Monad Labs, the developer behind the Ethereum-compatible Layer 1 blockchain Monad, has successfully concluded a substantial $225 million funding round, with investment firm Paradigm leading the charge.
“We are excited to announce the completion of our $225 million fundraising endeavor,” stated Monad. “This significant funding milestone provides us with ample resources to further expand our team and propel Monad into production.”
Alongside Paradigm, Electric Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, GSR Ventures, and Greenoaks also participated in the funding round. Notable angel investors, including Inversebrah, Ansem, Hsaka, punk6529, Eric Wall, Rune Christensen, Bryan Pellegrino, Luca Netz, and Mert Mumtaz, have also shown their support for Monad.
This announcement follows recent reports indicating that Monad was eyeing a fundraising round exceeding $200 million, reflecting increasing investor interest in the digital assets industry post-crypto winter.
Paradigm had previously signaled its commitment by pledging $150 million towards Monad’s next funding round, which now values the company at $3 billion. Bloomberg also reported that Paradigm was in discussions with investors to raise up to $850 million for a new crypto venture fund, potentially making it the largest since the market crash of May 2022.
Charlie Noyes, Partner at Paradigm, expressed enthusiasm for the long-term partnership with Monad, stating, “Monad is revolutionizing EVM performance, empowering developers to build next-generation applications that will significantly expand the crypto ecosystem.”
Monad Labs had previously secured $19 million in funding led by Dragonfly Capital, following a $9 million pre-seed round in May 2022 and a $10 million seed round in December 2022.
Unlike merely replicating the Ethereum codebase, Monad is pioneering a new Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) from scratch. It implements parallelization to enhance processing efficiency and ensures instant block finality instead of sequential processing.
Since Monad is EVM bytecode compatible, Ethereum developers can seamlessly migrate their existing decentralized applications to the network.
In March, Monad’s development network went live, achieving an impressive 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) in internal testing. This level of throughput, according to analysts at Bernstein, is crucial for broader adoption in mainstream consumer or B2B payments.
Monad aims to optimize Ethereum’s functionality to achieve greater throughput, with a target of up to 10,000 TPS and a one-second block time, catering to high-frequency trading requirements. However, this may pose challenges for node operators, as hardware requirements are approximately twice as large compared to the main Ethereum blockchain.
Monad plans to introduce a native token to pay for transactions within blocks and for executing transactions, as outlined in its technical documents. However, the token name was later removed from the documents for unspecified reasons.
A public testnet from Monad is expected to follow shortly, with the mainnet release anticipated later in the year.
