Monad (easter) Mondays text AMA in Discord

April 12th, 2023

Text AMA with community in general chat discord Monad

Bill Monday: The team ripped the keyboards for this one, with Keone, Eunice, and I am answering your questions in the general channel.

1. Developing production-quality dApps on Ethereum and other SC platforms is extremely challenging. Even experienced developers struggle to prevent hacks, exploits, and failures in Solidity-based dApps; even simple functionality requires complex code that is difficult to analyze for production readiness. As a result, there is a scarcity of professional SC developers, and the competition for their services is intense. Can you talk about Monad’s plans for dApp development and how Monad will support developers in building scalable and secure dApps?

This may be a controversial opinion, but I think our society actually has a lot of programmers — every year a new batch of CS students graduates, plus the proportion of students studying CS seems to increase every year. What’s needed is an environment where programmers can be productive in developing new applications in a small team, leveraging existing services and open APIs. I think that’s a big part of what decentralized computation offers — the ability to plug into an existing network of applications, APIs, and user assets, and create something experimental and new. With that said, we definitely need better resources (and even just better curation of existing resources) to help developers coming over from web2 to learn the fundamentals needed to be a productive SC dev.

A lot of the dapps right now are DeFi apps because that’s the most fundamental plumbing, but over time I’d expect there to be a greater focus on things that aren’t necessarily explicitly monetary. The DeFi plumbing will become more enshrined (while also benefiting from being battle tested in a highly adversarial environment) and the innovation will focus more on games and user experiences. I think that makes the scariness of SC development easier to reason about — the core utilities will be changing less frequently, while at the edges of possibility there will be a lot of new things. Think about all the flash apps that were created in the early 2000s that ended up not being specifically important, but which contributed to the development of tech that powered bigger websites that did achieve PMF and turn into big useful efforts.

2. How can we get involved in running validators?

There’s a form you can fill out!

3. How important is community to Monads success, and what plans do you have for growing/nurturing it?

Treat them mean keep them keen? Na — very important. Prioritization of info flows, activation and delegation of responsibilities, feedback etc. we want monad to be synonymous with our ambassadors and community.

Community is super important. Crypto (and especially programmable crypto) is still very new — it always shocks me to remember that Uniswap was only developed in 2017 — so there is a lot of unknown about what should be the focus from both the app and infrastructure perspective. Community keeps projects honest — adherent to the principles of decentralization and self-sovereignty — as well as focused on things that are actually important.

4. When team will present Github?

We’ll open-source at public testnet.

5. Will is this testnet run be private or open but limited (application process)? What are the team’s goals for this edition of the testnet? it’s probably a mix of all of these, but maybe just an order of priority: stability? speed? test the consensus mechanism with more diverse nodescape?

We’ll have phased testnet, so each phase will have a specific set of goals and objectives. To start, will be private and focus will be largely on stability and robustness prior to opening up to public / incentivized testnet should not require metamask snap for wallet functionality.

6. What is the team’s decentralization goal for the testnet? will a maximum be established (example: 1000 validators) ?

Aim is for decentralization across multiple axes, e.g. size, location, set-up type, etc. however, to start, there will be a maximum in active set of about 130 participants but we plan to improve this as we continue to research and implement consensus improvements beyond MVP.

7. Do you have any suggestions, what kind of NFT projects would you like to see on the testnet/mainnet? Or is everything in the hands of the community?

We’d like to see the whole range of projects! Ideally there would be familiar 10k pfps etc and then an evolution into dynamic/music/gaming nfts, or large scale collections of 100k+ really encouraging experimentation here and pushing boundaries so relying on the artists somewhat. monad will have some more hands on projects, but mostly will rely on the community and NFT devs. The Monad nomads is a community project and they’re getting good traction just by being the first and present, so def just start if you have an idea.

8. What about IBC implement for cross-chain?

It’s under consideration but not finalized!

9. Has Monad developed a native bridge or discussed with dapps to build one? Yeah they’re sus af but big restrictor for new chains is bridging at launch, is that being looked into.

Definitely. We recognize that we’re in a multichain world and having bridging capabilities day 1 is necessary, so are having those discussions.

10. Cross-chain interoperability is a complex issue that requires solutions that can seamlessly integrate different blockchains. How does Monad plan to handle cross-chain interoperability and integration with other blockchains; in particular, what strategies does Monad plan to use to ensure interoperability, and how will these strategies be able to overcome potential challenges such as differences in consensus mechanisms, token standards, and network architecture?

We think the most important thing is interoperability with Ethereum and maybe 1–2 other EVM environments (maybe L2s). If someone wants to bridge from (say) aptos they can go aptos <> eth <> monad. So we’re mostly focused on that. The general pattern is that the bridge operators run light clients of both chains, and relay messages from one to the other by having the validator set (effectively a multisig) make attestations that an event on one chain happened on the other. We think this fits well into our design but are still deciding on the exact bridge provider or rolling our own bridge.

11. How was the name Monad chosen? It brings to mind “monolithic gonads”, and I am not trying to be funny.

You might like this candidate logo (which we decided against because we felt that it evoked “family jewels” a bit too much haha):

12. Will Monad be exclusively made up of a single type of node? (validator)

May have other node types (e.g. light clients), but will not be as complicated or fragmented as with sharding solution.

13. Will Monad be compatible with standard Metamask on a new network or will it require a Metamask snap (which are coming in August it looks like!) ?

Monad will be compatible with standard metamask.

