Monad Labs, developer of the Ethereum-compatible layer 1 blockchain Monad, has closed a $225 million funding round led by investment firm Paradigm.
“We are thrilled to announce our $225 million fundraising,” Monad said. “This funding milestone provides us with ample resources to continue expanding our team and bring Monad into production.”
Electric Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, GSR Ventures and Greenoaks also participated in the round. Angel investors include Inversebrah, Ansem, Hsaka, punk6529, Eric Wall, Rune Christensen, Bryan Pellegrino, Luca Netz, and Mert Mumtaz, Monad confirmed.
The announcement follows news last month that Monad was eyeing a $200 million-plus funding round as investors show interest in the digital asset industry following the cryptocurrency winter.
At the time, Paradigm had committed $150 million to the next round of funding for Layer 1 projects, valuing the company at $3 billion. Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that Paradigm was in talks with investors about raising up to $850 million for a new cryptocurrency venture fund. If the fund raises more than $750 million, it would be the largest since the cryptocurrency market crash in May 2022.
“Monad is scaling all aspects of EVM performance by helping developers build next-generation applications that will significantly expand the cryptocurrency ecosystem,” Paradigm partner Charlie Noyes told The Block. “Keone, James, and Eunice have a unique ability to build technology and create vibrant communities that support it. Paradigm looks forward to a long-term partnership with the entire Monad team.”
Monad Labs previously raised $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.
Rather than simply replicating the Ethereum codebase, Monad says it is building a new kind of Ethereum virtual machine from scratch using a pipelined architecture. This staggered approach allows for more efficient processing and immediate block finality instead of performing each process sequentially.
Monad is compatible with EVM bytecode, allowing Ethereum developers to easily port existing decentralized applications to the network.
Monad achieved 10,000 TPS in testing as the devnet was launched.
In March, Monad’s Devnet reached 10,000 transactions per second in internal tests. It needs to break into more mainstream consumer or B2B payments, Bernstein’s Level analysts said in a note to clients earlier today.
Monad claims to have optimized the way Ethereum works to provide greater throughput, designed to deliver up to 10,000 TPS at 1 second block times, suitable for the type of high-frequency transaction requirements of companies like Jump. However, this may be more challenging for node operators as the hardware requirements are approximately twice as large compared to the main Ethereum blockchain.
According to Monad’s technical document released in September, native tokens are used to pay for transactions to be executed and included within a block, known as transportation costs. However, Monad later removed the token name from its documentation for unspecified reasons.
Monad’s public testnet is expected to follow soon, and the mainnet launch is expected later this year.
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