The Monad Pulse #016
Monad Ecosystem Updates, Feb 5 - 12
Monad’s ecosystem is accelerating on multiple fronts at once. From onchain Pokémon RWAs and a 500-team AI agent hackathon to validator infrastructure migrations, reward mechanics deep dives, and upcoming MONAD_NINE protocol changes, this week reflects a network scaling both culturally and technically, while operators work through the real-world complexity that comes with it.
Ecosystem updates
LootGo Launches Onchain Pokémon Cards
LootGo released onchain Pokémon Cards, enabling users to activate Pokémon Pack Boosters and collect cards through physical movement. Rare Pokémon Card RWAs are available for four weeks with weekly rewards for collectors.
The platform gamifies real-world activity by combining location-based mechanics with NFT collecting. Users can participate at packhunt.lootgo.app.
Moltiverse Hackathon Reaches 500 Teams
The Moltiverse hackathon entered Day 6 with 500 teams registered competing for $200,000 in prizes across two tracks. The Agent x Token Track ($140K) requires building autonomous agents on Monad and launching tokens on Nad.fun, while the Agent Track ($60K) focuses on pure agent development.
Notable submissions include Rock-Paper-Scissors by @uttam_singhk, battle-royale chaos by @KshitijGajapure, survival exploration by @Coopesmtg, and word guesser by @itsNikku876. 11 days remain in the competition.
Circle joined as a hackathon supporter, equipping builders with developer tools for agent-to-agent payments and onchain commerce with USDC. Developers can access Circle Wallets and Bridge Kit resources at the Moltiverse notion page. Additional supporters include Ethereum Foundation, Paradigm, Dragonfly, AttentionX AI, and Thirdweb.
Moltiverse Livestreams Feature AI Agent Experts
Port hosted Moltiverse livestreams with @VittoStack from Ethereum Foundation’s dAI team at 11AM ET, @jinwoo3981 from AttentionX AI at 12PM ET, and @Noah_eth from Monad Foundation discussing AI agent development.
Full broadcast: x.com/i/broadcasts/1zqKVdYOwLaJB.
Kizzy Adds Influencer Post Time Predictions
Kizzy launched a feature letting users predict posting times for popular crypto Twitter personalities including @JoeyMoose, @SolJakey, @blknoiz06, @notthreadguy, and @monad. The gamification mechanism adds social prediction markets to Kizzy’s mobile-first platform.
Try it at kizzy.io.
Levr.bet Launches with Super Bowl Markets
Levr.bet officially launched alongside RareBet Sports, both offering Super Bowl markets. Levr.bet’s leverage mechanics enable amplified positions: $100 at 5x on New England ML pays $1,074, while $100 at 5x on Seattle ML pays $345. The platform’s tagline is “Bet Less. Win More.”
Nitro Accelerator Offers $500K Per Team
Monad announced Nitro, a three-month project accelerator providing $500,000 per team distributed on Day 1. The program accepts 15 teams building on any chain, offering funding from top VCs, mentorship from industry-leading founders, and an elite peer group. The program runs one month in-person in NYC followed by two months online, culminating in Demo Day.
Investors include Paradigm, Electric Capital, Dragonfly, and Castle Island Ventures. Nitro targets infrastructure, developer tools, and user-facing applications, prioritizing consistent execution and product-market fit over hype.
Applications are open at nitroacc.xyz.
ETH Denver Events Announced
Monad is hosting multiple events at ETH Denver including the Monad Blitz Hackathon with Pizza DAO on February 17 ($10K to winners), Monad VIP Dinner on February 19 (dinner and drinks with builders and investors), and Frontier Markets roundtable on February 19 (prediction markets discussion). Registration:
Blitz Hackathon: luma.com/monad-blitz-ethdenver-2026
VIP Dinner: luma.com/monad-vip-dinner-ethdenver-2026
Frontier Markets: luma.com/frontier-markets-ethdenver-2026
Blog: Finality Enables Stablecoin Card Payments
Rparekh published a blog post explaining how Monad’s fast, deterministic finality unlocks stablecoin card payments at scale. The post details technical requirements for point-of-sale transactions and how sub-second finality enables real-world payment rails.
