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Source: The Pipeline, Medium; Compilation: Deng Tong, Bit Chain Vision Realm
Keone Hon, CEO and co -founder of Monad Labs, and Kevin G, a developer relationship engineer, participated in the third episode of The Pipeline Podcast to discuss the work of the Monad Labs team over the past two years.Why reconstruct EVM from scratch?Please read it carefully and find out the answer.
Guest background:
Keone has previously worked as a quantitative analyst in the field of Jump Trading.Here, he met James Hunsaker, co -founder and chief technical officer of Monad, and worked with him for the first time.Recently, Kevin G was the core developer at Solana Labs (previously in Apple, focusing on AirPods’s local system engineering design).
Monad’s chief technical officer James Hunsaker worked closely with KEONE, chief executive of Jump Trading (Source: 0xresearch)
Q: Why is Monad?In the environment where L2 and other extensions are so popular, why do you transform EVM?
Keone:
A few years ago, when we started, many people asked us, “Why not build a L2?” Our answer at that time was the same as now: We think that someone needs to focus on improving the performance of EVM execution stacks.By optimizing the introduction of parallel execution, custom state database, assembly line execution, and asynchronous IO support, Monad will be able to better use hardware to achieve higher -performance and decentralized systems.
Over time, it is more and more obvious that many bottlenecks in the Ethereum virtual machine can be solved and optimized by the appropriate team of engineers.As early as 2020, when Monad first conceptualized, not many teams focused on these optimizations, especially when you compared it with other infrastructure (Rollup, zero -knowledge certification or data availability).
As the dominant criteria of smart contracts, the EVM chain (so far) has a large part of TVL, the largest developer and research network, and an incredible community that has endured the test of time (and multiple bears).When we want to expand and support more complex applications, this makes optimization more important.
“The performance of EVM is indeed an interesting and challenging problem. I am very happy that our team has begun to pay attention to this when we do this.” In the next few monthsVery excited.”
EVM performance meets the scalability on Monad.
Kevin G:
Many things Monad are doing the best practice of computer science applied to blockchain networks.This is possible, because the team has such a deep background in this field.
Not every development team can work hard to solve the basic problems of the agreement and propose a high -performance solution.These optimizations are not only exciting; they are essentially ambitious.This has never been done before.
Q: How do you set up a team that can cope with this challenge?
Keone:
I am really lucky to have a group of outstanding engineering personnel in Monad Labs, as well as personnel in growth, marketing, community construction and business development.About 25 employees, we strive to maintain super streamlined to focus on problems that need to be solved.
Over time, our team will continue to grow to support the scale and adoption rate we try to achieve.This must definitely require wider skills and extra manpower.
Most engineering teams have rich experience in building high -performance and low -delay systems.A common model of developing a real high -performance basic layer system is your professional knowledge that you need to have the performance of the entire system.Sometimes you need to thoroughly study the kernel level to obtain the required optimization.In the end, the blockchain itself is actually a database.
Some loved Monad characters have consolidated their position in community legends.
Q: Why should the creator check Monad?
Keone:
A key advantage of Monad is that it has potential to promote extensive combination, surpass the existing restrictions of Ethereum, and even surpass higher performance systems such as Solana.
Because Monad and EVM bytecode and RPC are compatible, engineers’ learning curves are much lower than many other environments.We are glad and happy to use a large number of research and tools. These research and tools have paved the way for EVM’s booming development, and allows developers to build higher performance and scalability in the environment they already understand and trust.app.
Q: What is the strategic positioning of Monad in a wider Layer 1 solution?
Keone:
The ultimate goal is to create a platform with more scalability and cost -effectiveness to build a variety of applications, eliminating the restrictions that hinder the combined ability of existing blockchain ecosystems.
In the background of Ethereum’s initial design: its purpose is to enable the builder to create anything in its ecosystem.Monad is the accelerated development of this concept, which has gone away from the restrictions that have been existed for more than ten years.The transition from gasoline power vehicles to electric vehicles can be used as analogy, marking a paradigm change that can be achieved when new technologies are introduced.
Consider the actual challenges faced by Ethereum developers due to GAS restrictions.There can be more applications and functions on Ethereum, but it is disabled due to high cost.One of the main goals of Monad is to liberate existing EVM applications from the constraints of the current GAS limit.
Monad also uses the rich existing code and products in the EVM ecosystem to provide a platform for the ambitious builders so that they can truly build DAPPs that cannot be achieved in other places.
In general, the focus of Monad is the collective nature of the encryption community.The current stage is an experimental stage, and cryptocurrency enthusiasts are building applications for decentralized personal financial management.Monad aims to make these applications more cost -effective and release them to expand the real potential of a wider user base.
Q: What type of application do you see on Monad the happiest?
Keone:
There are two areas for me -decentralized finance (DEFI) and applications for consumers.
Defi
Anything that allows ordinary people to manage personal finance in a decentralized manner.Of course, there are applications such as the currency market, decentralized exchanges, derivatives, high -fidelity and high -scale prophecy machines.This is a vertical field that I really feel excited.
Before joining Monad, I was a member of the JUMP encryption team.JUMP participated in the Solana ecosystem and was excited about it because it was very meaningful.If the cost is only one -dollar of one -dollar, and you can expand to millions of users, then you can actually have a financial product that basically replaces the current existing enterprises.The centralized exchange is charged very high for data.
