Monad Founder: The Next Chapter For Monad | Keone Hon

So I do just fundamentally believe that execution is everything. Our team is amazing. Our team has shipped great initiatives, great products on very short timelines and is moving the space forward. And, and that ultimately opens up the space of design for any builder that's taking advantage of decentralized rails.

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All right, everyone, welcome back to Empire. Very excited about this one. We've got Keoni from Monad recording. We're recording on Wednesday, November 26th. I think this episode goes out on Monday. So in a couple of days from now, one day of Keoni on because obviously Monad just launched mainnet. So Keoni, I think first and foremost, a big congrats is due.

Thanks, Jason. It's been awesome. It's been really exciting. We've been working on Monad for a long time and it's just really fun to get it out in the wild and see how people are using the blockchain.

Yeah. Keoni, do you wear an Oura ring or like a Whoop or anything like that?

No, I don't actually.

Is that on purpose?

I'm really bad on data.

I was going to say, how's your health? How's your sleep? And how's your— well, I mean, to turn this into a real question, like, what have the last couple of weeks looked like for you? And what's it like going into a big mainnet launch like this? Yeah, I would love to just hear maybe specifics of what like a day in the life has looked like.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think the— so we're on Wednesday. This is day 3 of Monad mainnet. Monday was relatively smooth, um, as far as things go, which I think is just a testament to the team's preparation and all the things that have happened up to now. Monad launched its testnet in February of this year, and we tried to make that a bigger event, tried to simulate the mainnet launch, I guess, and going through that experience was helpful. But the past couple of weeks have just been really intensive effort to help many, many teams that are integrating, whether those are infrastructure providers like indexers or RPC providers, oracles, bridges, account abstraction. There's just a long list of different integrators that are really helpful for teams that are building. It's really important for the purpose of Monad is to be the best environment for developers to build, the easiest place for a builder to find a lot of success. And in order for that to be true, it should just be true that all friction should be minimized. So just getting, yeah, getting, sorting out all the kinks ahead of time and then onboarding many teams ahead of the public mainnet was a big focus of ours for the previous couple of weeks.

Yeah. How do you think the launch, how do you think mainnet went? Like if 10 was, oh my God, this was perfect. We nailed every single thing we wanted to nail. And 1 is that was catastrophic. You know, shut this thing down right away. Like, how do you think it went?

I think I would give it about a 7 out of 10. How come? I think that the, the blockchain itself worked really seamlessly in talking to many users. Folks were excited about the UX, speed of transaction processing, compatibility with all wallets, no major issues. And the chain itself is, is really fast and really performant while also being very decentralized. So 400 millisecond block times, means that users submit transactions and very quickly see their effect while seeing full finality on an L1. And I think that part was really strong. I guess to answer the other side of it, like why not 10 out of 10? I think it's just, it's hard to line up all of the teams that were shooting to be there on day one. Able to scramble to provide certain, um, features that had been desired for a long time, like Tenderly support. Um, Tenderly is a, like a debugging tool that a lot of developers really love to use, but it was available right on like day one. So there were some teams that were blocked by that. There were teams that were just, um, there's just a lot of things to do. So I think it was just a matter of not having everyone be fully ready. And then also some of the bridges.

It's a big coordination problem, isn't it?

It is. Yeah. Yeah.

What were some of the, um, maybe unique decisions that you guys made about anything related to mainnet? I mean, there's a couple deeper questions I want to ask around, you know, where you guys decide to list, how you guys did the token drop, you know, part, you know, partnership with Coinbase. There's some of that stuff I want to get into, but maybe tell me about some of the hard decisions you guys made or the unique decisions that you guys made around, around launch.

I'll give you kind of a rundown, just bullet points, and then you could ask which ones you're curious about. I think some of the bigger decisions are, um, the airdrop, the, uh, token sale on Coinbase, and, uh, Monad being the first project to do a token sale on Coinbase's new platform. Um, number 3 would be the decision to not have an ecosystem-wide pre-deposit campaign, which had been really popular. With a lot of new blockchains. Number 4, I guess, would be the set of exchanges that are, that listed Monat on day 1. And then I guess the number 5, which is just the bigger thing, is the amount of time that we, we waited to prepare every, to make sure that everything was in a very final, like, mainnet-ready, in my opinion, state with public source code, with open source code audits, things like that, that maybe we've seen some projects deviate from recently.

Yeah.

All right.

