Monad, the Promised Land?
Parallel execution, asynchronous I/O, and even MonadDb—yep, that's all we're going to cover in simple terms. Yet, these are also the very elements that make Monad so magical.
You’ve already seen a million of times that Ethereum in itself isn’t scalable. Twitter has been full of debates regarding the EVM, rollups or insane gas price. Well, for the last one it has been a while it hasn’t happened lol, I should have add the ETHBTC chart discussions instead.
Anyway, enough chatters. If we started talking about the Ethereum constraints, it for a good reason. Monad aims to become the L1 that solve all of them. Is this the final Ethereum killer? Let’s see!
First thing first, Monad is a Layer 1. Just like Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche or [insert shiny ticker], Monad can validate and finalize transactions without the need for another network. In simple terms, it is a blockchain that work completely fine just by itself. Sweet.
You might argue that we already have toooons of those chains and we don’t need more. Fair enough. Though, Monad presents a compelling value proposition: the EVM, or the same big computer than Ethereum, but with 500x its performance.
This represents 10,000 transactions per seconds, or 1,000,000,000 per day if you prefer. Yes, this is more than what Visa does.
As a insightful crypto bro, you’re thinking something like “huh but Ethereum would do it if it was possible” or something similar. And yep, Ethereum would love to. But if faces a major problem: the infrastructure.
Ethereum is working on its scalability with many rollups executing more and more transaction per second for Ethereum. That’s one approach. Monad opted for another: building an new infrastructure from scratch, with parallel execution and a customized database at its core.
This is Monad's first trump card. If you’re somewhat familiar with the space, you might point out that Solana already does this, and you’d be absolutely correct. However, remember, Monad brings this technology to the EVM.
Now, what exactly is parallel execution? It means that multiple transactions can occur simultaneously.
Currently, Ethereum processes transactions one by one, or it waits for the completion of a previous transaction before executing the next. When numerous transactions are submitted simultaneously, the queue becomes huge, and users pay more and more fees to ship the queue. You now get why fees skyrocket sometimes, ggwp.
Parallel execution, on the other hand, is totally different. It enables multiple transactions to occur AT THE SAME TIME. Instead of waiting for each transaction to complete sequentially, they can be executed simultaneously.
Imagine it's that time of the year when we're watching Christmas movies and baking delicious cookies. Please get me back there.
You have two options:
Begin by preparing the cookies, place them in the oven, wait for them to bake, and THEN, finally, settle in to watch a movie.
Watch the movie WHILE you’re baking those insanely delicious cookies.
Notice the difference? Option one represents sequential execution—baking THEN watching. The second option illustrates parallel execution—you're doing both tasks simultaneously.
It's also important to understand that transactions executed in parallel must be independent. For example, if you wanted to eat the cookies while watching the movie, you'd have to wait for the cookies to finish baking before starting the film. However, if the cookies were a gift for your grandma, you could bake them while watching the movie. Similarly, if transactions involve swapping tokens within the same liquidity pool, they are dependent because the price will fluctuate, and thus cannot be executed in parallel.
Congratulations! You now master a new concept that has the potential to increase your throughput by 10 to 100 times.
Monad can execute a lot of transactions very quickly, which is very cool. But, this also means that the rest of its infrastructure must be extremely performant.
That’s why Monad built MonadDb from scratch, a custom database for storing blockchain state. It houses the current status of the chain. Imagine taking screenshots of the blockchain to make sure you keep track of what’s happening and saving them in your library; the library represents the database in this analogy.
Monad is the first chain that decided to build its database from scratch and optimize it for Ethereum's data structure for storing state. Currently, every existing blockchain uses a commoditized database, which more suitable for different data structures. It's akin to trying to store text in a library designed for pictures; it simply doesn't make sense.
Asynchronous I/O
Monad executes multiple transactions in parallel, right?
Now, say a task needs to read data from the disk, or the place where the data is stored if you prefer. The disk, which also retrieve the data, shouldn't wait for that operation to finish, we don't want it to slow things down. Instead, it should start the task and move on to others until the task is totally completed, then get back to the first operation, etc. This requires the database to use asynchronous I/O, or async I/O.
Async I/O means starting a task, like saving a file, and doing other work while waiting for it to finish. When the task is done, the computer gets a signal and handles it.
Think about baking cookies while watching a movie. Yes, again lol. You prepare the cookies, put them in the oven and read your book while they bake. When the cookies are ready, a timer beeps, and you take them out.
That's what Monad wants for its database. A task needs data from the disk, so it starts but doesn't wait. It begins another task while waiting for the first. It’s a way more optimised process. Simple!
This way, reading the blockchain's status isn't a problem, and transactions can be executed at the pace of parallel execution.
We have seen how Monad excels in execution, thanks to parallelization and its customized database.
The 'ah-ha' moment is coming. Say it, bro. Yes, Monad is Ethereum-compatible.
Simply put, that means every single application built on Ethereum can be deployed on Monad... without changing a single line of code. No need to reinvent the wheel or start from scratch in another language. None of that. Simply port your existing code, and voilà, you can enjoy a highly performant infrastructure.
But that’s not all; you also benefit from every single tool already created. This means that you can use the same wallets such as Metamask or block explorers like Etherscan.
Last but not least, the address space in Monad is the same as in Ethereum. In simple terms, this means that you can reuse your existing keys and therefore have the same address on both Monad and Ethereum.
Isn’t it great, bro?
Monad is pushing the EVM to the next level. It has rethought the entire infrastructure of Ethereum to make it suitable for very high performance while maintaining compatibility with the EVM. This will not only allow Ethereum applications to unlock high performance but also enable the development of new applications and use cases that were unthinkable... until now.
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Great piece! I learned a lot