Monad Labs, founded in February 2022 by Keone Hon, Eunice Giarta, and James Hunsaker, is a blockchain infrastructure company headquartered in New York, NY. Monad is building a next-generation, high-performance Layer 1 blockchain that is fully EVM-compatible. The protocol is designed to address Ethereum’s scalability and efficiency limitations while maintaining compatibility with existing Solidity-based applications.

The platform delivers over 10,000 transactions per second, 1-second block times, and single-slot finality, all with near-zero gas fees. Monad’s technical innovations include MonadBFT (a custom high-performance consensus mechanism), optimistic parallel execution, and MonadDB, a custom state database optimized for SSD storage to reduce RAM requirements. These features enable a scalable, cost-efficient, and decentralized blockchain ecosystem.

Since its inception, Monad has raised a total of $244 million in funding across multiple rounds, backed by top-tier investors including Paradigm, Dragonfly Capital, Electric Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and Naval Ravikant. The most recent round—a strategic raise in May 2024—was among the largest early-stage investments in crypto infrastructure.

The company employs between 51 and 200 people, with approximately 50 engineers focused on protocol development, security, and ecosystem growth. Monad is actively supporting developers through testnets, hackathons like evm/accathon, and its Mach Accelerator program. With a strong emphasis on decentralization and compatibility, Monad aims to position itself as the fastest and most scalable EVM-compatible chain for high-throughput decentralized applications.