Why Monad
When you tell people you work in crypto, the conversation usually goes one of two ways. Some ask how much money you’ve made. Others assume you’re trying to convince them to buy something. The efficient ones manage both in the same sentence.
I get it. Spend five minutes on X and you’ll find charts, acronyms and new ways to lose money with cutting-edge technology. A large part of this industry has worked hard for its reputation, and pretending otherwise would be ridiculous.
But I don’t work at the Monad Foundation because I’m particularly interested in money. I work here because money shapes almost everything else.
To explain why Monad, I first need to explain what I think money’s for.
Money, time and freedom
Money is one of the most powerful technologies we’ve ever invented. It allows us to store work, coordinate with strangers and move value through time. Thanks to money, you don’t need to grow wheat every time you want a haircut, which is a considerable improvement for everyone, especially hairdressers.
But money is also a map of possible futures. It determines where you can live, which risks you can afford to take, how much time you can spend with the people you love and how many times you can say no before fear enters the room.
Think about it. We don’t want money because we’re fond of the numbers in a bank account. We want it because behind those numbers are decisions we’re still able to make. Part of our life has already been spent working, and we hope to recover it later as time, security or freedom.
Perhaps poverty isn’t only about having very little. Perhaps it’s also about having so few alternatives that every choice looks suspiciously like the last one. If every road leads back to the same room, calling it freedom is mostly a branding exercise.
We tend to imagine freedom as the absence of limits, but that doesn’t exist. Even Robinson Crusoe couldn’t ignore hunger, the weather or the dreadful internet coverage on his island. Freedom is something more modest: keeping enough room to make decisions within those limits. Being able to leave, refuse or start again without the price being everything you have.
A person can be free on paper and still have no real way out. They can choose between enduring a job that’s slowly draining them or failing to pay the rent. Technically, that’s a choice, just as it’s technically a choice when someone asks for your wallet while holding a knife.
Money matters because it expands or narrows that margin. It isn’t the meaning of life, although it determines an obscene amount of the conditions under which we’re allowed to search for one.
The problem begins when that freedom depends on permission. Your money carries your name, but it lives inside a system whose rules you didn’t write, can barely inspect and rarely get to question. While the system works, its infrastructure remains invisible. You only discover the difference between ownership and permission when someone withdraws the permission.
The account’s still there. The money, however, has stopped obeying you.
Crypto is a mirror
Crypto was born, at least in part, from a reasonable suspicion: perhaps we shouldn’t depend entirely on centralised institutions to own, move and coordinate value. Honestly, it came from engineers, philosophers and libertarians. Quite the trinity.
Then came the greed, the snake-oil salesmen, the personality cults and those who thought placing the word “decentralised” in front of a scam turned it into innovation. Human nature is EVM-compatible too.
Crypto doesn’t eliminate greed or stupidity. Sometimes it simply processes them faster. Nor does a cryptographic signature turn a bad decision into a good one.
And some parts of this culture drive me mad. Take the digital collectibles of childish rubber ducks that supposedly represent high status. We developed cryptographically verifiable digital ownership so adults could compete over who owns the bath toy with the rarest hat. Seriously?
I have nothing against rubber ducks (I loved the way they smelled of cheap plastic). What I struggle with is seeing a JPEG turned into a kind of aristocracy. Apparently feudalism wasn’t dead. It was waiting for better image compression.
Then there are speculative fads that occasionally transform blind luck into public authority. I have no problem with someone getting lucky. The fun begins when luck becomes talent and the winner starts lecturing everyone about discipline, vision and perseverance. Yesterday, he bought a token literally named Fart. Today, he explains the nature of capital. The internet loves a prophet, especially one with a fortunate timestamp.
There are far too many moments when crypto culture would have made the philosophers of earlier ages weep. For centuries, we asked what it means to live a good life. Now we seem to have settled on an answer: checking a dashboard every three minutes and barking in an X Space for attention.