Full article: blog.monad.xyz/blog/finality-and-cards.
monlog v0.7.3 Adds P2P Peer Analysis
AEcat Labs released monlog v0.7.3 with P2P Peer Analysis mode (-p) for instant network health visibility. Features include active peer tracking with last-seen times, color-coded status (🟢 active | 🟡 timeouts | 🔴 dropped), sync peer visibility for state/block sync, and optional validator name resolution.
Compact mode (-c) adds readable validator keys, startup status showing forkpoint comparison and config source, StateSync progress percentages, and multi-user friendly temp file handling.
Documentation: docs.monad.xyz/node-ops/general-operations#log-analysis-with-monlog.
VDP Stake Cycling Begins on Testnet
As the Validator Delegation Program expands with more participants under testnet evaluation, a stake cycling script is running. Validators may be cycled in or out of the active set temporarily. An increase in the active set will soon roll out on testnet to accommodate additional operators.
Bootstrap Peers Updated for Authenticated UDP
Following Authenticated UDP activation, bootstrap peers must be updated on all nodes to join the network. Get new bootstrap peer signatures from:
Mainnet validators: bucket.monadinfra.com/config/mainnet/latest/node.toml
Mainnet full node: bucket.monadinfra.com/config/mainnet/latest/full-node-node.toml
Testnet validators: bucket.monadinfra.com/config/testnet/latest/node.toml
Testnet full node: bucket.monadinfra.com/config/testnet/latest/full-node-node.toml
Replace existing peering records with new ones, ensuring no duplicated entries for a given secp256k1_pubkey. Restart the node: systemctl restart monad-bft monad-execution monad-rpc (no hard reset required). Note that hard resets wipe the peering cache since reset-workspace.sh deletes peers.toml, requiring nodes to rebuild peer lists from scratch.
First Monad Core Devs Call Scheduled
The Monad Foundation will host the first Core Devs Call on Friday, February 13 at 9:30 AM EST to discuss upcoming protocol changes proposed in MIP-3 (Linear EVM memory cost), MIP-4 (Reserve Balance Introspection), and MIP-5 (Fusaka EIP activation). These changes will result in the MONAD_NINE upgrade, to be scheduled following the call.
Teams interested in future meetings should fill out this form with email addresses to invite. Add the event to your calendar to attend. Discussion threads:
Summary of Validators’ Discussions
Network Infrastructure Migrations
The week was dominated by two major network updates that required coordinated action from all validators. The Authenticated UDP Migration represented a significant protocol upgrade to enhance network security and performance. Validators needed to update their node configurations to enable UDP authentication, which involved modifying node.toml files with new port settings and authentication parameters. The migration had specific considerations for validators operating with downstream full nodes versus those running standalone setups.
Early in the migration, validators encountered questions about proper implementation. The distinction between self_auth_port in the peer discovery section and authenticated_bind_address_port in the network section caused some initial confusion, particularly for operators with non-standard port configurations.
Several validators needed clarification on whether they were running with downstream full nodes, as this determined whether they needed to complete the additional peer records update step. The community provided collaborative troubleshooting, with experienced operators helping newcomers navigate edge cases like servers that had previously run testnet nodes.
Later in the week, a Bootstrap Peers Update required validators to refresh their peering configurations. This involved replacing existing bootstrap peer records with updated versions, ensuring no duplicate entries existed for any given secp256k1_pubkey. The update affected both mainnet and testnet networks, requiring operators running both environments to update configurations separately. Some validators questioned whether they should add new initialization peers or simply update the record_seq_num values for existing peers.
