Monad Founder: The Next Chapter For Monad | Keone Hon

Transcript

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. This episode is brought to you by Zashi wallet. You'll hear more about them later in today's episode. Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is forformational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Block Works. Our hosts, guests,

and the Block Works team may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed. All right, everyone. Welcome back to Empire. Very excited about this one. We've got Kion uh from Monad recording. Uh we're recording on Wednesday, November 26th. I think this episode goes out on Monday, so in a couple days from now. Um wanted to have Kone on because obviously Monet just launched mainet. So Keony, I think uh first and foremost, a big congrats is due. >> Thanks Jason. Um it's been 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 um see how people are using the blockchain.

>> Yeah. Kevin, do you wear do you wear an aura ring or like a Whoop or anything like that? >> No, I don't actually. I'm really bad really bad on data. Um, >> I was gonna say, has your how's your health these has your sleep and how's your uh what I mean to turn this into a real question like what what have the last couple of weeks looked like for you and what's it like going into a big mainet launch like this? Um, yeah, I would love to just hear maybe specifics of what like a day in the life has looked like. Yeah, I think the So, we're on Wednesday. This is day three of of Monad Mainet. Um, 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. Um, Monad launched its test net in February of this year and we tried to make that a bigger event. um tried to simulate the mainet launch I guess and uh going through that experience was helpful. Um but the past couple of weeks have just been really intensive effort to um help many uh many teams that are integrating whether those are infrastructure providers like indexers or RPC providers, oracles, bridges, um account abstraction like there's just a long list of different integrators that um

are really helpful for teams that are building that's really important for Um the like 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 um it should just be true that all friction should be minimized. So yeah >> um just getting yeah getting sorting out all the kinks ahead of time and then onboarding many teams ahead of the public mainet was a big focus of ours for the previous couple weeks. >> Yeah. How do you think the launch how do you think mainet went? Like if 10 was, oh my god, this was perfect. We nailed every single thing we wanted to nail and one is that was catastrophic. Uh you know, shut this thing down right away.

Like what how do you think it went? >> I think I would give it about a seven out of 10. >> How come? Uh I think that the the blockchain itself worked um really seamlessly. Um in talking to many users um folks were excited about the UX speed of transaction processing, compatibility with all wallets. Um no major issues and the chain itself is is really fast and really performant while also being very decentralized. Um, 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 um, that part was really strong. I guess to answer the other side of it, like why not 10 out of 10? Um, I think it's just um, it's hard to line up all of the um, all of the teams that were shooting to be there on day one. um we were 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 mainet? Um I mean there's a couple uh 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 the hard decisions you guys made or or the unique decisions that you guys made around around launch.

I'll give you kind of a rundown um 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 Monad being the first project to do a token sale on Coinbase's new platform. Um, number three would be the decision to not have a ecosystemwide pre-eposit campaign, which have been really popular um with a lot of new blockchains. Um, number four, I guess, would be the um set of exchanges that are um the listed monet on day one. Um and then I guess

the number five which is just the bigger thing is uh the amount of time that we we waited to prepare every to make sure that everything was in a very final like um mainet ready in my opinion state um with public source code um with open source code audits um things like that that maybe we've seen some projects deviate from recently. Yeah. All right. That that gives us five topics. I like these. Let's let's start with number four actually, which is um 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, Buybit, and Bit Thumb were the four four biggest um four places with the most volume on day one. But actually number five was Salana. Then it went Gate and Kcoin. Correct me if this is wrong. Then eight was hyperlquid. And then Bitgget and Kraken. So the two most interesting observations for me there are one that Salana was the fifth largest place to trade Monad token. Um 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. Um, anyone can download the source code and compile it for their machines and run it and run a node. Um, any exchange like an exchange is kind of just like a business. It's a place that um accepts deposits and then credits users accounts internal to the exchange or um when users make a withdrawal request internal to the exchange um evaluates that and then sends tokens out. Um it's just a participant in the

network. So at the end of the day, exchange uh listing is really just exchanges like businesses integrating with an existing system. Um and I think depending on the participant that you mentioned there, some of them are truly um 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 um and added support for it and um just started like you know trading things. So, Hyperlquid and Salana are really two examples of that where um

