Monad Labs, a Layer 1 blockchain project co-founded by former Jump Trading developers, has raised $19 million led by Dragonfly Capital.
Other investors include Placeholder Capital, Lemniscap, and Shima Capital, as well as prominent angel investors with voices in the crypto community Naval Ravikant, Cobie, and Hasu. Overall, more than 70 investors supported the project.
Today Monad is our led $19M seed round by @dragonfly_xyz !
Additional participation by @placeholdervc (@cburniske), @Lemniscap+ notable angel investors such as @cobie, @hasufl, @0xMaki and others.
Check out the full article here: https://t.co/SZMG9TDG0j pic.twitter.com/yVrR2Fz7QW
— Monad (@monad_xyz) February 14, 2023
The funding is a combination of two rounds of $9 million raised in May 2022 and $10 million in December 2022. Keone Hon co-founded Monad Labs last year with former Jump Trading colleague James Hunsaker as CTO.
The duo also briefly worked at Jump Crypto, the crypto investment arm of Jump Trading. Monad Labs has a third co-founder, Eunice Giarta, who is also the project’s chief executive officer.
Monad is building an Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) compatible layer 1 blockchain designed to improve the overall Ethereum ecosystem. When asked why they are creating a new blockchain in an already crowded field, James Hunsaker said there is still an opportunity to increase the performance of Ethereum and expand the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem.
“Almost all EVM chains currently only use the Ethereum codebase, so they are Ethereum clones. They haven’t done any architectural work on the Ethereum side of things. We are building a new EVM from scratch. That would be very productive.”
According to the project, the Monad blockchain will operate on a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism and by design is set to process a total of 10,000 transactions per second. Keone Hon said the blockchain mainnet and testnet are expected to launch later this year.
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