Monad Labs 融资 2.25 亿美元，用于创建更快、更便宜的 Layer-1 区块链

A new player on the scene, Monad Labs, finalized a $225 million round led by Paradigm with additional funding by investors including Electric Capital and Greenoaks to build a layer-1 blockchain to challenge competitors such as Solana and Sui. (Fortune previously reported that Monad was in talks with Paradigm to raise money at a $3 billion valuation in March.)

新晋参与者 Monad Labs 完成了由 Paradigm 领投的 2.25 亿美元融资，Electric Capital 和 Greenoaks 等投资者提供了额外资金，用于构建第一层区块链，以挑战 Solana 和 Sui 等竞争对手。 （《财富》此前曾报道 Monad 正在与 Paradigm 进行谈判，以在 3 月份以 30 亿美元的估值筹集资金。）

In an exclusive interview, Monad founder Keone Hon said Monad’s innovation comes from rebuilding Ethereum’s blockchain from the ground up—maintaining the ability to execute smart contracts while completing transactions at faster speeds, higher volumes, and lower costs. While other new blockchains have a similar value proposition, Monad is compatible with the program powering Ethereum, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), meaning developers can port over applications built for Ethereum.

Monad创始人Keone Hon在接受独家采访时表示，Monad的创新来自于从头开始重建以太坊区块链——保持执行智能合约的能力，同时以更快的速度、更高的交易量和更低的成本完成交易。虽然其他新区块链也有类似的价值主张，但 Monad 与以太坊的程序、以太坊虚拟机 (EVM) 兼容，这意味着开发人员可以移植为以太坊构建的应用程序。

“We’re emerging from roughly two years of development,” Hon said. “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.”

“我们正在经历大约两年的发展，”Hon 说。 “当许多研究社区都专注于汇总、数据可用性和其他扩展方向时，Monad 基本上在纯粹的执行方面非常深入。”

The crowded layer-1 landscape

Since the launch of Bitcoin in 2009, developers have introduced new blockchains that promise an array of new capabilities, from cheaper and faster transactions to applications like decentralized exchanges or lending protocols that can operate on top of a blockchain.

拥挤的第一层景观自 2009 年比特币推出以来，开发人员推出了新的区块链，这些区块链承诺提供一系列新功能，从更便宜、更快的交易到可以在区块链上运行的去中心化交易所或借贷协议等应用程序。

Although Ethereum launched in 2015 with the innovation of smart contracts, it’s struggled to scale with increased demand, meaning transactions often come with high execution fees, known as “gas,” or are slow to be processed. More recent competitors—including Solana, which launched in 2020—promised faster speeds at lower costs but still suffer from congestion issues.

尽管以太坊于 2015 年随着智能合约的创新而推出，但它很难随着需求的增长而扩展，这意味着交易通常需要高昂的执行费用（称为“gas”），或者处理速度很慢。最近的竞争对手（包括 2020 年推出的 Solana）承诺以更低的成本提供更快的速度，但仍然面临拥堵问题。

Hon worked for eight years at Jump Trading, the secretive Chicago-based high-frequency trading firm, building systems that could process large numbers of transactions quickly. He soon branched out into Jump’s crypto arm, working alongside Monad cofounder James Hunsaker.

Hon 在 Jump Trading 工作了八年，这是一家总部位于芝加哥的神秘高频交易公司，负责构建可以快速处理大量交易的系统。他很快就涉足了 Jump 的加密货币部门，与 Monad 联合创始人 James Hunsaker 一起工作。

“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,” Hon told Fortune.

“我们意识到对性能更高的 EVM 的巨大需求，尽管有这种需求，但没有人真正致力于解决这个问题，”Hon 告诉《财富》杂志。

Unlike many new blockchains, Monad will have full support for the EVM bytecode, the standard that many developers build on when coding decentralized applications. Hon described EVM as the Web3 equivalent of JavaScript in the early 2000s—it’s used by blockchains including Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Binance Smart Chain, and Optimism. “Anyone who’s built an app for any of those blockchains can port it into Monad without any changes.”

与许多新的区块链不同，Monad 将完全支持 EVM 字节码，这是许多开发人员在编写去中心化应用程序时所依据的标准。 Hon 将 EVM 描述为 2000 年代初 JavaScript 的 Web3 等价物，它被以太坊、Polygon、Avalanche、Binance Smart Chain 和 Optimism 等区块链所使用。 “任何为这些区块链构建应用程序的人都可以将其移植到 Monad 中，无需任何更改。”

Avichal Garg, managing partner of Electric Capital, said 90% of developers working on multiple crypto ecosystems are working only in EVM chains, pointing to a recent report from his firm. While that means that Monad doesn’t get the same benefits of redesigning its entire programming language like other new blockchains such as Aptos and Sui, Garg said it still gets most of the benefits.

Electric Capital 的执行合伙人 Avichal Garg 指出，他的公司最近发布的一份报告称，在多个加密生态系统中工作的开发人员中 90% 只在 EVM 链中工作。虽然这意味着 Monad 无法像 Aptos 和 Sui 等其他新区块链那样获得重新设计整个编程语言的好处，但 Garg 表示，它仍然获得了大部分好处。

“The way you go to market is you hit the EVM compatibility and suck over a bunch of devs,” he told Fortune. “To us, it felt like this is the playbook.”

