Big shoutout to all the teams who have fought hard to be here on Monad mainnet, surviving many sleepless nights of shipping and firefighting, financial uncertainty, public scrutiny, and so much more.
We have just left the proving grounds. Everything that we face from now on will be bigger, scarier, and test our beliefs and convictions to the limit. Real money is now on the line. User acquisition suddenly takes on a whole new level of importance. Bad actors orders of magnitudes more resourceful than those we've seen on testnet are waiting for the right opportunities to exploit your protocol. The constant pressure from CT in the face of the toughest market conditions we've seen since 2022.
But we're not here because it's easy. We're here to show that there is a future for crypto, despite what all of the cynicism out there wants you to believe.
In 2020 and early 2021, there was optimism everywhere because people were excited to see all of the new chains and innovative apps in crypto, like Aave, Yearn Finance, Compound, Synthetix, Uniswap, Solana, The Sandbox, and Axie Infinity, take off.
We can bring back this optimism again, by showing people that they can in fact do things that are either impossible in the Web2 world or do it way better than them - such as near instant settlement, privacy of transactions, and permissionless markets. Aave showed that you don't need to rely on a bank to get a loan. Uniswap showed how easy it was to create permissionless markets with the x * y = k formula. Solana showed that very fast transaction times are possible on a blockchain. Granted that in early 2021, all of them were very janky from a UX perspective, but they all worked and attracted a good number of savvy people who eventually became crypto-natives.
However, in 2025, your marginal user is no longer the technically savvy guy who always had an interest in crypto, but often the retail user who has no clue of anything in crypto beyond "Bitcoin is worth $90,000". They will often just give up if you try to get them to do a complex crypto transaction from scratch because either the process is too annoying or the prerequisite knowledge required is just too high. Examples might include: adding a new network, figuring out ERC-20 token addresses, having to fiddle with slippage settings, using orderbooks, dealing with failed transactions, or excessive numbers of approval transactions. Figuring out how to solve the main crypto UX issues, in addition to making the UI look snappy and bug free, would go a long way in onboarding the next 10 million users and beyond from Web2.
But of course, we wouldn't be here at the Monad Foundation if we didn't believe that you have what it takes, and we're also going to be figuring all out how to do this alongside everyone in the Monad ecosystem.
Mainnet is the starting line, not the finish line.
βοΈβοΈβοΈβοΈ
Dear Monad builders,
The Monad mainnet, and your own protocol's mainnet, are live. Awesome! What's next?
First of all, congrats! This is a huge accomplishment. It required you to power through a lot of adversity, investor rejections, the uncertainty of mainnet timing, excitement-but-skepticism from the community, and a whole lot of sleepless nights to get ready for this moment.
What you earned, for all of this effort, is a spot in the arena. An opportunity to fight to make your mark on the world.
Crypto's usage is tiny. 99%+ of all traders are on centralized exchanges. 99%+ of all savers are using old-school banks. 99%+ of all cross-border payment volume is on traditional rails. 100% of internet users are giving their data for free to the Mag7 companies. So the opportunity is massive.
But also, making inroads will require exceptional execution. Your frontend will need to be so easy to use that a grandparent would understand it. Every feature needs to be thoughtfully reinvented from the eyes of a new user.
At bare minimum, your frontend should be completely bug-free and intuitive to a crypto-native. If crypto-natives are confused, how on earth will a new user comprehend it?
This will require rapid adjustment and iteration. There is no detail too small to care about. Great strategy makes a win possible, but execution is what ultimately delivers a victory.
We at the Monad Foundation feel similarly. We don't assume any bit of success just for being here. Mainnet is simply the chance to compete in the arena.
Time to grit and grind π«‘
@ChaosWalk3r omg old leblanc lmao
also old eve had perma invis and just stood next to you with sunfire cape and you had no idea why you were constantly losing hp
@CryptoKaleo Completely wrong way to extrapolate it. Extreme price movements scale exponentially with vol
Last cycle BTC realized ~65% vol, right now BTC is sitting at a 40% vol
A better estimate is (1-0.77)^(40/65)=0.405, which means a 59.5% drawdown. We're pretty close right now
@0x_Abdul Close
Feb 2021 - one of the best times ever to have been in crypto, every other coin was doing a 10x
I bag held a lot of coins that hit their ATH during this period that I sold 50-70% lower lol, two of them are in this pic π
@kantianum Good question - in the MIP the proposal is that the issuance rate actually reduces slightly: 18 MON per 300ms block (60 MON per second) vs the current 25 MON per 400ms block (62.5 MON per second)
MIP-12 - reduce Monad block times by decreasing the vote pacing from 400ms to 300ms - has been published by @category_xyz
The vote pacing determines the min block time. Reducing it allows the network to proceed faster if quorum has been achieved
The tech has already supported this improvement, but mainnet launched with an extra buffer. With this change and others, youβll see the network continue to harden and streamline