yeah, there's not um this is not at all like something that uh it's pretty much Yeah, it's pretty much just like they they decide they have they can get some asset and start >> listing it on their exchange and um it takes off. >> Yeah. How do you think about this in your sho? I mean, there have been a lot of L1's 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 mainet um there were a couple of things that were really

top of mind for me. one was just literally the opening the um floodgates to uh everyday users, distributing the airdrop um and ensuring a broad distribution of the MON token at the start of the um public usage of the network. That's just really important from a decentralization perspective. Um, I think it's really important for growing crypto. Um, 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 Coinbased token sale is a great example of that where um uh the co Coinbased token sale is a way for um many everyday people to get um access to the MON token ahead of the public mainet. And I think it's it's been a huge success in terms of the number of participants that have been able to participate um over over 85,000 people. um 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 Salana or Hyperlquid um is totally fine by me and is totally exciting. I know that's a little bit controversial because sometimes people say like, "Oh, why um why do you want to help Salana? Why do you want to help Hyperlid? Aren't they your competitors?" And I just don't see it that way. I don't um 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 payw wall, but like gate your token on other chains. Um you 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 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 set up a you know your phantom wallet and get you know initiate coverage on monad basically and then go buy it there. Uh 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 um 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 the current, I guess you could say, like if the >> river's gone 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 proofof 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 CAT 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 three that you mentioned around uh the decision not to have an ecosystem predeposit campaign. This has been something that's very popular to um 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 three four five billion in TVL very very quickly. Um why did you guys not do this? >> There are probably at least two main reasons. Uh the first one is because I think that um the monad ecosystem needs to earn TVL over time um from enduser 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 um 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. Um so therefore to just flood the ecosystem with a ton of TVL um for no reason without it serving a useful purpose to end users um is kind of trying to actually the same thing like trying to um fight against the current like it the current should

be going in in the direction of um of what happens. 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, 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 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 um is ultimately transient. Yeah, there was a tweet from um I think his name is Abdul um at Monad. I think he maybe he's your head of DeFi or BBD or something like that. And >> yeah, head of DeFi.

>> Had a line that said too much TVL is a liability on a new chain. Can you uh can you expand on that a little bit? >> Yeah, I think it's a couple of things. First of all, um, in my view, the when users are using a new technology, they're inherently taking risk in order to do so. Um, that technology is less battle tested. Um, of course with Monad, we've been working on Monad for a long time. We've built a ton of testing. We've run test nets for a long time, but it is a new mainet 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 um, USDT0 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 or for a monad whatever it is >> and that's um >> it's a liability there too. K, 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 and because I know the exact chart you're talking about it's 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's accountability in um crypto and a lot of the accountability is really um at the social layer. Um I think that

like um 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 has 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. Um, however, also people I do think on crypto Twitter are generally driven by a semblance of truth. And when someone is >> um 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-eposit 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 Monad, even more generally to crypto. And the way to do that is to apply more traditional like web two 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 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 gain 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 spoke 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 here's my mental model of um how air drops 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 NFTts that are um important to the social layer um

and giving them a stake in the future network um as a you know olive branch and as a way to welcome them to the new network and and show them that they have a stake and get them excited. So that would be sort of the second one. Um maybe and I would add also to that acknowledging contributions that have happened in the past. Um for example um in the monitor drop we included spear bit auditors and or cantina auditors and um CL 911 members and protocol guild contributors and people that are working on educational initiatives like rare skills and chifi.

Um 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 mo 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 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, Coney? 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 um that's I guess what I was getting at when I said I can say this without making people mad. Um, 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 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 that 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, um, I cannot judge. Everyone has different personal circumstances as well. Um, but I do think that, you know, a lot of the the feedback that I got or that our team got going into this whole process was co totally across the board. like some people saying don't do any air drop at all. Everyone will just sell it. It's just bad for like the people that are stakeholders in the project. And I 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. Um, for us that was finding a distribution of over 10% in