That gives us 5 topics. I like these. Let's, let's start with number 4, actually, which is the set of places. I think you said the set of exchanges where you listed. I would describe this more as like the set of just places that were able to trade, uh, Monad token, right? And, um, I was trying to pull the data on this right before this. It looks like Upbit, Coinbase, Bybit, and Bitthumb were the 4, 4 biggest, um, 4 places with the most volume on day 1. But actually number 5 was Solana. Then it went Gate and KuCoin. Correct me if this is wrong. Then 8 was Hyperliquid and then Bitget and Kraken. So the 2 most interesting observations for me there are 1, that Solana was the 5th largest place to trade Monad token. Pros and cons of that, if you're sitting in your shoes. And then the other is that Binance is, you know, you know, doesn't show up on this list. So talk me through both of those ideas.

Yeah, I mean, the first thing to point out is that Monad is a permissionless network. Anyone can download the source code and compile it for their machines and run it and run a node. Any exchange, like an exchange is kind of just like a business. It's a place that accepts deposits and then credits users' accounts internal to the exchange, or when users make a withdrawal request internal to the exchange, evaluates that and then sends tokens out. It's just a participant in the network. So at the end of the day, exchange listing is really just exchanges, like businesses integrating with an existing system. And I think depending on the participant that you mentioned there, some of them are truly, like, it's, they just decided that they wanted to see the MON token trading in their internal system or a system that's like external to the Monad blockchain and added support for it. And just started like, you know, trading things. So Hyperliquid and Solana are really two examples of that where, yeah, there's not, this is not at all like something that it's pretty much, yeah, it's pretty much just like they decide they have, they can get some asset and start listing it on their exchange and it takes off.

Yeah. How do you think about this in your shoes? I mean, there have been a lot of L1s and L2s that have launched. This, this hasn't really been the dynamic that's played out. Why do you think this is different with Monad? Like, was this a conscious decision that you guys made to line this up like this?

Yeah, I want to make a couple of comments here. The first is that, um, in the launch of public mainnet, um, there were a couple of things that were really top of mind for me. One was just literally the opening the floodgates to everyday users, distributing the airdrop and ensuring a broad distribution of the MON token at the start of the public usage of the network. That's just really important from a decentralization perspective. I think it's really important for growing crypto, getting more people to use blockchains, uh, and getting people to use new systems that are being built. Um, so a lot of the things that I have thought about and, um, spent time on are really just related to getting a broader distribution of the MON token, um, leading up to this event. So the Coinbase token sale is a great example of that, where, um, uh, the Coinbase token sale is a way for many everyday people to get access to the MON token ahead of the public mainnet. And I think it's, it's been a huge success in terms of the number of participants that have been able to participate, over 85,000 people. The dynamics of the token sale were really exciting and captivated a lot of attention and interest. And I think this is all very bullish and exciting for the crypto industry. Um, but returning to your question, the topic of the MON token and where it's trading and where it's trading on day one. Um, I think that more is better. I think that it just allows more people to get access to the MON token and, um, if they choose to, to become holders of it. And, um, folks doing that on other blockchain networks like Solana or Hyperliquid, um, is totally fine by me and is totally exciting. I I know that's a little bit controversial because sometimes people say like, oh, well, why, um, why do you want to help Solana? Why do you want to help Hyperliquid? Aren't they your competitors? And I just don't see it that way. I don't think about that. I think it's just, um, it's really can be win-win.

Yeah. Yeah. In the past, I mean, one of the strategies has in the past has kind of been to almost, uh, uh, what's not paywall, but like gate your token on other chains. Um, you know, you can't do it entirely, but you kind of gate your token so that you have to then go to your chain to go buy your token. So that's a— like, why is it— did you ever think about just— I mean, did you ever think about doing— I'd call that like the old strategy is like, oh, you want to go buy Monad token, you got to go, go to Monad, go, go set up a, you know, your Phantom wallet and get the own initiate coverage on Monad basically, and then go buy it there. Why is that not the strategy you guys went with?

Uh, well, first of all, it's not a good strategy because realistically, the, you know, the Monad Foundation does not control where— what people do with their tokens. Like, I don't control that. So even if, um, you know, that were a desire by individuals here, that wouldn't be a very effective strategy because anyone can acquire Monad tokens and bridge them to other blockchains and trade wrapped versions of them and so on. So I just, I think, you know, usually you don't want to try to fight the current, I guess you could say, like if the river's going one way, like it's fine. Yeah. Yeah.

Why not? Why not list with Binance?

Um, it could happen at some point in the future. Um, I think it's really just, you know, more their decision.

Yeah, fair enough.

