Monad Labs raises $225M for Ethereum competitor layer-1 blockchain

Monad Labs Inc., the maker of the Ethereum-compatible blockchain Monad, today announced that it has raised $225 million in new funding led by Paradigm with the aim to accelerate the development of its scalable network capable of high transaction speeds.

Other investors joining the round included Electric Capital, GreenOaks, Castle Island Ventures, Animoca Ventures, Lightspeed Faction, Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute Ventures and numerous others. This round is one of the largest seen so far this year for a crypto firm, showing a significant financial contribution for Monad, which was reported to be in talks with Paradigm for the raise early last month.

Monad provides what is called a “layer-1” blockchain solution, a top-level network upon which decentralized applications, or dapps, can be developed and deployed. The company is also developing an Ethereum virtual machine-compatible ecosystem, which means that any dapps running on the Ethereum blockchain can be directly ported onto Monad without any modification. Ethereum is currently the second-largest blockchain by market cap and is commonly used for financial, social and gaming dapps.

In order to compete with Ethereum and other EVM-compatible blockchains, such as Solana, Monad claims, it’s building a highly scalable and performant blockchain that is optimized for transaction speed and efficiency. High-throughput blockchains such as Ethereum suffer from scaling issues that have created logjams and high costs for running decentralized applications, this has led to the rise of scaling solutions and competing blockchains looking to take the crown.

Instead of simply copying Ethereum’s code, Monad said, it’s designing a new Ethereum virtual machine from scratch. It will use parallelization to execute code more quickly so that processes are completed more efficiently instead of having to wait for each section.

Monad claims to support 10,000 transactions per second, a significant throughput for a blockchain network, with a one-second block time. For comparison, Ethereum currently handles between 20 and 30 transactions per second and averages 12 seconds per block.

The company said it intends to use the new funding to continue scaling its team and to bring its blockchain network into production. Monad’s public testnet is expected to launch soon, giving developers the opportunity to prepare dapps, and the mainnet release will roll out later this year.

Image: Pixabay