The new battlefield of parallel EVM: A review of the 12 "new forces" in the Monad ecosystem.

Author: Jae, PANews

This year, the highly anticipated high-performance public chain Monad has finally made its debut after much anticipation. On the evening of November 24, the Monad mainnet and the MON token officially launched. Previously, it was also the first Launchpad project on Coinbase, attracting 85,820 participants who invested $269 million. Even in a sluggish market environment, the oversubscription of the Monad token sale indicates its ability to attract funds and generate buzz.

As a leader in the parallel EVM track, Monad has long promoted its throughput promise of up to 10,000 TPS (transactions per second) and a final confirmation time of 1 second, and is finally about to face a “real test” in the market. As another major bet by the investment firm Paradigm in the public chain track, Monad also serves as a litmus test for its investment capabilities in the crypto market. Whether it can redeem itself from the previous shame of Blast will also be determined in this battle.

The value of a high-performance public chain will depend on its ecological carrying capacity. Unlike strategies that simply rely on “copying and pasting” existing EVM applications, Monad has attracted a number of emerging projects attempting to leverage its high-frequency trading capabilities through its unique technical architecture.

There are a total of 304 protocols in the Monad ecosystem, of which 77 are unique to it, and DeFi protocols account for over 60%. PANews has comprehensively referenced various dimensions such as Monad's unique protocols, investment institutions, and project activity to outline some representative emerging projects in the Monad ecosystem for readers, covering tracks like DeFi, Launchpad, prediction markets, DeAI, and DePin. However, Monad is still in the early stages of ecosystem construction, with many projects still in testing or early interaction stages, and users need to be aware of potential risks while participating.

Mynt (USDm)

Mynt (USDm) is a zero-knowledge proof stablecoin protocol, underpinned by Succinct's SP1 zkVM (zero-knowledge virtual machine) and combined with a collateralized minting model. Users can use MON tokens as collateral to mint USDm while earning returns from reserve assets. Mynt emphasizes verifiable privacy, collaborating with Fairblock to utilize additive homomorphic encryption (PHE) and multi-party computation (MPC) technology to encrypt transaction amounts, thereby avoiding the risk of front-running.

Mynt has also introduced the concept of “state liquidity.” Thanks to ZK technology, USDm can achieve seamless combinations of rents across different protocols, meaning users do not have to frequently transfer tokens between different DeFi protocols, but can instead achieve liquidity reuse and verification through state proofs.

During the testnet phase, Myn processed over 1 million transactions, generating $250,000 in revenue.

Kintsu

Kintsu is positioned as a liquidity staking protocol focused on maximizing capital efficiency. Users who stake MON will receive sMON, a circulating token that accumulates staking rewards over time. The sMON token model is designed for deep DeFi integration. By allowing sMON to circulate and trade across various DeFi applications, Kintsu not only maintains the liquidity of the staked assets but also enables users to deploy their assets into yield markets without sacrificing the underlying staking rewards.

After the mainnet launch, Kintsu demonstrated a strong early lead with a TVL of 17.5 million MON (approximately $540,000) and 605 holders of sMON. The protocol had previously raised $4 million in seed funding led by Castle Island Ventures.

Magma

Magma is a liquid staking platform that allows users to obtain circulating staking certificates gMON by staking MON tokens. gMON not only represents staking rewards but also has composability, allowing it to serve as collateral in various dApps (decentralized applications) within the Monad ecosystem for activities such as lending and trading. After the mainnet launch, Magma's TVL (Total Value Locked) exceeded 7.13 million MON (approximately $200,000), with over 800 gMON holders, 800 unique addresses, and more than 1,000 transactions. The protocol previously raised $3.9 million in seed funding from investors including Animoca Ventures.

Kuru

Kuru is a fully on-chain executed CLOB DEX (Central Limit Order Book Decentralized Exchange). The uniqueness of the protocol lies in its use of Monad's parallel execution and low latency to provide a user experience similar to that of CEX while maintaining self-custody. Kuru's design allows market makers to frequently provide and withdraw limit orders at low, constant Gas costs, addressing the core pain points of traditional DEX in efficiency and price discovery. Keone Hon, co-founder and CEO of Monad Labs, has stated that Kuru can help DEX narrow the execution gap with CEX.

After the mainnet launch, Kuru's TVL quickly surpassed $1.4 million, with a 24-hour trading volume exceeding $11 million, generating approximately $9,000 in protocol revenue. Kuru has raised $2 million in seed funding led by Electric Capital and $11.5 million in Series A funding led by Paradigm.

