Monad Co-founder Eunice Giarta on What It Took To Launch

Despite a difficult market backdrop, Monad managed to attract $269M from more than 85,000 participants in the blockchain's launch Monday.

As Monad co-founder Eunice Giarta explained to Coinage in a new interview, things are about to get even more interesting for MON token holders.

“We’ve been working on Monad for over three and a half years… I can’t tell you how many times we were like, man, that’s just around the corner. Just around the corner. Maybe the next corner. But here we are," she said. “The mission has never changed. From the very beginning, we knew that EVM was the play, and performance at its core was also the play.”

What launched today is a new Layer-1 blockchain promising to be faster, more efficient, and fully EVM-compatible. But Giarta insists it’s not just another “faster tech” project. “I do think that we need faster tech, but it can't just be faster tech. It has to be everything else,” she explained. “It’s a combination of speed, decentralization, reliability, security — all of that bundled into one.”

That “bundle” includes a completely rebuilt infrastructure. “The entire tech stack was built entirely from scratch. So new technology, new execution layer, new consensus layer, new database even — but still adheres to the requirements of the Ethereum Virtual Machine. So, [the] best of both worlds.”

The debut marks a rare feat: a new Layer-1 launching directly with public access and a strategy aimed at long-term decentralization. “We were really excited about the proposition of being able to have Monad be distributed in the hands of so many,” Giarta said of the project’s public sale on Coinbase. Despite the shakiness in the market, Monad still managed to post a oversubscribed launch.

About 7.5% of the total MON token supply was offered via Coinbase, and as co-founder Keone Hon explained the goal was distribution over price appreciation. "We chose Coinbase (and their allocation algorithm, which is democratic and transparent) because of their unique ability to reach an audience that we think is important to engage and re-activate," Hon told The Block. The world is a big place and it's so important to break out of the bubble."

But the goals for Monad to do things differently don't stop there. For Giarta, the goal now becomes building on the launch momentum.

“Monad on day one, minute one is just v0. It’s just the start,” Giarta said. “All of the work that has been done up until now has just been like the pre-race. And we’re running a marathon. We just crossed the start line.”

The next leg of that marathon includes onboarding new types of use cases and shipping new technical features. “There’s a lot of improvements that we’re looking forward to… thinking about privatized transactions, for example. And… one of the more recent technical additions was the just-in-time compiler.”

From day one, Giarta said it was critical to make sure users could immediately do something meaningful on-chain. “Sometimes you only have one impression to get it right. One of the things we were hopeful to ensure was that all of the things that you can do on-chain now, on any other chain, you'd be able to do on day one as well.”

Still, her biggest goal for 2026 is growing beyond just crypto-native audiences. “We keep talking about onboarding the next million, next billion, whatever it may be… I would like for us to see that transition point actually happen,” she said. “Where I think that might be is within more institutional adoption… some combination of RWAs or other types of on-chain mechanisms. That’s where I see the future going.”

And looking back on the hardest parts of building through multiple market cycles, Giarta emphasized the focus that kept the team going. “We’ve been able to just focus on the tech and tackling the hard problem… doing things differently and doing things well.”

Now that Monad is live, she says the real work begins. But for Giarta, the proudest part is sticking to the original vision. “We’re bridging that gap of performance, technology, and usability for blockchain,” she said. “So the design space there is now open. And I’m really excited to see what’s to come.”

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