Do We Need Another L1? - Inside Monad’s Parallel EVM with Co-Founder Keone Hon

What It Covers

Monad co-founder Keone Hon explains building a high-performance layer one blockchain delivering 10,000 TPS with 400-millisecond block times while maintaining consumer-grade hardware requirements and full EVM compatibility through six major architectural innovations.

Key Questions Answered

• •Consumer Hardware Decentralization: Monad requires only 32GB RAM, 2TB SSD, 100 Mbps bandwidth, and standard CPU to run full nodes, deliberately avoiding data center requirements that plague competitors. This constraint shaped three years of engineering decisions prioritizing accessibility over raw performance maximization.
• •Asynchronous Execution Architecture: Decoupling consensus from execution allows both processes to run in parallel pipelines rather than waiting sequentially. This addresses the fundamental inefficiency where execution consumes most block time while consensus waits idle, then reverses, dramatically improving throughput without hardware upgrades.
• •Custom Database Design: MonadDB stores Ethereum Merkle tree state natively on SSD rather than abstracting through LevelDB or RocksDB. This enables 30TB state scaling at consumer prices since SSDs cost 100x less than RAM, making global-scale state economically feasible for home validators.
• •Token Distribution Innovation: Monad launches with insider tokens locked and ineligible for staking rewards, unlike typical projects. Combined with Coinbase's token sale platform providing broad retail access, this approach prioritizes decentralized holder distribution over insider accumulation of staking yields and governance power.