Monad Co-Founder Keone Hon on Fixing Crypto’s Biggest Problem and Culture War

Crypto has spent years promising a financial system that is faster, cheaper and open to everyone. But even as more money moves onchain, users can still get punished simply for submitting a transaction.

Monad co-founder Keone Hon thinks if ever there were a time to fix that, it's probably now.

As Hon explained at The Tie's Out East Summit, two big updates coming to Monad could soon make it the first network to protect users from maximal extractable value, or MEV — one of crypto’s most persistent and potentially costly problems.

“In order to have an open financial system, it needs to be fair,” Hon told Coinage. “And one big component that’s not fair right now in other blockchains — in all other blockchains, actually — is this problem of MEV.”

MEV occurs when a user submits a transaction that remains visible in a blockchain’s pending queue, known as the mempool. Bots and other sophisticated actors can see that transaction and place their own trades before or around it, potentially changing the price or outcome for the original user.

In other words, crypto may be open, but the playing field may not always be level.

“It’s crazy that we live in this world right now where, although there’s so much growth and traction in crypto, there are still these fundamental problems that have not been solved,” Hon said.

Monad’s proposed answer combines two pieces of research that Hon says would deliver MEV resistance once implemented. The work is still under development, but Hon argues that it could make Monad a more trustworthy home for the financial activity crypto has long promised to bring onchain.

“The upshot of it is that Monad will become the first MEV-resistant blockchain,” he said, “and thus the best environment for people when they’re accessing this open financial system because they’re protected from MEV.”

That is the technical battle. But Hon believes an equally important ideological fight is now unfolding across crypto.

As Coinbase, Robinhood and other major companies build their own blockchain ecosystems, the industry is confronting a fundamental question: Should the future of onchain finance live on neutral public infrastructure, or on networks controlled by the same corporations hoping to dominate them? Hon calls it a “culture war.”

“There’s never been more of a culture war than what exists right now,” he said. “And we’re here to lead the charge, carry the banners for open, permissionless public blockchains.”

Hon acknowledged the obvious appeal of corporate chains. Large companies can bring recognizable brands, existing customers and established distribution to crypto. But he argued those advantages also create an unavoidable conflict of interest for independent developers.

When one company is both operating the network and building products on top of it, Hon warned, it can become the chain’s “priority tenant” with the ability and incentive to advance its own interests over those of competing applications.

“Credible neutrality is the most important issue on the table right now,” Hon said. “The corporate single tenant, priority tenant will ultimately advance their own interests and compete with some of the builders that are building the most successful apps on the chain.”

Monad is making the opposite bet: That developers, financial companies and users will ultimately prefer infrastructure that does not choose winners.

But that path has come with its own challenges. Monad is coming up on its one-year anniversary since the launch of its mainnet in November. Since then, there hasn't really been a runaway app that has attracted a massive spike in new users. The token powering the chain is also down by about 50% since launch (which compares to Bitcoin's drop of 28% over the same time period.)

This week, the popular crypto wallet company Phantom announced it would be sunsetting support for Monad's chain. In his honest assessment, Hon called it a step backward in the effort to scale. But at the same time, with wallets being somewhat abstracted away in bringing users onchain, will it really matter all that much?

Monad is already trying to demonstrate how that model could work. Hon highlighted integrations connecting fintech and wallet users directly to DeFi applications on Monad without requiring them to leave the interfaces they already use.

He pointed to Nook, a neobank that can route customer deposits into Aave on Monad, as well as a MetaMask Money product that allocates funds to Aave and Morpho on the network. Users can earn yield from those balances while retaining the option to spend through a card in the real world.

The network is also pushing toward faster settlement. Hon said Monad was preparing to reduce its block time from 400 milliseconds to 300 milliseconds, while cutting finality from 800 milliseconds to 600 milliseconds.

That speed is not only about producing an impressive transaction-per-second figure. Hon said many card payment systems require a network to respond in under one second, making sub-second finality important for real-world credit and debit card settlement.

“Monad is actually a better layer for credit card settlement or debit card settlement than other systems because it has this property,” he said.

Still, Monad’s next phase will be measured by more than technical benchmarks. Hon said the network’s focus is now accelerating adoption, attracting assets and connecting more consumer-facing apps to its onchain financial ecosystem.

He highlighted Perpl, a perpetual futures exchange on Monad that processed around $300 million in volume during its most recent week. More fintechs, neobanks and trading applications are also beginning to plug into lending protocols and decentralized exchanges on the network.

“The job of the Monad network is to connect the rest of the world,” Hon said.

That remains an ambitious challenge. But the time to show that Monad is delivering on its goal to deliver more than just faster settlement is getting closer.

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