Bankless: Why does Monad have the potential to replace Ethereum?

Author: Jack Inabinet, Bankless; Compiler: Deng Tong, Golden Finance

Non-EVM networks like Solana have become the forefront of the encryption industry’s awareness in recent months, becoming a potential Ethereum Even Ethereum’s most staunch haters can’t deny the powerful network effect established by the chain’s virtual machine: the EVM chain accounts for 93% of all TVL.

Many critics of Ethereum have legitimate concerns about its rollup-centric roadmap, which tends to destroy liquidity and complicate user experience. Instead, they advocate a holistic scaling approach that unifies the network into a single state.

While some Ethereum forks (such as BNB) have alleviated the need for Rollup and solved the limitations of EVM scalability by adopting more centralized consensus mechanisms (such as Proof of Authority), the fact remains , the future of finance will not be in the centralized chain.

For a blockchain to have a chance to become the next Ethereum killer, it must meet the needs of today's users and developers while making significant improvements to the aging EVM from a technical perspective and retaining a powerful decentralized features.

Monad is one of the most promising chains that meets this requirement. Today, we’ll outline what Monad brings to the table and discuss why the chain has the potential to replace Ethereum as the cryptocurrency’s dominant smart contract platform.

What are Monad’s key technological innovations?

Monad retains full EVM compatibility but improves on Ethereum through four key innovations: MonadBFT, deferred execution, parallel execution, and MonadDb.

Each innovation is an optimization for Ethereum, and when combined together, the end result is a sufficiently decentralized blockchain with Ethereum bytecode compatibility that can execute per second Up to 10,000 transactions with 1 second block times and single-slot finality.

1.MonadBFT

MonadBFT is the chain’s high-performance consensus mechanism, a modified version of HotStuff that combines the two elements required for communication between validating nodes and block leaders. The rounds are reduced to three rounds.

In order to reach consensus on a new block, the Monad’s block leader will send proof to the network’s validating nodes that the previous block is valid (or timed out), and the validating nodes can pass directly to the next The leader of the block sends a signed "yes" to approve the block, thus starting the process of restarting.

If the leader times out when validators are unable to reach consensus, the Monad will fall back to secondary communication, a more time-consuming alternative that requires mutual communication between all validators.

2. Delayed Execution

In Ethereum, transactions must be executed before the network can reach consensus and agree on the list of transactions and network status included in the block.

This paradigm reserves very little time to execute the transactions in a given block, since most of the block time is reserved for the multiple rounds of cross-global communication required for the network to reach consensus.

By delaying execution, Monads decouple execution from consensus, allowing the chain to agree on a state before it knows whether all transactions in the block have been executed, thus enabling execution to occur across the entire block!

3. Parallel execution

Existing EVM blockchains must execute transactions sequentially (i.e. one after another), while chains that can execute transactions in parallel, such as Solana, can simultaneously Process multiple transactions with no common dependencies, resulting in increased speed!

Blockchains that can process transactions in parallel take advantage of modern computing technology by allowing their virtual machines to run on multiple cores and threads of validator nodes’ CPUs.

However, to execute transactions in parallel, the blockchain must first determine which transactions can be executed independently of each other. Solana solves this problem by requiring transactions to specify the state they access during execution, but doing so requires the creation of a new virtual machine.

Instead of requiring transactions to declare state dependencies, Monads optimistically assume that each transaction can be executed simultaneously and attempt to execute in parallel. When a transaction conflicts the first time it is executed, it will be rerun with updated data to ensure it executes.

Monad utilizes a static code analyzer to predict which transactions have dependencies on each other to avoid wasting time trying to execute transactions that have prerequisite transactions.

4.MonadDb

Ethereum’s client uses a different database design from Ethereum itself, resulting in A less than ideal storage solution where one data structure is embedded within a different type of data structure that does not support data rewriting while data communication is ongoing.

Because Monads execute transactions in parallel, multiple transactions need to be able to read and write to the database simultaneously. MonadDb, a custom database on-chain for storing its state, enables this, providing high-performance, asynchronous state access, allowing the benefits of parallelization to be realized!

Can Monad win?

Although EVM is not perfect, there are currently few innovations that can improve Ethereum.

Monad exploits the full potential of the EVM through a series of innovations, creating a high-throughput L1 blockchain and eliminating the need for dApps to further develop or audit their code to port themselves to extremely high throughput Measure the needs of the execution environment.

Since the Monad is just a change to the software, Ethereum could theoretically replicate its design choices, but this would require a major system overhaul that could cost the chain billions of dollars in total locked value The risk of being exploited makes it unlikely that these changes will be implemented in the foreseeable future.

Solving interoperability between Ethereum and its Layer 2 solutions is a years-long effort that has only just begun. Until these challenges are overcome, blockchains that can handle the current load of cryptocurrency traffic in a unified execution environment will provide an arguably superior user experience and be successful in attracting users, developers, and capital to their chains. side has the upper hand.

By giving Ethereum’s mature application suite access to ultra-high-performance block space, Monads present an attractive combination of features that may help make it a significant center of on-chain activity. .