The team of Monad Labs has closed a $225 million funding round to develop a competitor to Solana and Ethereum. This was reported by Fortune.

The leading investor was Paradigm, with other participants including Electric Capital and Greenoaks. In February, the project raised $19 million from Dragonfly Capital, Placeholder Capital, Lemniscap, Shima Capital, and several business angels.

Monad founder Keone Hon, who worked at Jump Trading for eight years, stated that the project’s innovations are based on rebuilding the Ethereum blockchain from scratch. The EVM-compatible protocol aims to accelerate transaction execution and reduce user costs.

“It’s been about two years since development began. At that time, when much of the research community was focused on data sharding and availability, as well as other scaling directions, Monad mainly delved into pure execution,” Hon added.

The project founder highlighted the need for a high-performance blockchain. However, for unclear reasons, no one is working on creating such a platform, he clarified.

Monad fully supports EVM bytecode – a standard that many developers use to create decentralized applications. Hon described the technology as the JavaScript equivalent for Web3. It is used in Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, BNB Chain, and Optimism:

“Anyone who has built an application for any of these blockchains will be able to transfer it to Monad without any changes.”

The project team plans to deploy the mainnet by the end of the year, and the test network in the next couple of months. Hon also mentioned the possibility of launching a native token.

“If we want the scalability of an exchange like Nasdaq or CME to be possible on the blockchain, we need a much more performant protocol than those that currently exist,” emphasized the Monad founder.

Earlier, the developers of the DeFi-focused Berachain L1 blockchain raised $69 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion.

It is worth noting that the investment volume in crypto startups in the first quarter increased by 38% to $2 billion. This figure broke a two-year downtrend.

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