aggregate coming from the sum of the airdrop um, 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 proofof 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, Chain Link, and more. Katana's 1 billion CAT 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 Coinbased token sale. Why did you why did why was that a good idea to do? you talk you talk a couple times Doney about like expanding the distribution of token holders and I'm assuming that was a a strategy internally because you've mentioned it a few times and Coinbase was maybe the a how in terms of how to get to that objective but yeah dig dig into the why you guys decide I mean this was a test run right because it was first time you know Coinbase had just acquired Kobe'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 H 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 three at least three 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 onchain activity and GitHub activity and so on. Um, but it is still like it's an algorithm and it rewards participation um, 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, um, in the case of Monad, um, 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 um, 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 what went well and what didn't go well >> um oh actually that reminded me of you were saying that this is right after Coinbase acquired Echo >> right >> uh but one confusing thing is that this was not >> oh was this was sonar >> done or this was not done through Echko or Sonar this is uh done through a separate platform that Coinbase had been developed veloping.

>> Oh, I didn't realize that. I thought this was echo. Oh. Oh, interesting. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I thought Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that actually that makes sense. That makes sense. >> No worries. Yeah. I mean, they could probably speak better to it, but I think the summary is that Echo is for early stage projects that are >> um raising through an echo group where there's a group leader that has to 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. 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 test net, the airdrop, the token sale on Coinbase, and the mainet, 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 mainet. like the mainet is like driven by technology and driven by um uh integrations and ecosystem readiness

for day one of mainet. But that is really like the starting line of the a lot more to come. Um and we everything else is kind of like you know tminus tminus x days for those different things. >> Yeah. Yeah. Um, 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 mainet? >> Um, in my view we were not waiting at all. We were there this is simply like when the mainet 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 um uh well okay so I guess maybe the you know I'll tell you a little bit more about how to launch a mainet um there's a the sort of like full conformance to all of the >> standards that um exist in the Ethereum space so EVM compatibility RPC compatibility um 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 this software that um is now in mainet um where the staking functionality and um just things related to network robustness um especially given the need to support like thousands and tens tens of thousands of full nodes Um,

what was the toughest part about getting this about getting everything live? Kony, >> 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 you know, crypto Twitter sentiment can be very volatile and um just staying focused and staying focused on our northstar and our mission um has really helped us to

weather both moments where we where crypto Twitter was too euphoric about us about Monad and also moments were 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 um 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, um, uh, I don't know, probably a month ago and he was talking about the idea of, uh, angel investors and getting, you know, the benefits of having a lot of investors invest in your thing. And he actually brought up Monet as an example, which is, you know, you guys have a you guys have a 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's 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? >> Um, 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 the team through ups and downs. Um, that's just true no matter what. Um, I think we're very fortunate to have really supportive backers and people who are there for moral support and, you know, there's like specific things that,

um, 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. 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 um come to me and and talk. and that I think that makes a huge difference. That's really the single most important thing. >> Yeah. I think that with respect to um uh the approach of um prior investments that we've that we've raised I've raised it is um 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. Um 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. Mantle is launching the Global Hackathon 2025 to accelerate the future of real world assets. With a $150,000 prize pool backing from a $4 billion

treasury and direct access to Bybit's 7 million plus users, this is the ultimate ecosystem for builders. Mantle has entered a new phase as the distribution layer connecting Tradfi and onchain liquidity. To accelerate this vision, the Mantle Global Hackathon 2025 is inviting developers to build scalable realorld assets and DeFi products. By building on Mantle, you get direct access to Bybit's 7 million plus users for potential listing exposure, support from the Mantle Treasury, and mentorship from top VCs like Spartan and Anamoka Brands. With six tracks prioritizing realorld assets and real FI, and a

$150,000 prize pool, plus grants, this is your chance to deploy on a high-performance modular layer 2. To register, click the link in today's show notes. Thanks to Mantle for making today's episode possible. The Uniswap trading API solves the problem of adding crypto to your products without the hassle of needing deep crypto expertise, ongoing maintenance, or liquidity aggregation. The trading API provides access to the unis swap protocol which has processed $3.3 trillion in all-time volume, handled over $465 million swaps from more than 25 million addresses, all with zero security breaches. Developed by Uniswap Labs, the US-based team behind one of the most

