Monad Labs

We are a team of engineers with roots in high-frequency trading, embedded systems, and b2b SaaS. Our founders James and Keone have been working together since 2014, with most of that time spent at Jump Trading building automated trading strategies with sub-microsecond round trip times. We are applying our knowledge of low-latency optimization and system design to address severe scaling issues in decentralized computation. The product of our work is a new blockchain with support for parallel execution of smart contracts, which is thus capable of 1000x the throughput of Ethereum.

Decentralized computation is important because it enables secure, censorship-resistant computation, and because it creates a network effect for users and apps. These two properties allow developers to build a rich and interconnected landscape of apps that provide essential and beloved services to billions of users.

Decentralized computation against a shared global state is incredibly powerful, but it’s also challenging, because computation throughput is limited to the computational capacity of a single server. In particular, the computational capacity is limited by the capacity of the server to respond to arbitrary transactions involving a variety of previously uploaded programs, which for each transaction requires loading some or all of the state associated with that program, as well as committing any state changes upon completion.

Monad is addressing severe bottlenecks in state access and computational throughput
with innovations in both virtual machine design and Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus mechanisms.