Podcast Episode: Keone From Monad

Speaker 0: Hi. This is the Deco podcast, and I'm your host, Saurabh. Before we begin, views expressed here are personal opinions. None of this is any kind of advice, let alone financial or legal. It's a conversation about things we find interesting.

This is episode 9 with Keoni Horn from Monat, co hosted with Sohant. Keoni is the cofounder and CEO of Monat and has about a decade of experience in high frequency trading. He's one of the best post principal base thinkers in our space. The discussion revolves around 2 low side, tech and community. Keoni tells us about technical innovations Monark brought about to improve upon performance compared to established end ones like Ethereum and Shana.

While talking about the tech, he also underscores the importance of building a strong community pre product and how Monad is going about it. Hi, Keoni. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Saurabh and Joel. My name's Keoni, cofounder and CEO at Monad Labs. I've been working on Monad for over 2 years now, and prior to that, was in the high frequency trading space as a quant for about 10 years. When I was at Jump, our primary job was to build a really high performance trading system from scratch that would take packets from exchanges and extract information from them and make trading decisions and kind of turn all of that around in less than a microsecond.

So there was a lot of work involved in building this really performance system, squeezing out any bit of latency out of it, and then also doing so in a generalizable way so the trading system could trade many, many different things with many different kinds of configurations. So did that for a number of years, joined the crypto team at Jump in 2021,

Speaker 0: spent a

Speaker 1: little bit of time there, mostly working on Solana DeFi. And while I was there, I realized that there was a huge need for more performant EVM execution, and seemed like no one was really working on this because, for various reasons, a lot of the scaling focus was around layer twos and data availability and other directions of scaling that are also quite important, but no one was working on making the execution system itself, as well as the layers below and above it, much more efficient. So ended up leaving JuMP and then starting Monad at the beginning of 2022 with 2 other cofounders

And the way that our team has been able to accomplish this is because we've rebuilt everything in Ethereum from scratch at sort of 3 major layers, which are the storage layer, the execution layer, and the consensus layer, and have introduced a number of interesting optimizations, including parallel execution as well as a really performant state storage system which offers parallel state access and a high throughput consensus mechanism, which we call monad b f t. It's at all different layers of the stack. Our team has spent a lot of time making, like, squeezing all of the latency out of the sys

Speaker 0: Right. I mean, we'll get into the details of all that you mentioned right now. But before that, like, why don't we start with, like, a 10,000 foot view of what Monad is, where it falls without too many technical details, right, where it falls in terms of the spectrum of l ones. I think you mentioned Solana and Ethereum. So we'll just use them to sort of map where Monad falls.