This episode is brought to you by Zashi Wallet, your gateway to buying, storing, and spending encrypted Bitcoin. Zcash is decentralized digital cash encrypted to preserve agency and safety with a fixed supply of 21 million and a proof-of-work consensus. Zcash is encrypted Bitcoin. With Zashi Wallet, you can swap Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency into Zcash and stay shielded by default. Thanks to Zashi Wallet for making today's episode possible. Shout out to today's sponsor, Katana. Katana is a DeFi-first chain built for deep liquidity and high yield. No empty emissions, just real yield and sequencer fees routed back to DeFi users. Incubated by Polygon Labs and GSR, Katana is launching with notable ecosystem of primitives, assets, and partners like Morpho, Chainlink, and more. Katana's 1 billion KAT campaign is live. Bridge and deposit directly into vaults in one simple click and start earning immediately on your Ether, Bitcoin, USDC, and more. Follow the link in today's show notes to get started. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply.

Yeah, let's talk about maybe, I think it was point number 3 that you mentioned around the decision not to have an ecosystem pre-deposit campaign. This has been something that's very popular to basically juice the TVL numbers so that when, you know, upon launch you can have, you know, I think some, some people have gotten to 3, 4, 5 billion in TVL very, very quickly. Why did you guys not do this?

There are probably at least 2 main reasons. The first one is because I think that, um, the Monad ecosystem needs to earn TVL over time, um, from end-user demand. Um, so TVL growth is really meaningful only when it is driven by, um, organic demand and The reality of Monad is that as a very high-performance blockchain where, you know, people can make markets on order book exchanges and quote very precisely around whatever fair value is, they actually don't need a lot of capital in order to do that. So therefore, to just flood the ecosystem with a ton of TVL for no reason without it serving a useful purpose to end users is Uh, kind of trying to actually the same thing, like trying to, um, fight against the current. Like, if the current should be going in, in the direction of, um, of what happens. So that's sort of the first reason. And then I think the second reason is that, um, for a lot of early ecosystems, this TVL number is subsidized by token emissions. And it's sort of borrowing from the future to get an outcome right now that is maybe important from a marketing perspective or important from a, uh, you know, talking point, but actually is not really useful for longer-term growth. And for Monad, I think the talking— the things that people are talking about are the performance of the blockchain and the decentralization, the low hardware requirements, like the seamless user experience, seamless developer experience. Those are already like things that I think attract people and it's not necessary to sort of like have this like one headline that is ultimately transient.

Yeah. There was a tweet from, um, I think his name is Abdul, um, @monad. Um, I think maybe he's your head of DeFi or BD or something like that.

And yeah, head of DeFi.

You had a line that said too much TVL is a liability on a new chain. Can you, can you expand on that a little bit?

Yeah, I think it's a couple of things. First of all, in my view, the— when users are using a new technology, they're inherently taking risk in order to do so. The technology is less battle-tested. Of course, with Monad, we've been working on Monad for a long time. We've built a ton of testing. We've run testnets for a long time, but it is a new mainnet network and, um, real money is at stake for the first time. So users should demand a higher risk premium in order to bridge assets over. Um, of course, with, um, you know, really well-known trusted integrators like Circle or USDT Zero or things like that, maybe they feel more assured, but it's still like, there's a risk premium. And that is, again, it's like a liability from the perspective of needing to, um, compensate users for that, um, additional risk that they're taking. And then also it ends up being the kind of thing where a lot of TVL might be accumulated initially, but then over time, as those incentives disappear, The flow is the other way, and that is a very negative headline for every project when that happens. Uh, and there's Twitter screenshot, there's screenshots that are shared on Twitter of largest outflows are from Monad, whatever it is. And that's, um, it's a liability there too.

Keoni, how much do you guys think, uh, talk internally about like, this is what the perception will be on crypto Twitter?

Like, oh, if we do this, then we'll see, there'll be a screenshot.

Of outflows? Because I know the exact chart you're talking about. It's the, you know, the outflows chart.

