Crypto’s founding promise was open access to a fair and public financial system. Open networks have made gradual progress toward this goal. The first open network to get traction - Bitcoin - offered a medium of payments and a store of value, but halted at supporting stablecoins, DeFi, or RWAs. The second major open network, Ethereum expanded on that promise by enabling smart contracts, stablecoins, and RWAs, while facing limitations in scale, throughput, and trade execution fairness. The next big open network will be the one that solves trade execution fairness and scale, enabling global markets to actually move on chain.

If you are a signer on a multisig with admin control on a DeFi protocol, you should ONLY be signing using a separate device that you DON’T use to browse the internet, take video calls, vibe code, etc. Hardware wallets store your private key. But the computer you plug it into prepares the transaction. If you plug the hardware wallet into a computer doing everyday tasks, you cannot trust the payload. Many of the largest hacks this year could have been prevented by doing this. Every victim team describes the attack as complex, but fundamentally most of the boil down to getting access to the signing computer. Do you want all of your users’ funds to be taken and all of your hard work to get washed away? Switch with urgency. It is an extremely high-leverage action. MacBook Neos are pretty good for this. You can go cheaper too. If you are confused about this, please DM me and I will help you or put you in touch with our security team. Regardless of where you are building, we are happy to help. Security affects us all - hacks burn trust in the industry we know and love.

Incomplete happenings across Monad last week Perpl - $300M 7d volume - OI is up to $10M - there are 6 markets: BTC, SOL, ETH, HYPE, MON, and ZEC LeverUp - $80M 7d volume - BTC and ETH do the most volume, but there are a bunch of other markets including equity perps (mostly large QQQ constituents) OBSDN - $1.5M 7d volume - Most of the volume was in SAMSUNG. with some volume in SKHYNIX, SEMCO, ZHIPU, and KIXOIA - It's early days but the team is proving out the ability to launch interesting new markets Drake Exchange - Private mainnet just launched Kuru - 89M 7d volume - MON/USDC is the biggest market - WETH/USDC, cbBTC/USDC, and XAUt0/USDC also are quite liquid - Also launched Agent Arena PropAMMs - Metric led the pack with $16M 7d volume - LFJ's POE is in second place - is a new website tracking PropAMMs pricing, volume, and markouts - New blog post: Other DeFi stuff - @ethena is live on Monad - @saturn_credit is live on Monad, with a Pendle market - Monad is the second largest SyrupUSDC market (after Ethereum) - Stablecoin marketcap: $273M USDC, $118M AUSD, $73M USDT0, $9M M by M0, $9M mUSD, $9M GHO - AUSD also crossed 10k holders on Monad! - PT-AUSD is up to $83M - aHYPER is up to $66M - savUSD is up to $24M Payments - Monad is live on @PodsFinance for USDC deposits/withdrawals - MON is tradable on Interactive Brokers - USDC can be deposited/withdrawn to Monad on Interactive Brokers - New docs page: Earn/Yield Infra ( - New docs page: Payment Orchestrators ( - Nook app is growing its presence in Aave Monad Builders - @buildanythingso hackathon was this weekend. BuildAnything is an effort to teach everyone that they can build anything using modern tools. The hackathon received over 250 submissions, with winner announcement coming soon - @DeltaV_xyz weekly shipping: Protocol - New Cadence blog post: - New ELI5 Cadence page: - v0.15.1 is released; see changelog: - This release schedules the block time reduction (from 400 ms to 300 ms) for Thu, Jul 23. Testnet upgraded successfully two weeks ago - Foundry v1.7.1-monad-v1.0.0 is released Other - Monad Cards Onchain: - Great interview with Nick Cherny of Janus Henderson: - The x402 Foundation launch; Monad Foundation is one of the founding members: Every week, a bigger week

Monad v0.14.3 has been released for mainnet. This version is the first time that nodes are required to use Authenticated UDP for RaptorCast. Authenticated UDP is an improvement that significantly reduces overhead of verifying consensus messages; it was rolled out a few months ago in optional mode to give the network time to switch over. You can read more about Authenticated UDP here: This release also makes changes to allow full nodes to participate in reputation scoring, and does some preparatory work for Deterministic RaptorCast. Full changelog linked in the next post.

MIP-11 (Automatic Priority Fee Distribution) has been drafted by @category_xyz researchers. This proposal causes priority fees to be automatically shared to delegators, prorata to their stake, after deducting validator commission. Currently, all priority fees go to validators, who optionally share these fees with delegators using the `externalReward` syscall. This proposal makes the treatment of priority fees similar to the treatment of block rewards, and allows delegators to participate in the economics of the priority gas auction. Details As a recap, when users submit transactions on Monad, they pay a base fee and a priority fee. - Base fees are constant within a block (but vary from block to block based on recent network activity) and are burned. - Priority fees are variable (submitters send with elevated priority fee to have their transaction prioritized within a block) and are not burned. The protocol currently sends the priority fee to the node operator but gives the node operator the option of sharing it with their delegators using the `externalReward` syscall. However, most node operators are not sharing the rewards with their delegators, in part because it requires additional infrastructure to execute these syscalls periodically, and in part because it is difficult for users to know which node operators share these rewards. This proposal standardizes the behavior, causing priority fees to automatically share `(1 - commission_rate)` of the priority fees to delegators. This proposal slightly lowers node operator revenue and increases staker revenue. I want to mention a few philosophical points. When delegators bring stake to a node, they increase the number of blocks that that node will produce, thus increasing the amount of block rewards. They are compensated accordingly, receiving their "share" of the total block rewards earned by the validator (minus the commission of course). Priority fees are similar. The more stake a delegator brings, the more priority fees the validator unit earns. Smart delegators ought to demand their "share" of the priority fees as well, delegating to validators who agree to share the priority fees (after a commission). Validators would compete on sharing the priority fee and most stake would end up with validators who do so. However getting to that state with the current infrastructure is clunky. It is inconvenient for node operators have to set up the right infrastructure to call `externalReward` periodically, while handling corner cases like the dust threshold. It is also hard for delegators to see which node operators follow this policy since it is the presence or absence of action. This proposal standardizes the practice. Stakers receive most of the priority fees, while node operators continue to earn a cut proportional to the commission rate. Link to the MIP and the forum thread in the next post.

Feels like pooled lending protocols would benefit from a rate limit on the supply of an asset being deposited for collateral Like, if the current supply is 100m and the supply cap is 300m, the supply should only be allowed to go to 110m in the next 10 minutes. Nobody needs to deposit all 200m in one shot This matters because if/when an exotic asset is hacked, the impact of the hack is constrained by the size of the exit paths for that asset. Especially when you consider that many hacks are infinite mint bugs… there the size of the exits literally determines the size of the hack. Lending protocols are often the largest exits (DEX liquidity is usually pretty small). Having a “smart cap” that is a bit above current supply, which can adjust over a few hours to the true cap, would make a huge difference. It would have saved rsETH depositors $200m today This also raises an interesting point: asset issuers should want this too. If you are an asset issuer who issues receipt tokens which have a redemption delay, then you actually aren’t worried about a hacker redeeming with you. But you need possible exits to be as small as possible while not impeding normal users. High supply caps need to be seen as a liability, rather than a sign of stature.