Ethereum-compatible Layer 1 Monad begins rolling out testnet

The highly-anticipated Ethereum-compatible Layer 1 Monad has begun rolling out its testnet as part of a phased release, a source told The Block.

“I made a tx, it was fast,” well-known crypto trader Jordan Fish, also known as Cobie, wrote on X. Cobie subsequently confirmed his post was in reference to the Monad testnet.

The news follows the launch of Monad’s devnet in March, having reached 10,000 transactions per second in internal testing. "This is an important milestone for our team," Keone Hon, CEO and co-founder of Monad developer Monad Labs, told The Block at the time. 

Monad claims to have optimized the way Ethereum works to provide greater throughput — designed to offer up to 10,000 TPS with a one-second block time. However, this may be more challenging for node operators, with hardware requirements around twice as large compared to the main Ethereum blockchain.

Rather than simply cloning the Ethereum codebase, Monad says it’s building a new EVM from the ground up, using a pipelined architecture. This staggered approach, rather than carrying out each process one after the other, enables more efficient processing and instant block finality. Monad is also EVM bytecode compatible, making it simple for Ethereum developers to port their existing decentralized applications to the blockchain.

The network's token will be used to pay for transactions to be included within blocks, known as a carriage cost, and for transactions to be executed, according to Monad's technical documents released in September 2023. The token was initially called mon but Monad later removed the token name from the documents for unspecified reasons.

Paradigm-led $225 million funding round

Monad Labs was co-founded by former Jump Trading developers. In April, the blockchain developer confirmed it had finalized a $225 million funding round led by investment firm Paradigm.

Electric Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, GSR Ventures and Greenoaks also participated in the round, among others. Angel investors included Inversebrah, Ansem, Hsaka, punk6529, Eric Wall, Rune Christensen, Bryan Pellegrino, Luca Netz and Mert Mumtaz.

Monad Labs previously raised $19 million in funding led by Dragonfly Capital following a $9 million pre-seed round in May 2022 and a $10 million seed round in December 2022.

The Block reached out to Monad for comment.