But I think that it's good to have awareness of how, um, I think it's good to have awareness that there is accountability in crypto, and a lot of the accountability is really at the social layer. I think that, like, my job is not to optimize for what Crypto Twitter is saying on a given day. Um, my job is to help the growth and decentralization of the ecosystem in the long term, and sometimes that involves, uh, making decisions for the foundation that are maybe take short-term pain but for, um, longer-term gain. I think that it's hard to please everyone, and I think, you know, the airdrop is like Any project does an airdrop, like there's going to be sort of the different waves of people that are mad. It's like, first it's people that were running industrial farms and like didn't get anything. And then, uh, and they're just like kind of almost bodying the outrage. And then it could be like people who got something, but then are jealous that someone else that they feel did less is getting more, the same or more. And it's just at the end of the day, like We have to be aware of that and always have a mental model of like whether we believe we're doing the right thing and just do the right thing and know that not everyone will always be happy. However, also people, I do think on crypto Twitter are generally driven by a semblance of truth. And when someone is writing FUD that clearly does not have a basis in truth, while that may get a lot of likes, it won't necessarily like influence the opinion of people that are actually thinking critically.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, before getting into the airdrop, maybe a little more on the pre-deposit campaign or the decision not to do it. What kind of incentives will— do you have, do you have any incentives running?

Um, the Monad Foundation is, um, providing support for Ecosystem projects through a campaign called Monad Momentum, which is really about user acquisition.

Okay.

Um, so instead of, uh, teams having their KPI and their, the thing that they're using incentives for as TVL or volume, um, as a general statement, I think that it's more valuable for people to focus on attracting new users to, uh, the application that they're building, as well as more generally to Monat, even more generally to crypto. And the way to do that is to apply more traditional, like, Web2 thinking to user acquisition, like knowing what is my cost of acquiring one user, what's the long-term value of that user, what's my monthly retention rate.

Yeah, what crazy concepts, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Um, yeah, that's interesting. I, I, I really liked Abdul's tweet. Um, just about— yeah, it's, it's really just saying long-term games with long-term people and don't, don't try to game the system because it usually doesn't end up well. So, um, maybe we can talk about the airdrop and the token sale on Coinbase. What, um, so, uh, using the airdrop first, what, what decisions did you guys make with the airdrop that were tough? And like, how did you guys structure that? And what were maybe the learnings there?

I think I can say this without offending anyone. Um, the, at the end of the day, the airdrop is okay. So here's my, here's my mental model of, um, how airdrops should work, or maybe like what role they're playing. Um, I think that one reason for an airdrop is to acknowledge the contributions of core community members that have contributed to the success of the project up to now, and who, um, we believe will be really influential and important in the future. That would be, I'll call it Category A. And then Category B is like, um, a broader set of people that are very involved in crypto that are using blockchains that are DeFi power users that are holding NFTs that are important to the social layer and giving them a stake in the future network as an olive branch and as a way to welcome them to the new network and show them that they have a stake and get them excited. So that would be sort of the second one. Maybe, and I would add also to that, acknowledging contributions that have happened in the past. For example, in the Moneter drop, we included Spearbit auditors and our Cantina auditors and CL911 members and Protocol Guild contributors and people that are working on educational initiatives like Rare Skills and Shifi. So anyway, the point is, like, those are all— that's category B. And then I think category C is like the much larger set of people, like the the most, um, outermost concentric circle. And that's just people who are crypto curious, people who like trade on Coinbase or another exchange, but maybe haven't really been doing a lot of stuff on chain. And I think the ideal distribution strategy would involve all of those people. And it's really hard to design a single system that could involve all of those people. Therefore, you need actually multiple different kinds of initiatives in order to include all of them.

Why, why even do an airdrop in the first place, Keoni? Like, why is that the right thing to do, to give out free money for, you know, what we've— the data shows a lot of people just dump the airdrop. So why even do it in the first place?

Yeah, that's, that's I guess what I was getting at when I said I can say this without making people mad. I think that that's, that's correct, that there are— the reality is that there are a lot of people that receive an airdrop and are so conditioned to thinking that day one of the, uh, whatever, the public trading of that token is like the highest price that that token will ever be. And therefore the optimal thing to do is just to sell. Um, of course that is all relative to ev— like everything is, um, relative and it depends on a lot of other things, but that's a lot of mentality people are hardwired to have. And then I think also maybe an element is that for people that have— they really feel like they've earned the airdrop, people that have been contributing a lot, um, that probably affects their psychology as well about whether they want to hold. Um, I think that people might, you know, really core community members might sell their airdrop but still may be very involved in the community going forward as well, and that's totally fine too. Like, I cannot judge, everyone has different personal circumstances as well. But I do think that, you know, a lot of the feedback that I got, or that our team got, going into this whole process was totally across the board. Like, some people saying don't do any airdrop at all, everyone will just sell it, it's just bad for like the people that are stakeholders in the project and had other people saying like, you should do a massive airdrop. And I think at the end of the day, the right thing is to find what's, what feels fair and also what optimizes for the success of the ecosystem and the project in the longer term. For us, that was finding a distribution of over 10% in aggregate coming from the sum of the airdrop plus the, um, Coinbase token sale.

