Monad Labs Raises $225M for Ethereum-Compatible Blockchain

Monad Labs, a blockchain firm, secured $225 million in funding led by Paradigm, Electric Capital, and Greenoaks.

Fortune reports that Paradigm, along with Electric Capital and Greenoaks, led a $225 million fundraising round for Monad Labs, a blockchain firm developing a high-performance layer-1.

Only a few weeks had passed since Fortune reported in March that Monad was in talks to raise over $200 million for an L1.

The release states that Monad is working on a layer 1 that is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and is aimed at the blockchain ecosystem’s execution side. In comparison to Ethereum, the startup intends to reduce fees even further while accelerating transaction speeds.

Keone Hon, the creator of Monad Labs, stated in an interview with Fortune on Tuesday: “We’re emerging from around two years of development… At a time when the academic community was focusing on roll-up, data availability, and other avenues of scaling, Monad essentially went pretty deep on the pure execution side.

Because of Monad’s 100% EVM compatibility, developers building on Ethereum will be able to transfer their projects to the Monad platform, unlike many L1s.

As a decentralized, developer-forward Layer 1 smart contract platform, Monad aims to solve some of Ethereum’s drawbacks, such as high gas costs during network congestion.

Hon told Fortune, “We realized there was a huge need for a more performant EVM, and that no one was really working on this problem.”

The Monad Labs development network saw its release last month, following two years of development. In a March X post, the business asserted that its technology could process 10,000 transactions per second.

After an 18-month bear market, this news comes just as cryptocurrency fundraising is beginning to gain momentum. To cap off an optimistic first quarter of venture capital activity in the sector, cryptocurrency entrepreneurs garnered over $1.1 billion in funding last month.