14. Will Monad have any restrictions on types of MEV allowed or will it be left entirely up to governance?

We are unopinionated on MEV. We think that MEV arises from user losses (e.g. slippage resulting in a backrunning opportunity) and we should be trying to minimize user losses through efficient markets (tighter spreads, less slipapge, more precise oracles etc). We think that there will naturally be a lot less MEV in an environment where assets are priced more precisely but yeah, in a leader-based algorithm, the leader has the ability to choose transaction ordering (which is why having a rotating leader is so important). We think it would be very naive to enforce a mechanism strictly through threat of social slashing.

15. Where do You see Monad in next 2 years, What will You achive with the highest possibility in your opinion?

Such a difficult q to answer! Obvi have big dreams, big goals. I personally hope to see quite a paradigm shift in how blockchain is used. Today, lots of constrained defi, some basic gaming. But with the higher tps and performance Monad offers, hopeful to see new use cases that we don’t have yet. How Monad grows in terms of features and future performance innovations will be driven by the needs of the ecosystem and community.

16. How does Monad plan to address the potential issue of increased transaction costs as activity expands to fill up available TPS? Given that even successful scaling solutions will eventually face block space competition and the need for sharding/L2s, how will Monad ensure sustainable and affordable transaction fees in the long term? Additionally, how does Monad plan to prevent bot and spam transactions that can contribute to increased gas fees, and what measures will be put in place?

Multiple Monads (like subnets/supernets) (we just think it is important for each network to be much more computationally dense than existing systems are — like if you have to make 100 copies of a 100 tps network to get to 10,000 tps that’s not very good) — regarding spam prevension, we are exploring different solutions ranging from something like PBS, to something like gas rebates for community-chosen public goods.

10,000 tps will fill up but i think having 10,000 paid transactions per second is a good problem to have.

17. It is necessary to make the network more secure and resistant to attacks, which is important for a DeFi that processes high-value transactions. What are the specific steps and mechanisms involved in Monad’s distributed key generation process, and how does this process enhance the security of the network compared to traditional key generation methods?

Nothing new here. Validators create their own private keys (same namespace as Ethereum).

18. Does Monad currently have a working developer test network for developers? how many tps does it have now?

Not yet it’s 76% ready.

For sure, however Ithink sandwiching is kind of an artifact of people sending what are effectively orders that are reaching very far through the book (like very high bids or very low asks). That’s what creates the incentive for someone to frontrun. To address this we need deeper liquidity and better tools for execution also more of a technical thing but on an AMM you can sandwich atomically because the price immediately adjusts after the trade and the frontrunner can trade against the same liquidity to exit. An order book doesnt do that.

20. How does Monad plan to address the challenge of scaling dApps and smart contracts while maintaining full SC functionality as a L1 network for DeFi, particularly in relation to the relationship between the consensus layer and the application layer?

A blockchain is an immutable, (generally) linear record of transactions. transactions are generally 1 of 3 things: 1) balance transfers, 2) creation of new smart contracts, 3) function calls against those smart contracts. Given a starting state (the “genesis block”) and the official order of transactions, the state of everything is fully determined.

Consensus (the process for determining the official ordering) and execution (the process for determining the effects on the global state of applying those transactions in order) are almost completely separable considerations. The reason they’re not fully separable is that there is some recursiveness: transactions are paid for using the base token (Ether in Ethereum), i.e. the balance of each account submitting a transaction needs to be sufficient to submit that transaction. (also, the leader schedule is determined by stake weight which is obviously stateful, although separability here is less of an issue because leader schedule can be predetermined.) The separability above is the motivation behind some recent projects that refer to themselves as modular blockchains (systems that only do one or the other of consensus and execution). Monad is also a modular blockchain in this manner, except that we offer high-performance versions of both components and handle various wrinkles that allow us to continue to conform with an Ethereum-like interface (same RPC API, etc).

21. What motivated the development of Monad, especially considering there are already established projects such as Radix and Sui in the later stages of development? Can you highlight the unique ideas and features of Monad that sets it apart from these projects?

We were motivated by a clear lack of high-performance EVM environments. that was a pretty clear call to action, given that most smart contract developers are building for EVM, and 97% of all DeFi TVL is on EVM.

22. As it’s a new ethereum like blockchain/network — will it work with existing ethereum client like geth, nethermind, besu etc or is monad labs developing any new client ?

Monad uses a new client, built from the ground up. The clients you mentioned wouldn’t have the protocol or execution changes needed to deliver the performance.

23. I was reading some of your previous comments. You mentioned that — “monad is also a modular blockchain in this manner, except that we offer high-performance versions of both components” . What kind of modularity monad will bring in the evm ? please highlight some of them.

I meant that we have modularity between consensus and execution (those are the 2 components i was referring to).

24. What methods will be applied to bring developers to monad? What about for the community?

Developers: educational sessions; hackathons; hacker houses; incentives for early developers deploying novel apps on testnet/mainnet; and more generally our team will be looking out for developers trying to build ambitious decentralized apps and working to support them in their build.

Community: fundamentally we’re building something very new. the execution infra allows for a new design space of apps that are much more interactive. You should expect to see new apps on monad that couldn’t be built elsewhere, and get a first crack at trying them out and shaping their direction (or maybe building them yourselves — i know we have a lot of great developers, artists, and community builders in here). I think that’s ultimately the biggest incentive — getting to be early to new tech, learning from that experience and using that to develop one’s own knowledge and maybe career but along the way, we do have a lot of resources that we’ll put into community initiatives, which might be a secondary incentive. Also stuff like helping to incentivize DeFi on Monad to incentivize productive capital.