This episode is brought to you by Zashi Wallet, your gateway to buying, storing, and spending encrypted Bitcoin. Zcash is decentralized digital cash encrypted to preserve agency and safety. With a fixed supply of 21 million and a proof-of-work consensus, Zcash is encrypted Bitcoin. With Zashi Wallet, you can swap Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency into Zcash and stay shielded by default. Thanks to Zashi Wallet for making today's episode possible. Shout out to today's sponsor, Katana. Katana is a DeFi-first chain built for deep liquidity and high yield. No empty emissions, just real yield and sequencer fees routed back to DeFi users. Incubated by Polygon Labs and GSR, Katana is launching with notable ecosystem of primitives, assets, and partners like Morpho, Chainlink, and more. Katana's 1 billion KAT campaign is live. Bridge and deposit directly into vaults in one simple click and start earning immediately on your Ether, Bitcoin, USDC, and more. Follow the link in today's show notes to get started. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply.

Let's talk about the Coinbase token sale. Why did you— why did— why was that a good idea to do? You talk, you talk a couple of times, Kony, about like expanding the distribution of token holders. And I'm assuming that was a strategy internally because you've mentioned a few times and Coinbase was maybe the how in terms of how to get to that objective. But yeah, dig into the why you guys decided— I mean, this was a test run, right? Because it was the first time You know, Coinbase has just acquired Kobi's platform, Echo, and you guys were, I think, the first, um, you know, protocol to use that for token sale. Tell us about that decision.

Hmm. Um, yeah, the, the ultimate thinking is that it's really important to expand beyond the crypto Twitter bubble, and instead of just including the same, um, Well, sorry. So as I was saying before, like, I think that there are 3, at least 3 different distinct stakeholder groups, A, B, and C, um, where group B is like people that are very active on-chain or very active on crypto Twitter. And then group C is just a much larger group of people. I think it is hard to incorporate both of those in a single initiative, like a single sale. And so you've seen Some projects take the approach of targeting Group B through a token sale. Um, Legion in particular does that, and I think they're quite thoughtful about their, um, scoring system for automatically building up a score of each person based on their on-chain activity and GitHub activity and so on. Um, but it is still like, it's an algorithm and it rewards participation. In crypto, which is great, but it also excludes people that maybe don't, haven't gotten there yet. And maybe you need two different tiers in order to be able to tackle that. In any event, in our case, in the case of Monad, Group B was really targeted through airdrop and Group C was targeted through the token sale on Coinbase, which is more of a lower common denominator. Anyone with access to the Coinbase platform could participate.

What, what are the learnings having— I mean, you guys were the first company to use this new platform, like what went well and what didn't go well?

Oh, actually, that reminded me of— you were saying that this is right after Coinbase acquired Echo, right? But one confusing thing is that this was not— oh, this is Sonar done, or this is not done through Echo or Sonar. This is done through a separate platform that Coinbase had been developing.

Oh, I didn't realize that. I thought this was Echo. Oh, interesting. Oh yeah. I thought, okay. Yeah. Yeah. That actually, that makes sense. That makes sense.

No worries. Yeah. I mean, they could probably speak better, Chip, but I think the summary is that Echo is for early stage projects that are raising through an Echo group where there's a group leader that has to kind of sponsor it. And then Sonar is like a KYC as a service platform where the project does the sale themselves and then just uses Sonar's KYC abilities to—

this was more like their native, maybe you could call it like a launchpad or something like that.

That's, um, yeah, something like that. Like, it's, it is on their platform, it's on their website, it's in their mobile app. Yeah, um, it's, uh, users that have onboarded onto the Coinbase platform already.

Yeah. What do you think about the timing of all of this? Like, when you timed the testnet, the airdrop, the token sale on Coinbase, and mainnet. Would you, looking back, would you do all the timing the same?

I think I would, honestly. I mean, really the, the constraining factor is, is the mainnet. Like the mainnet is like driven by technology and driven by, um, uh, integrations and ecosystem readiness for day one of mainnet. But That is really like the starting line of the, a lot more to come. And everything else is kind of like, you know, T minus, T minus X days for those different things.

Yeah. Yeah. Why did you wait? I'm trying to think of a polite way to put this, but like, why did you wait so long to launch mainnet?

In my view, we were not waiting at all. We were, there's just simply like, when the mainnet is ready to go live. Um, there's certainly— I could tell you for like very affirmatively that, um, we are not trying to time the market or time anything. Like it's literally the right— the moment when the technology is ready to go.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

What were the last little things that you guys were working out?