Still, it would be unfair to blame crypto for all of it. We live inside a fairly rotten digital culture that fragments our attention, monetises our anxiety and keeps us reacting to things we’ll have forgotten five seconds later. Crypto merely attached money to it. A splendid combination: humans hungry for status, algorithms hungry for attention and systems that never sleep.
It’s a mirror with an amplifier. It reflects what we already are, only faster and louder.
Even so, freedom includes the freedom to waste it on nonsense. A network open only to the uses we consider noble wouldn’t remain open for long. It would need a committee to decide what deserves to exist, and we already know what follows: forms, friends of the committee and a presentation assuring us that it’s all for our own good.
I’m not defending the ducks. I’m defending the fact that nobody should need my permission to create them. The challenge is to build things useful enough that the ducks can eventually return to where they belong: the damn bathtub.
I don’t work in crypto because I admire all of its culture. In many respects, I work in crypto despite it. I do it because underneath the noise lies an idea that’s still worth pursuing.
The power to leave
Crypto’s important contribution isn’t giving us more objects around which to build a frenzy. We already had plenty.
Its contribution is allowing us to build systems where the rules are public, ownership can be verified and an operation doesn’t depend entirely on an intermediary’s decision. Instead of trusting that an institution will never abuse its power, we can design systems that reduce the power available to abuse.
Good systems don’t assume people are perfect. They assume they’re not.
A protocol resembles an institution expressed in code: it defines what can happen, how agreement is reached and which conditions must be met to change the system’s state. That doesn’t make the code inherently fair. It can contain mistakes, favour particular interests or turn a stupid idea into a remarkably efficient stupid idea.
Decentralisation doesn’t save us from thinking. It forces us to think earlier, because the system will later execute exactly what we asked it to do. Computers have always had that irritating habit.
For me, crypto’s deepest value lies in expanding our ability to leave. When a genuine alternative exists, the balance of power changes. An institution treats someone who can walk away differently. An intermediary stops being an authority and returns to what it should always have been: a service you can replace.
Decentralisation doesn’t make power disappear. It makes power easier to challenge, easier to see and harder to accumulate without resistance.
Notice how freedom rarely vanishes all at once. We normally hand it over bit by bit in exchange for convenience, through decisions that seem perfectly reasonable on their own. Centralisation works the same way: you solve every problem by adding another layer of control and, before you know it, you have built a bank.
Only now it has a Discord server.
Why Monad
I joined the Monad Foundation because I saw technology with genuine potential to change the ecosystem. Not because it promised a utopia - utopias tend to age badly and cause stomach ulcers - but because the protocol’s architecture tackles a concrete problem: decentralisation can’t become global infrastructure while using it remains slow, expensive or unnecessarily difficult.
To be clear: Category Labs develops the initial client; my work sits closer to the point where the protocol meets the people building around it. That may sound like corporate plumbing, but it matters. An open protocol should eventually be larger than any one company or foundation.
For years, we’ve accepted a poor choice. We can have open, decentralised systems that are inefficient, or we can gain performance by concentrating infrastructure in fewer hands.
The protocol’s architecture is designed to break that trade-off. It combines parallel and asynchronous execution, a purpose-built storage system called MonadDb, efficient block propagation through RaptorCast and the MonadBFT consensus mechanism. At the same time, it preserves full EVM bytecode compatibility and compatibility with the Ethereum RPC API, allowing developers to keep using familiar knowledge and tools. It’s what I keep saying in UX: don’t make people relearn what they already know.
The names matter less than the design choice behind them: performance should come from better software, not from quietly reducing the number of people able to participate. Nobody writes “fewer people can join” on a benchmark slide. They simply make the number bigger and hope you don’t ask what paid for it.
As of October 2026, the Monad docs describes 10,000 transactions per second of throughput, a 300-millisecond block frequency and 600-millisecond finality. It attributes that performance to software architecture improvements rather than reliance on heavy hardware or node colocation.
The figures matter, although there’s nothing particularly spiritual about the number ten thousand. They matter because technical limits eventually become human limits. If a network is too expensive, some people are excluded. If running a node requires too much hardware, fewer people can verify it. If an application is slow and unpleasant to use, most people will return to centralised alternatives.
