In 2020, while leading high-frequency trading at Jump Trading, Keone Hon ventured into crypto after the COVID crash. His investment deepened at Jump Crypto in 2021, where he led blockchain research and development of Solana DeFi.
This experience of combining institutional trading expertise with high-performance blockchain development led Hon to spot a gap in the market: the need for a trading infrastructure that could match the efficiency of traditional finance, while still remaining within the Ethereum developer ecosystem. In early 2022, during the crypto winter, Hon left Jump to co-found Monad Labs.
This vision has attracted $225 million in funding in 2024 – one of the largest crypto fundraising rounds of the year. Monad’s technical specifications tell the story: while Ethereum processes 15 transactions per second (TPS) with fees of $10-50 and Solana handles 2,600 TPS with fees under a penny, Monad aims to run 10 000 GST for just $0.001 per transaction. Currently, DeFi’s daily trading volume is in the billions, a fraction of the trillion-dollar daily volume of traditional finance.
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The MonadBFT consensus mechanism of blockchains aims to achieve these efficiency and cost gains through pipelined consensus and parallel execution, while maintaining EVM compatibility. “We chose to build on Ethereum because almost all developers build for EVM,” Hon said in an interview with CoinDesk. “By making EVM much more performant, we’re giving developers the best of both worlds.”
This addresses a critical limitation of DeFi: “In traditional finance, typical execution costs are single-digit basis points…whereas in DeFi, right now, people are very accustomed to to pay 30 basis points or 50 basis points or 1%”, The honorable note.
As 2025 approaches, Monad’s focus on institutional-grade infrastructure and fully on-chain order books suggests a shift from the speculative era of crypto to rebuilding the core systems of traditional finance. With the mainnet launch scheduled for early 2025, the crypto world will be watching to see if Hon’s Wall Street-meets-Web3 experience can help bridge the gap between DeFi and traditional finance.
“A fully on-chain order book can do what traditional finance does, but with a fraction of the cost and greater transparency,” says Hon. “This is the future.”
