The Monad Pulse #032
Monad Ecosystem Updates, May 28 - June 4
A research-heavy week for Monad. Category Labs co-authored six of the 34 accepted papers at the Science of Blockchain Conference at Stanford — covering MonadBFT, encrypted mempools, spam MEV, responsive consensus, and peer-to-peer network measurement. That's not a footnote. It's the clearest signal yet that the infrastructure work happening inside Monad is being taken seriously at the highest academic level. Alongside that, Monad joined the Open Transaction Layer as a founding partner, v0.14.4 shipped to mainnet, and the ecosystem builder cohort reported significant progress across the board.
Research & Protocol
Category Labs Co-Authors Six Accepted SBC Papers
Category Labs researchers co-authored six of the 34 accepted papers at this year’s Science of Blockchain Conference, scheduled for July 27–29 at Stanford. The breadth of the work is notable:
Timing Games in Responsive Consensus Protocols examines how validators may delay proposals to capture higher MEV rewards, and introduces dynamic block rewards that decrease with locally measured round duration. Also accepted to ACM CCS 2026.
Blockspace Under Pressure: An Analysis of Spam MEV on High-Throughput Blockchains studies speculative probe transactions on low-fee, high-throughput chains and models how fee markets, block capacity, and minimum base fees affect user welfare, network externalities, and validator revenue.
MonadBFT: Fast, Responsive, Fork-Resistant Streamlined Consensus covers the consensus protocol underlying Monad. Presents a HotStuff-family BFT protocol with linear common-case message complexity, optimistic responsiveness, speculation-based faster finality, and tail-forking resistance.
Weighted Batched Threshold Encryption with Applications to Mempool Privacy improves prior BTE constructions from quadratic to quasilinear computational cost, extended to weighted proof-of-stake settings. Also accepted to IEEE S&P 2026 with a Distinguished Paper Award.
Forget-IT: Optimal Good-Case Latency For Information-Theoretic BFT presents an information-theoretic BFT consensus algorithm with optimal good-case latency, quadratic message complexity per view, and constant persistent storage per process. Also accepted to ACM PODC 2026.
Multiple Sides of 36 Coins: Measuring Peer-to-Peer Infrastructure Across Cryptocurrencies reports findings from a nine-month measurement study across 36 blockchain networks, covering node counts, geographic concentration, and peer churn patterns.
Six accepted papers at a single top-tier venue, this is what sustained research investment in a protocol looks like.
Mainnet Release v0.14.4
v0.14.4 is live on mainnet. The release includes a fix for the eth_fillTransaction convenience RPC method, along with additional preparatory work for Deterministic RaptorCast and zkVM development.
Testnet Release v0.14.5 - CODE ORANGE
v0.14.5 is available for all testnet node operators. Action recommended within 24-48 hours.
The key change: eth_sendRawTransactionSync now subscribes to block updates from execution events, improving response time by up to 100 milliseconds. The method is only supported when execution events are enabled.
Operators running RPC with websockets enabled should not experience changes. Nodes without execution events will return “method not supported” for this endpoint.
Upgrade instructions | Full changelog | Execution events setup guide
Ecosystem Updates
Monad Joins the Open Transaction Layer as a Founding Partner
Monad joined the Open Transaction Layer, an open protocol stack designed as a coordination layer for compliant onchain transactions. The Blockchain Payments Consortium announced six founding blockchain partners: Solana, Stellar, Polygon, TON, Sui, and Monad. OTL is designed to be chain-agnostic, with compliant onchain finance infrastructure built to work across all participating networks.
More information at OTL Network
Monad Discusses EVM Compatibility for Institutions
Joanita Titan, Head of Institutional Growth at Monad, and Max Lopatnikov, COO of Synopsis, sat down to explain why EVM compatibility matters for institutional adoption — covering familiar infrastructure, tooling, and developer standards that reduce friction for institutions evaluating onchain systems.
HelloTrade Moves to Monad
HelloTrade is moving to Monad as it continues alpha testing, focused on making global capital markets more accessible. Another data point for the institutional and capital markets thesis building around Monad’s execution environment.