used DeFi apps access some of the deepest liquidity in crypto, combining both onchain and off-chain sources for optimal pricing. The same liquidity that powers billions in swaps now available via a singular API. Thanks to Uniswap for making today's episode possible. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk terms and conditions apply. When it comes to ecosystem building, I think uh I mean Kevin did, you know, in intern did an amazing job obviously and got a lot of funding for new new projects building on Monad. Um there are a lot of funds that were big supporters like Dan and you know 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 Monet Foundation, we that we know who should be the winner even if we

have as individuals like a a belief because often times 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 Gecko 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 uh 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 you know rules about who got to trade what resulted in um other competitors catching up and eclipsing Gecko in the course of literally just like a couple of years. Um, and the company that I joined afterward called Jump Trading um, that people in crypto know about a lot already had the opposite policy where there's a bunch of different trading teams and um, 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 a very early days in the monet ecosystem. We don't know who will be successful. It could be um 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 Mon 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. um like sort of like low-level ways, but instead um just cultivate an environment where people get access to a lot of resources and can help themselves. >> How how do you do that? Because if it was a, you know, if this was web two and it was a SAS business, you would build what would be um 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 eight 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 um connect uh 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 um how much do you think of the tooling uh how much do you think of tooling is built out already versus there's like opportunity to go build more tooling like this like uh 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? Um it definitely has uh improved quite a bit. I agree with you especially on the um UX side and onboarding side. Um but at the same time the there's still like

a lot of things that are the same like people still use Nosis 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 um but also to just be like, you know, a brain deadad or sorry like to be able to integrate and use everything without having to think twice.

Tony, >> what would you say to people who say uh why why do we need another chain? I'm just reminded of this um uh meme that uh Frankie from Paradigm posted recently. It's the midcurve meme um with the like 70 IQ, 100 IQ, and 130 IQ >> uh personas. And the guy in the middle, the 100 IQ is saying, uh why do we need XYZ? like all these other ones have already they've 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. Um so I do just

fundamentally believe that execution is everything. Um I think our team has um our team is amazing. 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 um 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 Salana or um one of these public chain or 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 Salana? I I think that um big companies uh like existing web two 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 there's a lot to be built >> but they have the collaboration of paradigm would be the would be the argument there >> for sure and I think that tempo is an interesting um experiment definitely um more well staffed than um 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 um they're much better off integrating with a existing system that has already achieved a network effect from many users and a lot of apps and a lot of

integrations. >> Yeah. And as a from a go to market perspective, how do you uh if you could only prioritize like one customer? Would it be the cryptonative folks like bringing I don't know yeah crypton native applications on or would it be you know tempo is going after clarna and maybe arbitum's going after Robin Hood like how 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 peop that teams are not able to tackle both at the same time >> I just haven't seen anyone do it very well um I think that there's a uh who your core customer is ends up filtering down into the entire organization and like and it 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 a right? Those are two very different people. So um you know if you look at uh so that that's that's one reason is because it it's not only just like I don't know your marketing and who you how you talk about yourself but it it it trickles down to every decision you make at the company. Um the other thing is I think people who went after enterprises historically they're 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. Um, and so really turned them turned cryptonnative people away from those those those folks. I guess you could say there's probably, you know, uh, yeah. So that that's what I that's what I think. >> Yeah, I agree with what you said. Um, 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.

Um, we've really tried to take that approach. I mean that sincerely. Um, we've tried to take that approach in everything we've done up to now. Um, there's no, you know, like when we talk about the technology, 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 ads.com and check out the validator dashboard and see the global set of validators. Um, and this will continue to scale. And I think similarly, um, 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 um 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 is 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 is constitutes all or maybe even like more than 100% of the value.

>> Yeah. Yeah. What are your uh if everything goes well, Kony, what does 2026 look like? I think it's more of a grit and grind um sort of thing for us. Uh I don't assume instant success. I don't you know I think the monad ecosystem um has a lot of growth needed. Um 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 um occurred on like two days ago. So there's a lot of learning to do. Um I 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 mainet 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 read an end of year like review and reflection that we sent to investors and we just started making them public as well. And we I was starting to write mine this year and I was uh 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 seven years building block works has been less about the big moments in time less about the product launches the huge hires and the and the fund raise. 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 dayto-day of um 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 yeah, 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 a thousand free throws in a row on a Friday night. Like you have to do that. Um you have to really love it. >> Yeah. Yeah. K, 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.