The Last General-Purpose L1 The title hits home for me. Monad has been 4.5 years in the making, and it still feels like we’re just getting started. But when we set out in 2022 to build the right system from first principles, conditions and industry beliefs were very different. There is significant path-dependence, and I do feel we were lucky to acquire the resources and talent, and have the breathing room to truly innovate, to build the Monad of today. Monad is a general-purpose L1. I believe that no other L1 comes close to the level of reliability, performance, fairness, and decentralization. And I believe that there are significant advantages to concentrating all the network effects of DeFi, payments use cases, fintech integrations, asset availability, consumer experiences, and capital formation on a single shared global state, built on a decentralized and neutral network. It’s a bold bet, for all the marbles, and it’s one that almost no one is taking today. Almost every L1 or L2 that you see has pivoted into building a single first-party app. And the few new chains are corporate chains, running commodity tech and run by employees of a company with shareholders to answer to. Corporate chains get a boost from their existing distribution (or perhaps from crypto-natives anticipating that they will utilize their existing distribution). But what is built is inherently limited. The existence of an anchor tenant dissuades competitors of the anchor from integrating. Neutral is the right tack for a network that dreams of delivering universal access to finance. But neutrality is tough sledding these days. It requires years of prerequisite work, truly unique tech, a community of believers, and adequate resources to go the distance. Monad stands alone. It is a grand experiment, in which to succeed the ecosystem must outperform everything that came before. Better execution, better asset availability, better opportunities, fairer outcomes. I relish the challenges ahead.