My conversation with @KeoneHon.
As the Cofounder of Monad, Keone is relentlessly focused on building a credibly neutral foundation for developers, actively resisting the crypto Twitter pressure to verticalize for short-term revenue. He and his team are doing the hard, ground-up engineering required to eliminate the technical debt of the EVM.
We spend a lot of time unpacking the specific breakthroughs enabling Monad's performance, from fundamentally re-architecting storage trees with MIP-8 to the massive, often-overlooked importance of optimizing the read layer. At the center of it is a belief that true scaling requires turning the dial on both higher performance and cheaper hardware requirements to maximize throughput per unit of compute.
We discuss:
- Why building a robust ecosystem is more important than verticalizing for Day 1 revenue
- Hyperliquid, Appchains, and the true value of a credibly neutral base layer
-MIP-8, re-architecting storage trees, and unlocking massive EVM performance upgrades
- The unsung importance of the "Read Layer" and making RPCs developer-friendly
- Multiple Concurrent Leaders (MCP) and mitigating the impact of MEV
- Why "stablecoin-only" chains will inevitably have to pivot to general-purpose DeFi
Enjoy!
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro & Why Ecosystem Building Beats Verticalizing for Revenue
13:03 Hyperliquid, Appchains vs Decentralized Base Layers
20:26 Why Trading and Shared State is the Primary Driver of Blockchains
27:38 The Inevitable Pivot of Stablecoin Chains to DeFi
32:06 MEV, Censorship Resistance, & Multiple Concurrent Leaders (MCP)
41:12 Rethinking the EVM: MIP-8 and Optimizing State Access
44:47 The Critical Importance of the Read Layer & Ponder Acquisition
51:56 L2s, Crypto Twitter Sentiment, and Building from First Principles
58:00 Hardware Scaling and Throughput per Compute