A decision about memory, latency or disk access also draws a political boundary. We sometimes forget that behind every technical limit is someone who’ll be able to participate and someone who won’t.
That’s what drew me to Monad. Performance isn’t interesting merely as the largest number on a slide, but as a way to expand what people can build without abandoning the principles that made it worth building in the first place.
What you see from the inside
The technology made me join. The people are a large part of what makes me stay.
This is one of the first times in my career that I’ve been able to speak with founders and senior leaders as equals. I can ask questions, disagree and understand why a decision is being made without passing through three layers of corporate theatre. Nobody has to pretend a senior person has rediscovered fire every time they open their mouth.
That proximity lets you see things that never appear in a presentation. Someone can rehearse a vision for months, but it’s much harder to rehearse every small conversation, every disagreement and every moment when there’s no audience.
What I’ve seen has made one thing clear to me: before being great visionaries, they’re good people. This is something I’ve always defended at Etéreo - the power of good people. A good person can become an exceptional professional. The reverse is a lost cause.
That might sound soft in an industry that often mistakes cynicism for intelligence. It is not. Cynicism is often just laziness wearing a clever coat. Character matters precisely when people are building systems intended to distribute power. Intelligence can produce highly sophisticated systems, but it can’t guarantee that those systems will be worth living inside.
There’s a lovely paradox here: trust-minimised systems are initially built by people we must trust. I don’t see that as a contradiction. Such systems don’t come from contempt for human beings, but from understanding their limits. Even good people make mistakes, leaders change, organisations decay and power always finds remarkably creative reasons to keep accumulating.
Decentralisation is also a form of humility: building something that doesn’t depend forever on you remaining intelligent, fair or indispensable.
The work that happens on Tuesdays
Monad Foundation is one core contributor among many participants in the Monad community. Its public role includes developer support, ecosystem initiatives and decentralisation efforts intended to help foster the growth and adoption of the ecosystem around the Monad protocol. That’s the official description.
From the inside, the work is far less cinematic. In practice, it means listening to builders, connecting people, removing obstacles and helping where useful. You’d be surprised how much of that work goes on quietly. It also means remembering that support doesn’t make the Foundation the centre of the ecosystem. The work matters when it helps independent participants do more without needing the Foundation at all. Otherwise, support becomes dependency with better branding.
Important transformations rarely look important while they’re happening. They usually look like a conversation running long, a bug nobody understands or someone solving a problem on a Tuesday afternoon while somebody on X announces, for the fifth time that week, that they’ve reinvented finance.
Revolutions look much better in retrospect. In real time, they have open tickets.
That everyday work can help turn a technical possibility into a social reality. Technology changes nothing merely by being superior on paper. Someone has to understand it, use it, argue about it and build things with it that its creators never imagined.
If you control too tightly what’s allowed to emerge, you don’t have an ecosystem. You have a private garden.
What lies beneath
I don’t work at Monad to make people think more about money. I hope that one day they’ll have to think about it less.
Using what belongs to you shouldn’t require authorisation. Building an idea shouldn’t depend on knowing the right person. A community should be able to coordinate without first surrendering its autonomy. Where someone is born shouldn’t completely determine which economic systems they’re allowed to access.
None of this will happen automatically. Technology won’t save us from ourselves. At best, it’ll give us better tools for organising and fewer excuses for accepting structures that no longer work.
Perhaps freedom isn’t about reaching a world without dependencies. Perhaps it’s about gradually expanding the part of our lives we can still decide for ourselves.
From the outside, crypto appears to be entirely about money. But money is only the visible layer. Beneath it are time, ownership, power and the possibility of choosing another path.
That’s why I work at the Monad Foundation. I don’t want to contribute to a machine that produces more money. I want to contribute to infrastructure that gives some decision-making power back to the people who use it.
Money is the visible excuse. Freedom is the work.
These are my personal views. They do not represent Monad Foundation, Category Labs or any other participant in the Monad ecosystem.