Mega ETH vs Monad | Super Fast Ethereum

Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And today on Banklist, we are exploring the frontier of the Ethereum virtual machine from two different architectures. Two different blockchains are on the show today. Monad, representing the layer one camp, and Mega ETH, representing the layer two camp. Both are using the EVM and really turning the EVM up to 11 to see how far it can go, but with very different paths to actually getting there. On this episode, we compare and contrast each of these respective blockchains with the respective founders of each of the respective blockchains. So some of the topics that we talk about, which one is faster, which one's more decentralized, which one is more censorship resistant? All of the technical properties that we enjoy talking about in the blockchain world. Also, how did both Monad and Mega ETH attract such large communities ahead of actually shipping a test net? That's right, not a not a mainnet, a test net. And then also, what do they think about Anatoly's claim that building with the EVM is building through Quicksand? What do they think about that? And why, of all EVMs, did they choose to build on the EVM? All of these and other topics as well. Before we get into the episode, though, a message from our friends and sponsors over at Ryan, what do you think about this episode?

Yeah, I think it's a relevant topic. You know, there's discussion of, you know, whether Ethereum is going to find its way, how it holds up to uh things that uh maybe the SVM, the Solana community is kind of kicking up kicking out, right? With the the fire dancer client. Uh and I think the the super fast EVM, super fast Ethereum approach that both of these respective teams are um trying to build is kind of like one answer to that. I in particular, the most interesting part of the discussion was over this like decentralization word, like which which approach is more decentralized. And of course, we all know that decentralization is just a means to an end. It's about security, it's about settlement assurances, it's about censorship, resistance. But they've both taken a different architecture uh to that. One is a layer one, the other is a layer two. And so uh this was maybe the most contentious part of this discussion when we asked the question of okay, which approach is going to lead to more decentralization? Well, one element I feel like we didn't discuss, which you know, like is worth worth uh more investigation, is the concept of economic security uh as it relates to this. There's a lot of time spent on uh kind of technical requirements to run a node in this conversation of what is a full node. We didn't talk as much about distribution of stake. And I think uh that's maybe a follow up conversation. Anyway, lots lots jam packed in here. One disclaimer before we get in both David and I hold angel investments in in Monad and nothing in Mega ETH.

There's always a link to all disclosures at bankless.com slash disclosures. All right, guys, we're getting right into the episode. But before we do, we want to thank our friends over at

Bankless Nation, super excited to introduce you to Kioni Han, the founder and CEO of Monad Labs, the creators of the Monad chain. Kioni, welcome to Bankless.

Hey, thank you so much for having me.

And we also have Lei Yang, the founder and CTO over at Mega ETH. Lei, also, welcome to Bankless.

Happy to be here.

Okay, so two brand new high performance chains coming onto the scene, both leveraging and juicing up the EVM to I think really uh see how far we can take the EVM. Uh different ways of actually using the EVM that I don't think we've seen be used in the Ethereum ecosystem or its layer twos ever before. Uh and so this is kind of a new frontier uh for this tech stack that we call the EVM that I I think we all want to explore a little bit here on the podcast today. Let's go and take some time to introduce your guys' respective projects uh and really what are the key aspects, the key features of your guys' respective project uh projects as it relates to the EVM. I think Mega ETH was, excuse me, I think Monad was founded first. So that means we'll start with Kioni uh and then we'll go in with Mega ETH second. Kiony, uh, explain to us um uh Monad and just uh what is doing differently uh in the space of blockchains.

Yeah, thank you for having me. Um, my name's Keoni Han,

um, co-founder and CEO at Monad Labs. We're building Monad, which is a

reimagining of Ethereum from the ground up

by redesigning both execution and consensus layers

to introduce four major improvements and more generally

deliver a really high performance version of Ethereum, um, offering over 10,000 transactions per second of throughput.

Um, and Monad is doing that by

introducing a completely new database that's built from scratch called Monad DB,

by introducing optimistic parallel execution so that many transactions can be executed in parallel,

um,

by introducing asynchronous execution, where consensus and execution kind of run in separate swim lanes to massively raise the budget for execution. And lastly, through Monad BFT, which is a really performant consensus mechanism that allows hundreds of nodes that are fully globally distributed to stay in sync with each other. So overall, it's

An effort to

go really low level and

apply systems engineering techniques to build a really performant reimagining reimagining of Ethereum?