Um, Some things related to, well, okay, so I guess maybe the, you know, I'll tell you a little bit more about how to launch a mainnet. There's a, the sort of like full conformance to all of the standards that exist in the Ethereum space. So EVM compatibility, RPC compatibility, integrations with like a bunch of different third parties, exchanges, etc. Um, there's, uh, like getting, um, the codebase audited, um, responding to like any issues that were identified there. Um, those are all like parts of the process. Um, I think some of the later things that we, uh, that the Category Labs team, um, which is the developer of the software that is now in mainnet, where the staking functionality and just things related to network robustness, especially given the need to support like thousands and tens of thousands of full nodes.

What was the toughest part about getting this, about getting everything live, Keone?

It's not one big thing. It's really just a lot of, um, it's a lot of small things. It's not also not on me. It's really just on, on our whole team to share the work. And yeah, I think that, um, what I will say is that it's interesting that the, uh, Crypto Twitter sentiment can be very volatile and just staying focused and staying focused on our north star and our mission has really helped us to weather both moments where we were, where Crypto Twitter was too euphoric about us, about Monad, and also moments where too bearish.

Yeah. What do you think the sentiment is today?

I think it's very strong right now. I think people are super excited about, um, the Coinbase token sale. They're excited about the opportunity for a lot of people to like get a stake in this, in the network, and a stake in the project. Um, I think people have been excited about the performance of the blockchain itself and the new technology and just optimistic about the future.

Yeah, nice. Um, so we had Kane on Jason Yanowitz, um, uh, I don't know, probably a month ago, and he was talking about the idea of angel investors and getting, you know, the benefits of having a lot of investors invest in your thing. And he actually brought up Monad as an example, which is, you know, you guys have a, you guys have an expansive cap table, um, and I think you guys raise capital really strategically. And because of that, I think that actually really helps with the— you have a lot of supporters, right? You know, people are you know, maybe not going to speak poorly about you guys if they're investors in the project or something like that. How do you think that's— maybe what advice would you give to other founders in terms of like what went well there? And then I mean, the downside of that is you have to coordinate with— I don't know how many people you have on the cap table, but, you know, it's probably one of the larger cap tables, I think, in crypto. How do you think about the pros and cons of it and what you guys did right versus wrong there?

I think that Well, first of all, the most important thing with respect to investors is just having people that will support, um, the project and the team through ups and downs. Um, that's just true no matter what. Yeah. Um, I think we were very fortunate to have really supportive backers and people who are there for moral support and, you know, there's like specific things that folks can help with, but a lot of it is also just like, you know, the mental reminder of, you know, I've got your back, like I'm rooting for you. I'm, you know, when you do something well, like I'm congratulating you. And if something's not going well, like you can come to me and talk. And that, I think that makes a huge difference. That's really the single most important thing. I think that with respect to approach of prior investments that we've raised, I've raised. It is, yeah, without getting into all the details, I do think that we've taken an approach of having a lot of smaller investors and that in some ways can be reminiscent of, although at an earlier stage with more risk taken by each person, reminiscent of the approach to, um, now with the public sale and just a goal of having a lot of stakeholders. And yeah, I don't— at the end of the day, um, investors also are taking, you know, a lot of risk, and, um, we understand that and appreciate that.

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When it comes to ecosystem building, I think, I mean, Kevin did, you know, Intern did an amazing job, obviously, and got a lot of funding for new projects building on Monad. There are a lot of funds that were big supporters like Dan and CMS and stuff like that. How do you think about what is the right strategy to support teams and applications building on Monad? There's kind of the, like, uh, you know, one side of the spectrum would be kingmaking, the other side of the spectrum would be like, don't give anybody any support. Most people have done something in the middle. Um, how do you think about what the right strategy is there?