Poker Arena Launches AI Agent Competition With Monad Support
Poker Arena introduced a platform where autonomous AI agents compete against each other in poker, with a $50,000 prize pool and Monad support. Top agents qualify for the main tournament, with the best-performing entry earning a seat at a real table with Tom Dwan.
Ecosystem Builder Highlights
A strong week of reported progress across the cohort, here are some selected highlights:
40acres Finance: $10M in outstanding loans, $28K monthly fees, 92% retention, upcoming Hydrex secondary markets.
CapturGo: 9,250 monthly active users, 2,735 weekly active users, 29.6% stickiness.
PingMe: Ping Business integration across 10,000+ merchants for wallet-free stablecoin settlement.
BranchlessPay: two Odoo App Store modules now available to 170,000+ companies.
Accountable published a Neutrl case study, partnered with Axis and Saturn Foundation, and joined a Stable Summit panel.
Stoa: completed five-phase adversarial audit with 281 findings resolved, hardened six independent signing keys.
Monad Mogs: launched Arena on testnet with agent registration, match prize pools, leaderboards, and four game types.
EmpowerTours deployed AuditAnchor, AllocationVault, mini-DEX, and RoutingVault to Monad testnet.
Kizzy.io: removed KYC, shipped multichain deposits to production, added custom address withdrawals.
Revalyze shipped contextual Ask Revalyze, section-level retry, Watchlist, and Scenarios comparison.
Volya.io integrated an AI wallet assistant, multichain wallet support, an NFT marketplace, and a dApp interface. Emoverse launched the Emonad AI Studio public beta with user-paid image generation and video tooling.
K613 launched Genesis Season 1, opened Discord, verified Galxe, released quests, and started leaderboards.
Specter: began mainnet preparation including ENS migration and onchain announcement contract.
Jester shipped live price charts, drawing tools, fullscreen mode, and real-price market creation.
Everdraw: completed Merkl integration, migrated winner randomness to Pyth Entropy, added backup RPCs.
Rocket Markets rebuilt its custom onchain indexer, validated position lifecycle, and unified Survivor positions.
Sirath Network shipped a Sui agent wallet, testnet transfers, portfolio tools, DeepBook planning, and bridging flows.
Everdraw completed Merkl integration, migrated winner randomness to Pyth Entropy, and added backup RPCs.
Trendle improved fiat onboarding, launched in-app feedback, added categories and lifecycle emails, and prepared user-generated content flows.
Gwei Exchange resumed dApp development and reported growth in impressions, engagements, profile visits, and Discord visitors.
Denaria completed Arbitrum Buildathon week one, refactored its landing page, and advanced Stylus benchmarking.
Monatrix fixed Uniswap and Pancake adapter data deviations by matching official UI sources.
FonVerse rolled out a stats update, reaching 15 recorded stats and one additional week-over-week metric.
Ninjaverse fixed testnet controls mapping and added map decorations for smoother retro gameplay.
Facto completed structural upgrades, narrative updates, and brand-design kickoff.
Umbrella Finance continued its dry run, switched UX to event-driven data, and added market-price APIs.
Cultverse wired agent workflows V3 into the codebase and sharpened Web2-facing creator-tool positioning.
Jichu attended Foundry Shanghai and gathered founder, investor, and team feedback on business direction.
Canonicals launched a Discord test-token faucet and drafted research papers after a French institution collaboration.
Peerfolio fixed cash-out bugs, improved onboarding dashboard, tightened account safety, and added invite QR sharing.
Forkast Prediction Market added daily trading quests and a TVT League biweekly trading competition. Demether shipped an on-ramp UX upgrade, improved RPC stability, and nearly completed Version 3 testing.
Thinkee Senior explored life-path analysis, digital preservation, Thinkee Institute, and LifeNet AI modules.
dFusionAI started an enterprise proof of concept, tested its Web2 version, and optimized AI voice and digital-twin retrieval.
Bottlers planned a 30-plus user test for its next match to gather product feedback.
Full builder brief details available across the Monad ecosystem channels.
Biweekly Validator Meeting Canceled
This week’s biweekly validator sync was canceled due to travel, the next meeting is expected in two weeks.
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