How Monad Works

Monad is a high‑performance, EVM‑compatible Layer 1 blockchain designed to deliver extremely low‑latency finality (800 ms) and high throughput without sacrificing decentralization. Built from scratch in C++ (execution) and Rust (consensus), it introduces a suite of optimizations for consensus, execution and state storage parts to achieve parallelism, efficiency and scalability on modest hardware while remaining compatible with Ethereum tooling and smart contracts.

Key Ideas

MonadBFT + RaptorCast: A pipelined, tail‑fork‑resistant BFT consensus with linear communication complexity, two‑round finality, and speculative one‑round finality. RaptorCast uses erasure coding and a two‑level broadcast tree to distribute large blocks efficiently across 150–200 validators.
Execution Optimizations: Asynchronous execution decouples consensus from execution, aided by a Reserve Balance mechanism to prevent DoS exploits. Speculative and optimistic parallel execution allow transactions to be processed in parallel, with serial commitment ensuring correctness.
Performance Enhancers: JIT compilation accelerates frequently used contracts; MonadDb, a custom state database, eliminates storage bottlenecks and synergizes with parallel execution for faster state access.
Developer Compatibility: Fully EVM bytecode‑compatible (including Cancun fork opcodes), geth‑compatible RPC/WebSocket APIs, Solidity and Rust smart contract support via Arbitrum Stylus‑like environment.

Why It Matters?

The technology allows to redeploy existing Ethereum contracts without recompilation and exploit Monad’s parallel execution and JIT compilation to build high‑throughput dApps. Developers may design smart contracts to benefit from parallelism by minimizing storage slot conflicts and leverage MonadDb’s fast state access for data‑intensive logic. This is very bneficial for DeFi, gaming or real‑time applications that demand sub‑second finality and high number of transactions per second enabling user experiences impossible on slower chains.