I think it's extremely important for, um, Monad, and really for any crypto project. So this is like the advice I would give any team that is trying to grow an ecosystem, it's really important to be very neutral and to not pick favorites, to not kingmake, to not assume that we know, as the Monai Foundation, we, that we know who should be the winner, even if we have as individuals, like, uh, a belief, because oftentimes we as human beings are wrong. Um, it's really important. Like, I think one of the reasons why Ethereum has been really successful is because of that policy of credible neutrality and, um, just openness to anyone competing. I think this is also for me personally, um, driven by previous experience because I was, um, I started my career at a company called GetGo, um, which was one of the early movers in high-frequency trading. Uh, it was a really interesting and fun company to work at when I joined in 2011. Um, but they had a very you know, like assignment-driven approach to assigning different trading desks to different products, um, to different exchanges and different opportunities. And I saw the company go from being the number one player in the space to, uh, basically extinct in the course of just a couple of years, um, because the lack of competition and all the rules about who got to trade what resulted in other competitors catching up and eclipsing GetGo in the course of literally just like a couple of years. And the company that I joined afterward called Jump Trading, the people in crypto know about a lot, already had the opposite policy where there's a bunch of different trading teams and it's just capitalistic. Like every team can figure out what they want to trade. Figure out how they want to spend their time and may the best team win. And the result was that, um, Jump Trading was really successful across a huge variety of different exchanges and asset classes and so on because of that policy of competition and not kingmaking. So I just think that it's really important that, you know, it's the very early days in the Monat ecosystem. We don't know who will be successful. It could be you know, an incumbent that's, um, you know, multi-chain and has a lot of experience. It could be the scrappy upstart team that's just hustling really hard and innovating really fast. And I think for us at the Monad Foundation, our job is to elevate the baseline level of support and provide, you know, great tools and great support to all builders, um, and automate as much as we can, um, so we don't have like a million Telegram chats where we're helping people like in Yeah, like sort of like low-level ways, but instead just cultivate an environment where people get access to a lot of resources and can help themselves.

How do you do that? Because if it was a, you know, if this was Web2 and it was a SaaS business, you would build what would be, you know, notably called like a customer success team or an account management team. And you'd have like, you know, maybe one customer success rep per 8 companies or something. How have you guys set that up? How do you give the teams the support without having it just be super chaotic and everyone's pinging Kevin or something like that?

Um, well, part of it is through technology, actually. Um, so we've built a platform called Delta V, um, which I like to describe as a social network for founders of sorts. Um, so it's a website where people can, uh, builders can go create a profile, answer some questions about why they're building, what their vision is, share updates. Um, and then we use a bunch of, um, AI to like summarize updates and connect builders to investors. And also we run some programs that people can access through this.

Huh. This is cool. So you guys built this all in-house?

That's correct. Yeah.

Yeah. Interesting. How much of this is— how much do you think of the tooling? How much do you think of tooling is built out already versus there's like opportunity to go build more tooling like this? Like, you know, you mentioned like account abstraction or wallets. Like, you know, I'm assuming when you guys founded Monad, there weren't things like, you know, like Privy, for example. And now I see on Delta V you're using Privy. How much did the— basically the tech stack change as you guys were building this?

It definitely has improved quite a bit. I agree with you, especially on the UX side and onboarding side. But at the same time, the— there's still like a lot of things that are the same. Like, people still use Gnosis Safe as the default multisig. Um, the oracles, they still like generally use the same ones. So I think what Monad offers is the best of, you know, the ability to, um, for developers to benefit from new improvements to the Ethereum ecosystem and new infrastructure, but also to just be like, you know, a brain dead or sorry, like to be able to integrate and use everything without having to think twice.

What would you say to people who say, why do we need another chain?

I'm just reminded of this meme that Frankie from Paradigm posted recently. It's the mid-curve meme with the like 70 IQ, 100 IQ, and 130 IQ. Personas and the guy in the middle at the 100 IQ is saying, why do we need XYZ? Like all these other ones have already, they failed before, like failed to achieve meaningful adoption, failed to move the needle. And the 70 IQ person and the 130 IQ person are saying, just do the thing well. So I do just fundamentally believe that execution is everything. I think our team has, our team is amazing. Our team has shipped great initiatives, great products on very short timelines and is moving the space forward. And the only thing that I can say is, so far the Monad team has executed well and delivered a really high quality product. And that ultimately opens up the space of design for any builder that's taking advantage of decentralized rails.

Who do you think ends up being a bigger competitor? Someone like, uh, maybe a crypto-native player like Solana, or, um, one of these public chain— or, uh, I don't know, corporate chain. I don't know, let's use Tempo as an example. Like, who do you think more about, Tempo or Solana?

I, I think that, um, big companies, uh, like existing Web2 enterprises getting involved in the crypto space has a long history of Um, when, um, when an initiative is done without collaboration with very crypto-native companies, it, um, it's very difficult for them to really find success because there's a lot of sort of background knowledge that you need to have. It also just takes a long time. Like you have to, there's a lot to be built, but they have the collaboration of Paradigm would be the, would be the argument there for sure. I think that Tempo is an interesting, um, experiment, definitely. More well-staffed than maybe some of the previous efforts we've seen, but there aren't going to be like 10 Tempos also. Like, I think the reality is that for most companies that want to use crypto for payment rails to take advantage of decentralized tech, they're much better off integrating with an existing system that has already achieved a network effect from many users and a lot of apps, a lot of integrations.

