The Monad Pulse #012

Monad Ecosystem Updates, Jan 8 - 15

Monad is starting 2026 the way it ended 2025: shipping fast and attracting real volume. This week’s updates cut across trading, derivatives, AI, and infrastructure, offering a clearer signal of where activity on Monad is concentrating and what kind of ecosystem it’s becoming.

Hanji Surges to Top Trading Volume with Stealth Launch

Hanji, a new orderbook trading platform, quietly deployed on Monad weeks ago and has already climbed to second place in weekly trading volume. The platform’s rapid ascent demonstrates strong market demand for efficient onchain trading infrastructure.

Hanji’s orderbook architecture delivers several competitive advantages. Execution and settlement happen entirely onchain, ensuring transparency and security. The platform charges zero maker fees and maintains near-zero taker fees, significantly reducing trading costs compared to traditional centralized exchanges. A vault-based liquidity model captures fees and spread, creating sustainable revenue streams for liquidity providers.

Currently, orderbook trading is live for six trading pairs, with additional pairs planned for near-term deployment. Traders can access the platform at monad.hanji.io. Non-traders can participate by providing liquidity to the vault and earning passive income from trading fees, offering an accessible entry point for those seeking yield opportunities without active trading.

Monday Trade Launches First TVL Campaign of 2026

Monday Trade, the perpetual futures DEX that launched on Monad mainnet in December 2025, kicked off 2026 with its first Total Value Locked campaign. The platform leverages Monad’s 500ms block times and 10,000 TPS to deliver institutional-grade perpetual trading with up to 33x leverage.

Monday Trade combines orderbook precision with AMM liquidity depth, offering tight spreads and minimal slippage. The platform supports 424 trading pairs with advanced order types, position insights, and streamlined execution designed for serious traders. All trades settle onchain with verifiable data, allowing users to maintain full custody of their assets.

The campaign represents Monday Trade’s push to establish itself as the flagship perpetual DEX on Monad, competing directly with established platforms on other chains by offering superior execution speed. The platform was incubated through the SynFutures Builder Program and positioned itself as one of the first venues to bring high-frequency perpetual trading to the Monad ecosystem.

Kalshi Adds Native Monad Support for MON and USDC

Kalshi, a regulated prediction market platform, now supports native MON and USDC deposits and withdrawals on Monad. This integration enables Kalshi users to move assets at Monad’s full 10,000 TPS capacity, eliminating the friction and delays associated with bridging through intermediate chains.

The addition of Monad support expands accessibility for prediction market participants and creates new use cases for MON beyond DeFi protocols. Users can now seamlessly transfer assets between their Monad wallets and Kalshi accounts, leveraging the speed and cost efficiency of the Monad network for prediction market activities.

Orbs Launches Onchain Perpetuals Through Atlantis Integration

Orbs has brought onchain perpetual trading to Monad through its Atlantis protocol integration. This deployment adds sophisticated derivatives trading capabilities to the ecosystem, allowing traders to access leveraged positions without leaving the Monad network. The integration represents a significant expansion of Monad’s DeFi offerings beyond spot trading and lending. Full details are available in the CoinMarketCap announcement.

KINETK AI Secures 50 Million Content Pieces in First Month

KINETK AI users have secured 50 million pieces of content during the platform’s first month of operation. This milestone demonstrates substantial adoption of AI-powered content protection tools among creators concerned about unauthorized use of their work.

KINETK provides creators with technology to protect their content from scraping and unauthorized AI training. The platform’s rapid growth reflects increasing awareness around digital rights management in the AI era. Creators interested in protecting their work can learn more about KINETK’s services and participate in the new campaign at sentinel.kinetk.ai.

Vitalik Critiques “Corposlop” in Crypto, Sparks Ecosystem Debate

On January 10, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a critique of what he termed “corposlop” in the crypto industry, referring to profit-driven platforms that exploit users through addictive algorithms and data extraction. While not directly naming Monad, Buterin’s comments appeared in response to discussions with Monad community members, including prominent voices in the ecosystem.

Buterin’s critique emphasized the importance of building privacy-preserving, wealth-building tools rather than reckless leverage products that prioritize engagement metrics over user welfare. His stance aligns broadly with concerns about sustainable protocol design versus extractive business models, a debate that resonates across Layer-1 ecosystems including Monad.

The commentary highlights ongoing tensions in crypto between building infrastructure for genuine utility versus creating platforms that maximize short-term engagement and revenue. For Monad, which positions itself around high-performance DeFi infrastructure, Buterin’s perspective underscores the importance of demonstrating sustainable value creation beyond speculative trading activity.

Monad’s Progress on Vitalik’s Ethereum Walkaway Test

Vitalik Buterin recently published a “walkaway test” outlining seven critical features Ethereum needs for long-term sustainability. This framework provides a useful benchmark for evaluating any blockchain’s technical maturity and future readiness. Monad has already implemented several of these features, while others remain on the development roadmap.

Vitalik’s complete wishlist includes full quantum resistance, thousands of TPS capacity, durable state architecture, full account abstraction, DoS-resistant gas scheduling, sustainable PoS economics, and decentralized block building.

Features Already Live on Monad:

Monad delivers thousands of TPS through its parallel execution architecture, meeting this requirement directly. The network’s database design enables scaling via SSD storage rather than RAM, reducing costs by orders of magnitude and supporting billions of accounts. This approach addresses the state architecture requirement with significant progress, though storage charge rationalization still needs implementation.

Partial Progress:

The gas schedule has received attention through repricing of six precompiles and cold read operations. Future improvements will further rationalize hot versus cold slot access patterns. Regarding PoS economics, Monad starts with approximately 2% annual issuance of total supply, lower than most networks at launch. This contrasts with Ethereum’s square root issuance model, which Vitalik notes may overoptimize for discouragement attack defense while making unstaked ETH less attractive as collateral.

Work Remaining:

Full quantum resistance, complete account abstraction beyond EIP-7702 compatibility, and decentralized block building all require substantial development. These features are critical for long-term network sustainability and will shape Monad’s technical roadmap in coming quarters.

Additional Monad Strengths:

Beyond Vitalik’s list, Monad implements sub-second finality and asynchronous execution, both essential for user experience and throughput. The network also uses RaptorCast as a replacement for libp2p and gossip-based message propagation, addressing scalability concerns with traditional peer-to-peer networking.

The Monad team plans to revisit this assessment in coming months as development continues. The walkaway test provides a clear framework for measuring progress and identifying areas requiring additional engineering focus.