Perpl

Perpl is a full-chain Perp DEX (decentralized perpetual contract trading platform) built on Monad, which also adopts the CLOB model. The real-time requirements for pricing, clearing, and margin in derivatives trading pairs are extremely high; any delay can lead to significant slippage or liquidation risk. The protocol leverages Monad's high throughput and sub-second finality to ensure that the entire process of order matching and trade execution can be completed on-chain, thereby eliminating reliance on centralized components such as off-chain orderers, further enhancing the transparency and efficiency of trading.

Perpl has received $9.25 million in funding led by Dragonfly.

Mu Digital

Mu Digital is a RWA (Real World Assets) platform aimed at bringing the Asian credit market on-chain, with a goal of tokenizing the $20 trillion Asian credit market. The protocol offers two main risk-tranching products: 1) AZND (Asian Dollar): a senior risk-tranching product backed by high-quality Asian credit instruments, which will offer a native yield of 6% to 7% at launch; 2) muBOND: a junior risk-tranching product designed to provide enhanced yields of up to 15% for users seeking higher returns.

The agreement has previously secured $1.5 million in Pre-Seed round financing, with traditional financial institution UOB Venture Management among the investors. Mu Digital has simultaneously launched its mainnet, with muBond's TVL (Total Value Locked) reaching $20 million, and AZND's TVL soaring to $80 million.

Castora

Castora is a decentralized P2P (peer-to-peer) prediction market, similar to platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, that allows users to place P2P bets on real-world events such as elections or sports matches, with on-chain settlement. The protocol utilizes Monad's low-latency feature to achieve real-time odds updates.

Unlike traditional order book models, Castora adopts a pool-based betting model. Users pay an “Entry Fee” to enter a specific prediction pool, and the system determines at the snapshot time which user’s prediction is closest to the actual outcome, who will win the prize pool. Compared to order book model prediction markets, Castora's mechanism is more similar to a “full split” or “jackpot” model, which also lowers the threshold for market makers, making it easier for ordinary retail investors to participate in liquidity provision and betting.

Currently, Castora has launched early pools such as ETH price prediction, making it one of the dApps with relatively high interaction in the Monad community.

Nad.fun

Nad.fun is a social Meme coin issuance platform that allows users to deploy tokens at a very low cost within minutes, supporting the entire process of creation, issuance, and trading, similar to pump.fun. The protocol uses a classic bonding curve pricing to ensure a fair launch for early participants.

After the mainnet launch, Nad.fun has generated 30 new Meme tokens. Currently, the highest market cap Meme coin is NADS, which is at $730,000, with an ATH (all-time high) market cap that once approached $2 million.

FortyTwo

Fortytwo is a DeAI reasoning network that utilizes “collective reasoning” technology to achieve scalable, low-hallucination AI through node contributions. The protocol supports the training and inference of distributed models, where AI Agents can directly exchange data on-chain. The operation of Fortytwo has extremely high latency requirements. It ensures that data exchange and inference tasks between AI Agents can be completed with very low latency through the high-performance parallel execution environment of Monad. High transaction speed is also a prerequisite for achieving scaled intelligence.

The protocol relies on a dynamic load balancing system to optimize resource utilization, ensuring that nodes maintain high activity levels during lightweight tasks such as video calls or web browsing. However, during heavy operations like 4K video editing, the system will automatically reduce or pause inference. This fine-grained resource management is only feasible when the underlying public blockchain can handle fast and inexpensive transactions.

As of now, Fortytwo has 450 active nodes, and has completed over 4,500 inference tasks within the day. The protocol previously secured $2.3 million in Pre-Seed funding led by Big Brain Holdings.

Rumi

Rumi aims to establish an AI-driven media and advertising company. The protocol adopts a unique “watch-to-earn” model, rewarding users for their content consumption behaviors through visual language models. Rumi is dedicated to transforming passive media content into interactive experiences, with the protocol supporting intelligent analysis of media content and has established partnerships with TVision, Story Protocol, and others.

Rumi's live streaming duration reached 8.5 billion hours in Q3, equivalent to 970,000 years of attention. The protocol previously secured $4.7 million in Pre-Seed funding led jointly by a16z crypto, CSX, and EV3.

Multisynq

Multisynq aims to build a real-time application layer for the internet, dedicated to bringing Google Docs-level instant collaboration experiences to all online applications, including DeFi, gaming, and ambient programming, without relying on centralized cloud service giants.

The agreement previously secured $2.2 million in seed funding led by Manifold.

Poply

Poply is an NFT marketplace and issuance platform that emphasizes respect for creator royalties and has optimized the minting and listing experience for NFTs based on Monad's high-frequency trading characteristics. Poply also offers AI tools (for example, prompt-based generative artworks that can be minted as a series of NFTs) along with user-friendly real-time bidding and trading features.

The agreement will launch 6,000 Poply Otters series NFTs on November 24, granting holders benefits such as lower transaction fees, higher token allocation limits, and exclusive airdrops.