Yeah. And from a go-to-market perspective, how do you, uh, if you could only prioritize like one customer, would it be the crypto-native folks, like bringing, I don't know, yeah, crypto-native applications on, or would it be, you know, Tempo's going after Klarna and maybe Arbitrum's going after Robinhood? Like, how do you think about that strategy? It's very, because I've never seen someone do both well, right?

Why do you— let me turn that back on you a little bit. Like, why do you think people— that teams are not able to tackle both at the same time?

I just haven't seen anyone do it very well. I think that there's a— who your core customer is ends up filtering down into the entire organization. And like, and it actually impacts everything. It impacts not only like your branding, but also like who you hire. Do you hire someone from Uber? Or do you go hire someone who's worked at Aave, right? Those are two very different people. So You know, if you look at it, so that's one reason is because it's not only just like, I don't know, your marketing and who you— how you talk about yourself, but it trickles down to every decision you make at the company. The other thing is, I think people who went after enterprises historically, they did it in a way that drove more marketing than actually adoption. And I think that there was a lot of probably under-the-table payments that happened, which people in crypto knew about. So then it gives you a bad rap and it actually turned—

it was like very—

it wasn't only neutral, it was like negative marketing for that brand. And so it really turned them— turned crypto-native people away from those folks. I guess you could say there's probably, you know, yeah. So that's what I think.

Yeah, I agree with what you said. I think that at the end of the day, nothing that the Monad Foundation team does should be for the purposes of an empty headline. We've really tried to take that approach. I mean that sincerely. We've tried to take that approach in everything we've done up to now. There's no, you know, like when we talk about the technology, when we, when we talk about decentralization, when we talk about finality, like these are provable things. We have open source code. People can go look at gomonads.com and check out the validator dashboard and see the global set of validators. And this will continue to scale. And I think similarly, yeah, I just, I think that empty headlines are, like you said, not very valuable in the long run. Maybe there's a short-term spike in interest, but if there's one thing that's true, it's that the crypto space has become increasingly fast about moving on from such headlines and removing the incentive for teams to actually do that, which I think is healthy. So at the end of the day, it's going to be about identifying real adoption that does actually benefit from Um, where the value to the counterparty is from the efficiencies from using the technology rather than just from like a one-time grant that constitutes all, or maybe even like more than 100% of the value. Yeah.

Yeah. What are your, uh, if everything goes well, Keoni, what does 2026 look like?

I think it's more of a grit and grind. Thing for us. I don't assume instant success. I don't, I think the Monad ecosystem has a lot of growth needed. The teams, every Monad-native builder has a ton of iteration to do on their product. These are basically their MVPs, their first dollar of revenue and their first dollar of TVL occurred on like 2 days ago. So there's a lot of learning to do, um, that can't happen overnight. It happens through a lot of experimentation and, um, a lot of candid feedback and feedback from the users. So yeah, I just think that, um, I don't know, I just tell my team, like, we're not successful. Like, we just launched a, um, public mainnet, and that's something to be extremely proud of, and everyone worked really hard, But, um, this is actually just the beginning. Yeah. Just really excited to be on that journey now.

Yeah. Um, Mike and I write an end of year, like, review and reflection that we send to investors, and we just started making them public as well. And we, I was starting to write mine this year and I was reading back to what I wrote last year in this, like, um, you know, 2024 reflections. And I wrote, as we look back over the past 7 years, building Blockworks has been less about the big moments in time, less about the product launches, the huge hires, and the fundraise. It's been more about putting one foot in front of the other day after day after day while making sound decisions that optimize for sustainable long-term oriented growth, which doesn't sound exciting on a podcast, but it is the job of a founder.

So I think one, one thing that I realized recently is that, um, I'm a person that cares about the end goal, that cares about the ends, but also cares a lot about the means. I like, I really enjoy. The day-to-day of solving problems and figuring things out and seeing people grow. And like that, a lot of that is really what drives me, is just wanting to do things well and wanting to support a team that does things well. I think that if you're a basketball player, like, you cannot be elite without really loving the game because you're— you have to shoot 1,000 free throws in a row. On a Friday night. Like, you have to do that. Um, you have to really love it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Kieran, that's probably a good place to end it. Congrats on everything. Um, I know this is only the beginning for you guys and yeah, yeah. Just congrats on everything to not only you, but also the team as well.

Thank you.