Buy & Swap Monad (MON)

Familiar on the surface

Monad's documentation describes the network as a high-performance, Ethereum-compatible Layer 1. Apps built for Ethereum can be ported without code changes, and full Ethereum RPC compatibility lets tools such as Etherscan or The Graph work with it.

For users, it behaves much like Ethereum: the same wallets such as MetaMask, the same address space so existing keys can be reused, and linear blocks with ordered transactions.^{[1], [2]}

The performance target

The documentation states a throughput of 10,000 transactions per second, about 1 billion a day, with 300 ms block frequency and 600 ms finality.

The documentation says this lets Monad support many more users and far more interactive experiences than existing blockchains, while offering much cheaper per-transaction costs.

Like Ethereum, Monad is a proof-of-stake network run by a decentralized set of validators, and the team says it has taken care to keep hardware requirements for running a node minimal.^{[3], [4]}

Parallel, but with identical results

Monad executes transactions in parallel using optimistic execution: it starts later transactions before earlier ones finish, tracks the inputs each one used, and re-executes any whose inputs were changed by an earlier transaction.

The documentation gives a simple example: if two transactions both update the balance of the same account and the second starts before the first has finished, the second may read a stale balance. Tracking inputs and comparing them against earlier outputs lets Monad catch this and run the affected transaction again, so parallelism never changes the outcome.

Because results are committed in the original order, the documentation stresses that executing a block on Monad gives the same result as on Ethereum.^{[5], [6]}

Separating agreement from execution

In Ethereum and most blockchains, nodes must execute a block's transactions before voting on it, which leaves only a small slice of block time for execution.

Monad's asynchronous execution decouples consensus from execution, so nodes first agree on transaction order and execution can use the full block time. Its consensus protocol, MonadBFT, offers speculative finality in one round and full finality in two, and is designed to resist tail-forking.^{[7], [8]}

A database built for blockchain state

Ethereum stores state in a Merkle Patricia Trie, which most clients embed inside a generic database. MonadDb is a custom key-value database that implements the Patricia Trie natively, on disk and in memory.

Because Ethereum clients embed one data structure inside another, reading and writing state involves extra work. Storing the trie natively is intended to reduce that overhead, and the documentation notes that MonadDb remains a flexible key-value store able to hold other kinds of data too.

The documentation presents this as key to keeping full Ethereum compatibility while delivering higher performance.^[9]

MON on mainnet

Monad's official network information lists Monad Mainnet with MON as the currency symbol, used to pay for transactions in the same way ETH is on Ethereum.

The same page lists MonadVision and Monadscan as block explorers, which users can use to look up transactions.^[10]

How much of Ethereum's ecosystem moves over

Compatibility means Ethereum apps can be ported without code changes, but which apps and users actually adopt Monad is UNKNOWN from public sources.

Future network usage and token performance are not predicted here.^[1]