A couple of days ago, over a beer, a friend asked me about @Monad. He then said "Should I do it or not do it ?":) I told him some industry insider things you won’t hear from anyone else—except me. Read below ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️ It starts about five years ago, when @VitalikButerin decided not to increase Ethereum’s small transaction throughput—about 10 TPS—and instead pushed for “rollups.” Rollups are single computers that batch transactions and post them to Ethereum mainnet. This was a big U-turn. Before that, Ethereum planned to scale with “sharding,” multiple blockchains linked together. But sharding was ugly, complex, and messy to implement. From the start, I thought sharding was inferior to Solana’s approach. Anatoly and his team focused on a single fast chain—better for composability. On a sharded network, DeFi apps have trouble talking to each other. On a single fast chain, everything works seamlessly. Ethereum abandoned the idea of simply increasing TPS for three reasons: Sharding complexity – It was a technical nightmare. Geth’s limitations – Ethereum’s main client, written in Go, was slow and poorly suited for high performance. Rollups were easy money – Simple to build, no expensive engineering needed, and subsidized to near-zero fees, effectively a gift to insiders. While Ethereum stayed at ~10 TPS, Solana surged ahead with its fast single chain, steadily improving and eating Ethereum’s market. High gas fees pushed developers elsewhere. Polygon thrived with its PoS chain—faster than Ethereum and rich in stablecoin activity. In rollup-land, Base became the leader, with pretty much everyone else now in Darwinian extiction mode. Ironically, Base has no token and probably never will. To “invest” in Base, you’d buy Coinbase stock. VCs noticed Solana’s rise and rollups’ weaknesses. They funded faster EVM chains—first Sei, then Monad. Monad was spun out of a major Wall Street crypto trading firm; the founders were essentially assigned. This year brought the twist: a power shift at the Ethereum Foundation. Now everyone except Vitalik himself talks about taking Ethereum to 1,000 TPS. Polygon also announced big speed upgrades. The punchline: with Ethereum and Polygon both accelerating, imho it’s too late for a new chain to win on being “fast EVM L1.” That’s why FAIR is focusing on something no one else is doing—MEV-proof encryption and a new niche for encrypted blockchain data. Monad faces an uphill fight against both Ethereum and Polygon. It has zero market differentiation - the features are the same, the chain is fast, but it is too late to win by doing just a faster L1. So I told my friend: “Don’t do it.” #ethereum #solana