Introduction

Monad is a Layer-1 blockchain delivering high performance, true decentralization, and EVM compatibility.

Monad's north star is making decentralization more powerful, and eliminating the perceived tradeoff between decentralization and performance.

Monad supports a large globally distributed network (see the validator map), with intentionally minimal hardware requirements so that anyone may run a node. Performance comes from software architecture improvements rather than reliance on heavy hardware or node colocation.

Monad's codebase is fully open source (consensus, execution) and is built for extreme performance in C++ and rust.

Monad introduces novel architectures in five major areas:

• MonadBFT, a frontier BFT consensus mechanism solving the tail-forking problem
• RaptorCast for efficient block transmission
• Asynchronous Execution for pipelining consensus and execution to raise the time budget for execution
• Parallel Execution and JIT Compilation for efficient transaction execution
• MonadDb for efficient storage of Ethereum state

Monad's improvements address existing bottlenecks while preserving seamless compatibility for application developers (full EVM bytecode compatibility) and users (Ethereum RPC API compatibility).

The result is an Ethereum-compatible Layer-1 blockchain with 10,000 tps of throughput, 400ms block frequency, and 800ms finality.

Select a level of detail by visiting either Monad for Users or Monad for Developers.

Deploying on Monad

See Deployment Summary for Developers for everything you need to know as a developer deploying on Monad.

Monad features first-class support for many leading Ethereum developer tools and infra providers. See Tooling and Infrastructure for a summary.

Architecture

Monad is designed with a focus on performance and scalability with commodity hardware. The subsequent pages survey the major architectural changes in Monad as well as the interface for users.

The first Monad client is built by Category Labs and is written from scratch in C++ and Rust.

monad-bft, Category Labs's implementation of a Monad consensus client, and monad, Category Labs's implementation of a Monad execution client, are both open-source under GPL-3.0.

Testnet

Monad's public testnet is live! Head to Network Information to get started, or check out the MonVision block explorer.