Validator Rewards and Commission Mechanics
A detailed technical discussion emerged regarding how validator rewards flow through the Monad staking system. The conversation centered on three main questions: the commission structure for priority fees, the routing of different reward types to various addresses, and the calculation of actual block rewards versus priority fees. Validators expressed confusion about conflicting information they had received regarding whether priority fees were subject to the validator’s commission rate or went entirely to the validator.
The community clarified that in a vanilla setup, 100% of priority fees go to the validator’s designated beneficiary address, not subject to commission splits. MEV rewards follow different rules depending on the provider being used, with some mechanisms cranking back commission to validators. The standard reward flow has validator commission plus self-bonded stake rewards going to the authentication address requiring manual claiming, while priority fees and certain other rewards flow directly to the beneficiary address specified in node.toml.
Validators attempting to calculate their actual returns discovered that a significant portion of their yields came from priority fees rather than base block rewards. One operator found approximately 20% of their total rewards accumulated in their beneficiary address despite not running MEV, suggesting substantial priority fee revenue. The discussion highlighted the need for better analytics tools to break down APY sources, with community members referencing Dune Analytics queries showing approximately 5.8% of staking revenue coming from tips network-wide.
Node Performance Issues and Troubleshooting
Multiple validators experienced operational issues requiring community support and intervention. Several high-profile validators including CMS Holdings and RockX had their nodes go offline, prompting public notifications from monitoring services. In one case, a validator’s node was not proposing blocks despite being online, indicating issues with the block production mechanism rather than simple connectivity problems.
A particularly complex troubleshooting case involved a validator experiencing “high QC too far ahead of block tree root” errors upon restart. The standard recovery procedure of performing a soft reset failed because the remote forkpoint was not newer than the local forkpoint, creating a catch-22 situation. The community walked through the hard reset process, which should have resolved the issue, but the validator continued experiencing problems with state synchronization failing to find new fork points.
Port configuration emerged as another source of operational challenges. One validator explained running mainnet on port 8001 instead of the default 8000 because the server had previously hosted a testnet node. Since the IP:port 8000 combination was already known to the testnet network, switching to port 8001 for mainnet avoided receiving stale testnet peer requests and peering conflicts.
Technical Configuration and Best Practices
Advanced configuration topics generated technical discussions about optimal validator setups. The default CPU pinning strategy, which assigns monad-execution to CPUs 1–7, monad-bft to CPUs 8–11, and monad-rpc to CPUs 12–15, raised questions about the rationale for excluding CPU0. Validators theorized this exclusion reserves CPU0 for operating system and IRQ housekeeping tasks, but noted that without explicit IRQ affinity management, interrupt requests could still land on any CPU including those designated for BFT processing.
Validator failover procedures became a pressing concern for operators seeking to implement high availability setups. One validator attempted to practice failover between their testnet and mainnet environments but encountered signature mismatch errors, indicating they were missing a critical step in the process. The community had previously shared failover documentation, but it had become difficult to locate in the channel history. The question of peer record hygiene emerged as validators completed the authenticated UDP migration. Operators wanted to know whether they should proactively prune old unauthenticated UDP peer records to avoid potential connection issues.
Community Management and Documentation
Administrative activities and documentation maintenance remained ongoing throughout the week. The Discord community processed role assignment requests, with validators requesting mainnet and testnet validator roles for new team members joining their operations. The social coordination required multiple confirmation steps as moderators verified that the new members had actually joined the Discord server before granting appropriate permissions.
Documentation issues surfaced when validators discovered that the official monlog script distribution pointed to an outdated version. The monitoring tool, which validators rely on for observing node behavior, had been updated but the documentation still referenced the old checksums and download locations. Community members reported the discrepancy, and the Monad team quickly corrected the documentation. The issue was compounded by simultaneous GitHub service problems that slowed the fix deployment.
The week concluded with preparations for the bi-weekly validator meeting, with a topic thread opened to collect discussion items. These regular synchronous gatherings provide opportunities for validators to raise concerns that don’t fit into asynchronous Discord channels and for the Monad team to share upcoming changes.