: : [Crypto/Report] Monad: The Last General-Purpose L1
Written by
@c4lvin,
@r2Jamong
- Monad is a large-scale experiment that revisits the long-standing thesis of a general-purpose, high-performance blockchain through extreme systems engineering. In an environment where specialized chains and appchains are increasingly dividing responsibilities, Monad is testing whether a single chain can deliver sufficient performance and composability at the same time by jointly optimizing consensus, execution, storage, and network propagation while preserving EVM compatibility.
- The ecosystem was built through a long-term funnel spanning community, founders, testnet, and mainnet, and the focus is now shifting from participation to sustainable demand. The testnet and early incentives succeeded in establishing technical credibility and attracting liquidity, but the key question after mainnet is whether users have sufficient reasons to trade, borrow, make payments, and pay fees even without incentives.
- The mainnet ecosystem has already established roughly $1 billion in DeFi and more than $700 million in stablecoin supply, while the center of growth is expanding beyond TVL toward actual capital utilization across trading, lending, payments, and RWAs. Native trading infrastructure led by Kuru is becoming increasingly prominent, while lending markets such as Aave and distribution channels such as MetaMask Money Account are taking root. As a result, Monad is entering a phase of transition from a chain where capital is simply deposited to one where capital is actively put to work.
- The foundation of this performance is not a new VM, but a comprehensive redesign of the EVM, and that performance comes with additional complexity. Monad-specific execution rules, including parallel and asynchronous execution, reserve balances, and its memory cost structure, enable high throughput while also creating additional learning costs for developers and infrastructure providers. Upgrade frameworks such as MIPs and MONAD_NINE can be viewed as part of a gradual process of standardizing and abstracting these differences while developing a high-performance variant of the EVM.
- Monad’s next challenge, therefore, is not simply to prove that it is a “fast EVM,” but to demonstrate that its performance can translate into a durable economic advantage. The key is to create a composability premium that only an integrated chain can provide, reduce the incentives for successful applications to migrate to separate chains, and generate recurring fee-paying demand across trading, borrowing, payments, and other activities even after incentives decline. Ultimately, Monad’s success will be judged not by TPS, but by whether a high-performance general-purpose chain can create a sustainable application economy.
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