The Paradex, Lighter and edgeX TGEs left a bad taste in some people's mouth so can totally understand here
as far as Monad, there's been a few interesting things that
@category_xyz has been cooking under the radar so here's a few comments
1. Block times are going from 400 ms -> 300 ms (no longer at parity with Solana, fastest general purpose now) w/ indications that we may go to 200 ms (which is the same E2E median latency that HL describes on their docs).
2. Even though mempools are already local (thereby constraining the MEV surface), they're working on adding a fully encrypted mempool (BTX). Long and the short of that is that
@perpltrade will be able to do encrypted orderflow soon.
3. TVL went very quickly from 50->100 bucks around mainnet launch. Chain is ~350 now with the peak around 450 bucks. I prefer to see a slower and more consistent CAGR there than what we saw with Plasma/Stable etc. Keep in mind this in a bear market with BTC halved and potentially going lower.
4. Every new L1 is a zombie chain until demonstrated otherwise. Monad has a clear purpose: pushing EVM forward. As someone trying to build a smart contracts native to the virtual machine with no offchain components, there are a slew of things we are only able to do on Monad that are either impossible, computationally infeasible or cost prohibitive anywhere else onchain. EVM fundamentally has the biggest TAM and the Ethereum Foundation is absolutely asleep at the wheel. EVM to DeFi is like Linux to computing.