One thing I want to bring up, Keoni, about the way Monad NURC works is I think there was a lot of excitement about Monad after the Solana virtual machine, Solana, and the parallelization of the SVM got everyone excited about parallelization. And then there was like some technical pushback from very smart people who said it's actually not parallelized execution that is really the bottleneck. It's parallelized read access of a database, to which Kioni of Mon had said, well, we've also parallelized our database too. And then everyone was like, wow, that's pretty sick. Can you kind of walk us through that like part of an architecture of a blockchain? Uh, why is parallel parallelization of a virtual machine cool? But then also, like, how does it boil down to needing to have parallel read access to a database, which you guys also have?

Yeah, it's a great question.

I think people kind of intuitively understand that

parallel execution is

um of some benefit because.

Um, our modern computers clearly have many processors and are running many tasks in parallel. You know, I have hundreds of browsers tabs open. It's kind of a bad habit, actually. But um,

you know, I have a whole bunch of different browser tabs, Spotify,

um, Discord, all these things going on in parallel.

And it's a little bit crazy right now that Ethereum and other EVM blockchains all are single threaded and and execute completely serially. So parallel execution is

The aspect of utilizing multiple threads or multiple processors on the host to run many pieces of work in parallel. And that's one of the improvements that ultimately can unlock performance.

But when you do the benchmarking and when you look at what the real costs are, actually the single biggest bottleneck for execution is not that CPU time. It's not like, you know, doing math or

Um,

you know, like executing individual instructions, the actual biggest bottleneck is state access.

Um, because every smart contract depends on some

uh residual state that's associated with that contract. For example, when you're making a uniswap swap, you need the balances of the two assets in the pool. Um, say it's Uni V2. You need to be able to look those up in order to actually like execute the swap and figure out what the new balances are.

So, and that requires reading some data from disk.

So the biggest bottleneck for execution actually is state access and

only parallelizing the execution only parallelizing the computation without also parallelizing

reads to the database would be only a small improvement relative to the much bigger improvement that could be made by also allowing the database to be parallel readable. And that's exactly what our team has done with MonadDB, which is a completely from scratch database that's specifically optimized for the problem of storing the Ethereum Merkle tree data really efficiently on disk.

It's been a big endeavor to build this database. Everyone always, you know, the common computer science advice is don't write your own database

because it's a big undertaking. But in this particular case, it's really needed and really impactful because

we have high value state, aka Ethereum state.

We need to be able to access it as fast as possible.

Kioni, uh one last question for you before we delay in the and the mega ETH side of things. And uh this goes to the kind of the the word choice you were using and the and the phrasing you were using of you're you're talking about bringing this to uh Ethereum, this technology to Ethereum. And so like my question to you is like, in what sense is that true and what sense is that not true? So certainly you are bringing this to the EVM, let's say, which is a virtual machine that Ethereum uses. But um correct me if I'm wrong, Monad still plans to kind of launch its own alternative layer one. So we maybe call that an uh alt layer one in uh common parlance, not as a layer two. And this gets to maybe one of the distinctions and differences. So, in what sense are you bringing this to Ethereum? What sense are you not bringing this to Ethereum? So you're not actually expanding uh Ethereum as a layer two, you're not uh doing this in mainnet, you're not doing this um like uh like you're doing this as an alternative uh chain to Ethereum, is that correct?

That's correct. Monad is a vanguard environment

for proving out the capabilities

of these different architectural improvements that our team thinks ultimately are really needed in Ethereum L1 as well.

I think at the end of the day,

the discourse around layer ones and layer twos

is one that's evolved over time. And

while when we first started in 2022,

Um, there was very, very strong

feeling of like, you know, layer twos

that all interact with Ethereum in the same way, utilizing Ethereum both for state commitments and for data availability.

Um, you know, these are very

you know, there's like this one pattern of how layer twos interact with Ethereum. Now in 2024, that spectrum of sort of how layer twos interact with Ethereum and to what extent they're utilizing the services of Ethereum directly has evolved as well. And

Um, our team's belief is that there are many different ways to be

to be contributing to Ethereum overall. And