exponentially. At a certain point, the network can't keep up, so chains cap their validator count to stay fast.
Monad's consensus mechanism, MonadBFT, is designed differently. Instead of all-to-all communication, it uses a fan-out, fan-in pattern: the block leader broadcasts to validators, and validators send their votes directly to the next leader. Communication stays linear, not exponential, so the validator set can grow without the network slowing down.
Monad has designed a fast consensus mechanism that can scale with a large validator set. Paired with low hardware requirements, this sets Monad up to be truly decentralized at scale - as more people choose to run Monad validators, the network becomes more and more decentralized.
The History of Monad
Monad was founded in 2022 by three former Jump Trading colleagues: Keone Hon, James Hunsaker, and Eunice Giarta.
Keone spent years at Jump building high-frequency trading systems - infrastructure where a single millisecond of latency could mean millions of dollars. He understood at a mechanical level what it takes to make software fast, and saw an opportunity to apply that to blockchain.
James worked alongside Keone at Jump and later spent time writing smart contracts on Solana, where he got a firsthand view of the limitations of existing blockchain infrastructure. He became the principal architect of Monad's technical design and now leads Category Labs, the engineering team behind the protocol.
Eunice brought deep experience in product and operations - having led teams building enterprise trading systems and payments infrastructure - and became the foundation's COO, overseeing ecosystem, community, and business development.
Together, they started building from scratch. Not a fork. Not a Layer 2. A new Layer 1.
In 2024, the team established the Monad Foundation. In 2025, Monad launched its mainnet.
How many transactions per second can Monad process?
Smart Contracts
So how do apps actually run on a blockchain? Through smart contracts.
In traditional software, when you build an app, the logic lives on a server you control. You can change it, take it down, or block certain users at any time. That's what made it possible to ban an account, freeze a payment, or shut down a platform overnight.
Smart contracts flip that. A smart contract is a program that lives on the blockchain instead of a server. Once it's deployed, no one can change it or take it down - not even the person who wrote it. It just runs, exactly as written, forever.
Think of it like a vending machine. You put in money, select your item, and the machine gives it to you. No cashier needed. No manager who can decide to refuse you. The rules are baked into the machine itself. Smart contracts work the same way: the rules are baked into the code, and the blockchain enforces them automatically.
A smart contract doesn't care who's asking, what country you're in, or whether a government sent a letter to a data center. It executes exactly as written, every time, for everyone.
On Monad, smart contracts are written in a language called Solidity. Monad runs on the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) - the same standard as Ethereum. That means every smart contract, every tool, and every tutorial written for Ethereum works on Monad without any changes.
When you deploy a smart contract, it gets replicated and processed across every computer in the network. It's not just your token balances that live on Monad - it's the full logic of every app deployed there.
If you deploy a smart contract on Monad, it will be replicated and processed on all the computers on the Monad network.
How are smart contracts executed?
Monad is EVM-compatible. What does that mean?
MON
Monad has a native currency called MON. Every time a transaction happens on the network - sending value, interacting with an app, deploying a smart contract - a small fee is paid in MON. These fees are called gas.
MON is also used for staking, where token holders lock up their MON to help secure the network and earn rewards in return.
What is the native currency of Monad?
What's Next
Monad is where decentralized applications are built. You now know what it is, where it came from, and why it exists.
In the next lesson, we'll cover the foundational blockchain vocabulary (gas, validators, consensus, proof of stake) so the architecture lesson right after it, and everything you build on top, makes sense.
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