By
Temitope Olatunji
April 29th, 2024
San Francisco-based crypto venture capital Paradigm led the $225 million fundraising for Monad Labs to help it compete with other layer-one solutions like Solana.
Monad Labs, a web3-oriented company that has been developing an Ethereum-compatible layer one (L1) blockchain dubbed Monad, has completed a funding round led by Paradigm Venture Capital. According to the announcement, the funds will be used to further build and expand the Monad blockchain, with a goal of deploying the mainnet by the end of this year.
Meanwhile, Monad Labs is confident its 30 employees will deliver a testnet in the coming months.
The successful fundraising saw key participation from Electric Capital, Castle Island Ventures, Greenoaks, eGirl Capital, Amber Group, Animoca Ventures, Archetype, Bankless Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, Coinbase Ventures, and CoinFund, among others. Notable angel investors in the just concluded Monad fundraising include Inversebrah, Ansem, Hsaka, punk6529, Saquon Barkley, Eric Wall, and Rune Christensen, among others.
Monad Labs is excited to announce a $225M fundraise, led by @paradigm pic.twitter.com/cRchQd506k
— Monad (evm/acc) (@monad_xyz) April 9, 2024
As the Monad blockchain enters the next-level development phase, Monad Labs announced that it is hiring passionate and experienced system engineers. Furthermore, the Monad blockchain intends to fill a gap in enabling secure and scalable transactions that have been neglected by leading L1s like Solana (SOL).
“We’re emerging from roughly two years of development at a time when a lot of the research community was focused on roll-up, data availability, and other directions of scaling, Monad basically went really deep on the pure execution side. We realized there was a huge need for a more performant EVM, and that in spite of this need, no one was really working on this problem,” Keone Hon, the founder of Monad Labs, noted.
Closer Look at Monad Blockchain
After a successful launch of the mainnet, the Monad blockchain intends to accelerate the adoption of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) among the web3 developers. Furthermore, the Ethereum network is home to the majority of the top-tier decentralized financial (DeFi) platforms. Out of the $100 billion in Total Value Locked (TVL), the Ethereum network has about $54 billion and over $79 billion in stablecoins market cap.
The Nomad blockchain will ostensibly process 10,000 transactions per second, thus significantly outstripping Solana (SOL), which is struggling with network congestion amid high adoption. Ideally, the Nomad chain introduces low-level optimization that enables it to deliver high performance and still maintain exceptional decentralization.
Market Picture
The Web3 ecosystem has significantly changed the adoption of digital assets and blockchain technology. However, interoperability remains a major hindrance to the mass adoption of the nascent technology.
The Monad blockchain will be entering the industry amid the ongoing crypto bull market fueled by institutional investors. Additionally, Bitcoin halving 2024 is about 10 days from taking place, which will further boost the bullish sentiment.