Monad Labs Raises $225M in This Year’s Biggest Funding Round

Crypto VCs are still vying to back the leading Layer 1 chain , as Monad Labs closes a whopping $225 million round.

Led by Paradigm, the round includes Coinbase Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, Electric Capital, and a number of angel investors such as MakerDAO’s Rune Christensen, professional NFL player Saquon Barkley, and Reflexivity Research’s Will Clemente.

“Very excited to have angel invested in Monad,” said Clemente today on X. “After meeting the team several times it was clear that they were on to something special. Expect Monad to solidify itself as a leading L1, sitting at the cross section of why people love Ethereum and Solana.”

Monad says it’s a performant Layer 1 blockchain,which introduces parallel execution and superscalar pipelining to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which is the computational engine that enabled smart contracts that was first developed by Ethereum but is now used by may other chains.

Monad’s goal is to improve on the EVM, and says it can enable 10,000 transactions per second, 1-second blocktimes and single-slot finality.

Focus on EVM-compatibility

According to DefiLlama, 95% of the smart contract language landscape is dominated by Ethereum’s Solidity, which explains the choice for Monad’s focus as an EVM-compatible blockchain.

In an interview with Fortune, Avichal Garg, managing partner for Electric Capital, explained that this focus permits a much more seamless go-to-market strategy.

“You hit the EVM compatibility and suck over a bunch of devs,” he said.

Monad has been focusing on execution at the base layer.

After two years building in stealth, Monad aims to launch a testnet in the next few months, and roll out its mainnet towards the end of 2024.