Blockchain Developer Monad Labs Raises $225M Led by Paradigm

• Monad Labs raised $225 million in a funding round led by Paradigm.

• The money will help in the development of its faster version of the Ethereum blockchain that is compatible with existing DeFi applications.

Monad Labs, which is looking to develop a faster version of the Ethereum blockchain, said it raised $225 million in a funding round led by Paradigm that will allow it to add staff and spend on bringing the test version of its blockchain into production.

The layer-1 blockchain is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) that executes the rules of Ethereum and makes sure submitted transactions and smart contracts follow the rules. More than 96% of the capital invested in decentralized finance (DeFi) is processed by the EVM, Monad said in a post on Substack.

However, while Ethereum processes fewer than 20 transactions per second, according to etherscan.io, Monad says its testnet, which went live in March, can handle some 10,000 TPS.

Ethereum’s speed, or lack of it, has spurred many efforts to provide a faster DeFi environment, including alternative layer-1 blockchains such as Solana and Cardano and layer-2 chains that bundle, or roll up, transactions and process them at a faster pace before sending them back to Ethereum for validation.

Monad said it rewrote the blockchain code, introducing techniques such as parallel execution to optimize performance at all levels of the protocol, to improve throughput.

Other investors in the round included Electric Capital, Castle Island Ventures, Animoca Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and CoinFund.