Keone Hon is the founder and CEO of Monad Labs — the development team behind a new Layer-1 blockchain that aims to bring pipelined execution to the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

In this episode, Keone shares how his background at various HFT firms led him to identify problems with existing blockchain infrastructure and ultimately inspired him to rebuild the EVM entirely to optimize it for high-performance trading activity.

Monad has raised $19 million from investors including Dragonfly Capital, Naval Ravikant, Cobie, Hasu and others.

OUTLINE:

03:33 - Monad Overview

05:17 - Another Layer-1?

06:26 - ‘Pipelining’

08:32 - Web3 Social

11:38 - Bridges to Monad

12:11 - High Performance DeFi

13:34 - DeFi Summer 2.0?

16:01 - Monad’s Funding

16:49 - Onchain HFT

19:05 - The Future of Trading

22:55 - Onchain Sports Betting

23:19 - Surviving Crypto Winter

28:30 - Closing Thoughts