“进入市场的方式就是达到 EVM 兼容性并吸引一群开发人员，”他告诉《财富》杂志。 “对我们来说，感觉这就是剧本。”

‘A much more performant blockchain’

After raising a $19 million seed round announced in 2023, Monad’s $225 million funding round represents the largest crypto fundraise of 2024 so far, according to Crunchbase’s Web3 Tracker, signaling that the sector’s bear market is beginning to thaw. Paradigm, the crypto VC firm leading the round, is reportedly raising a new fund over $750 million. The round also represents one of the first crypto deals for Greenoaks Capital, the VC firm led by veteran investor Neil Mehta, after a small bet on FTX.

“性能更高的区块链” 根据 Crunchbase 的 Web3 Tracker 的数据，在 2023 年宣布筹集 1900 万美元种子轮融资后，Monad 的 2.25 亿美元融资是 2024 年迄今为止最大的加密货币融资，这表明该行业的熊市正在开始解冻。据报道，领投本轮融资的加密货币风险投资公司 Paradigm 正在筹集超过 7.5 亿美元的新基金。该轮融资也是由资深投资者 Neil Mehta 领导的风险投资公司 Greenoaks Capital 在对 FTX 进行小额押注后进行的首批加密货币交易之一。

While Jump incubated a number of crypto projects, including Wormhole and Pyth Network, Hon said Monad is completely separate from the trading firm. Jump has been embroiled in scandal due to its role in the collapse of the so-called stablecoin project Terraform Labs led by Do Kwon, whose civil trial resulted in a guilty verdict in federal court last week. Hunsaker testified at the proceedings, where it was revealed that he filed a whistleblower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission against his former employer.

虽然 Jump 孵化了许多加密项目，包括 Wormhole 和 Pyth Network，但 Hon 表示 Monad 与贸易公司完全分开。由于 Do Kwon 领导的所谓稳定币项目 Terraform Labs 的崩溃，Jump 卷入了丑闻，该项目的民事审判上周在联邦法院做出了有罪判决。洪萨克在诉讼程序中作证，据透露，他向美国证券交易委员会提交了针对其前雇主的举报投诉。

Armed with its new round of funding, Hon said that Monad aims to deploy its mainnet by the end of the year, as well as a testnet in the next couple of months. Monad Labs currently has around 30 employees and plans for a native token, although Hon declined to comment on whether it would launch with the mainnet.

Hon 表示，凭借新一轮融资，Monad 的目标是在今年年底前部署其主网，并在未来几个月内部署测试网。 Monad Labs 目前拥有约 30 名员工，并计划推出原生代币，但 Hon 拒绝评论是否会与主网一起推出。

While crypto companies continue to chase mainstream adoption, Hon said Monad’s first use case will likely be for the type of high-frequency trading he performed at Jump, citing that the biggest stock and futures exchanges in the world process between 500 million and 1 billion transactions per day.

尽管加密货币公司继续追求主流采用，Hon 表示 Monad 的第一个用例可能是他在 Jump 进行的高频交易类型，并指出世界上最大的股票和期货交易所处理 5 亿至 10 亿笔交易每天。

“If we want the scale of an exchange, like NASDAQ or a CME, to be possible on the blockchain, we need a much more performant blockchain than what exists right now,” he told Fortune.

他告诉《财富》杂志：“如果我们希望像纳斯达克或芝加哥商品交易所这样的交易所规模能够在区块链上实现，我们就需要一个比现在现有的区块链性能更高的区块链。”

Hon also pointed to other applications that could be enabled by a blockchain with high transaction capacity and low fees, such as games. A program like Runescape might have a player picking up 50 items in an hour, meaning that a blockchain-based game would need to update their stats each time, with each update representing a new transaction that needs to be cheap and fast enough to make economic sense on a blockchain.

Hon 还指出了可以通过区块链实现的具有高交易能力和低费用的其他应用程序，例如游戏。像 Runescape 这样的程序可能会让玩家在一小时内拾取 50 个物品，这意味着基于区块链的游戏需要每次更新其统计数据，每次更新都代表一个新的交易，该交易需要足够便宜和足够快才能产生经济效益区块链上的意义。

While VCs are betting big on Monad, Garg said his investment doesn’t preclude other blockchains from succeeding—just in different capacities. “We think of these ecosystems in a non-zero-sum way,” Garg told Fortune. “Just because Facebook exists doesn’t mean that Twitter and LinkedIn and Tiktok and Instagram and WhatsApp can’t exist.”

尽管风险投资家在 Monad 上下了大注，但 Garg 表示，他的投资并不妨碍其他区块链取得成功，只是功能不同而已。 “我们以非零和的方式思考这些生态系统，”加格告诉《财富》杂志。 “Facebook 的存在并不意味着 Twitter、LinkedIn、Tiktok、Instagram 和 WhatsApp 就不能存在。”