One of the reasons we like Solana is that it is a great technology.Although it lacks EVM compatibility (this may make the development experience tricky), since James and I have committed to developing it in 2021, Solana has made great progress.
Consumer application:
I am also very excited about Monad’s applications to consumers.For example, sports gaming, casino, social networking; basically anything meaningful as a mobile application on mobile phones.
If I know all my data is in my wallet, I will interact with applications, services and content more easily; this is because the wallet is encrypted safely.For example, shopping applications that include personal experience and preferences (on the chain) into the background are very meaningful for shopping user experience.
Question: What aspects of EVM make you the most interested in the Monad route?
For me, this is what developers who can eventually help the largest number of developers expand their applications.In the final analysis, Monad is a developer platform.It is important to solve the problem where the developers are located and solve their real urgent problems.I think pure EVM compatibility is part of these problems, but other problems will occur in the future, which essentially makes more support for more encrypted functions easier and cheaper.
In the final analysis, this is just to solve the problem of hindering developers to build the first application in iOS stores.For me, I think EVM is the best place to achieve this goal.
Surprisingly, no one really pays attention to the execution stack.Considering the previous background of our team and the urgency we think that the problem needs to be resolved, this is a very natural workplace.
Monad proposed this path. The ideal of EVM and Ethereum community has the opportunity to truly reach the product scale.
“In the end, Monad is a very cool combination. We can get a user experience similar to Solana on EVM. Then, developers can choose the position they want to build according to the needs of the system.”
Cooperation is indeed important.Our team realized that we did not know all the answers to all questions.We are experts.We know a lot about building a high -performance parallel system, Byzantine fault consensus, and other very specific issues.However, many people have devoted their energy to Ethereum’s research, focusing on the issues such as MEV minimization, governance and cryptography.Therefore, it is also important to follow the standards and work you can do with the work of others.
Kevin G:
EVM is a bond that is a huge effort for many application cryptography, the huge efforts to build applications, and the great efforts of developing better security practice.It is really good to meet the standards and help promote the development of the entire field.
Because of this, we can deeply focus on the expansion of the basic layer -this is what we are good at — while using the research community’s professional knowledge in this field.In addition, we do not have to rebuild all the developer tools that have been provided for EVM.
Q: What is the biggest challenge to support the builders in the EVM environment?
Keone:
I think there are a few.At present, it is very challenging to attract funds for developers; investor groups are very biased to the United States.For international developers, it is really difficult to obtain funds.
In addition, from a security point of view, the construction of DAPP is also challenging.There are a large number of black hats and hackers constantly detect vulnerabilities and look for vulnerabilities.This makes it a very hostile environment.We need better security practice, including GAS optimization.
By significantly reduced the GAS cost, Monad solved the huge compromise of the developers; whether it contains additional defense assertions (this will cost more GAS).
A Monad community member showed his new mural in Türkiye.
Question: A neglected advantage to build an encrypted product?
Keone:
It is surprising that the encrypted community is so powerful.If you are building a traditional technology startup, your Twitter will have no fans.You can post updates, no one will care.No one is eager to try your product.
In the field of cryptocurrencies, we have such a powerful community (the community is indeed the core part of its spirit), which is actually a huge advantage relative to other technical fields, and it is also the reason why cryptocurrencies are finally successful.This is actually only using advantages and minimizing the disadvantages; then we can expand as an industry.
Since November 2023, the community has produced an early ecosystem map for Monad.
As an industry, the blockchain has just begun to mature.Over time, the performance of the blockchain will become higher (so that I will not expect Monad to be different from other blockchains because of its performance).
Other systems will make additional improvements, and ideas will occur or technology crossing.This ultimately promotes the development of this field and can build higher performance applications.We will continue to break through the limits of the blockchain and introduce other infrastructure support for the new implementation.
Q: There are many discussions on TPS as general transactions and voting trading indicators on the encryption Twitter.When is TPS a valuable indicator?
Keone:
Regarding the general measurement of TPS, we believe that it should only calculate the real transaction, smart contract interaction and the transfers on the chain: not just voting transactions.For Monad, we will not include voting in any TPS display.
Generally speaking, there are a lot of confusion about what should be counted as real transactions.Many teams use different indicators to calculate the transaction.As far as different teams are concerned, it is now a very uniform space.For example, some of the transactions are regarded as instructions.Therefore, if a smart contract calls multiple sub -instructions below it, others will calculate it about 10 transactions, and this is incorrect.
The only one you can really measure is the number of trading through the system.If the system is not fully loaded at any given time, the actual TPS that can be observed will be much lower.So there are a lot of confusion there.
I think the real solution is to have a repetitive benchmark in the GitHub repository.Each team should contribute to the repository and push a complete script, which defines the deployment of many different servers around the world.The script will then be able to send a lot of transactions to various nodes in the system and actually generate a complete transaction throughput test.
This is what our team planned to introduce, at least for Monad, but also hopes that the same is true for other competition benchmarks.This is similar to normal scientific research processes. You must not only publish results, but also publish procedures for generating these results.In this way, third parties can replay experiments and reproduce these benchmarks.This is very important for us, and it is also what we intend to do.
