The Monad Pulse #035
Monad Ecosystem Updates, June 18 - 25
A governance and protocol-heavy week, anchored by the June 24 Core Devs Call covering MIP-1, MIP-10, and MIP-12. Pendle went live on Monad with AUSD pools. Blend Money introduced a Neobank Stack. And there is an active security incident affecting Cherry Servers operators that requires immediate attention.
Security Alert: Cherry Servers Operators: Action Required Now
Monad Foundation alerted operators to a compromise involving the Sensu Monitoring agent running on bare metal Cherry Servers infrastructure. If you run a node on Cherry Servers, act on this before anything else.
Recommended immediate steps:
Review Cherry Servers’ email instructions and apply the prescribed mitigation steps
Disable the Sensu agent
Check for known indicators of compromise
Review recent executable files in temporary directories
Inspect suspicious processes or connections
Known indicators of compromise:
/tmp/.tc/var/tmp/.tc/dev/shm/.tccloud-assets-api.netstatic-cache-prod.net144.172.99.201104.194.153.133
Follow-up review items: SSH keys, users and sudo access, cron jobs, systemd services, recent logs, and stored credentials.
If compromise is confirmed, Cherry Servers recommends preserving evidence and rebuilding from a clean image.
Operators needing additional support should contact the Monad Foundation DevOps team through Telegram, Discord, or email.
Core Devs Call: June 24, 2026
MIP-1 Defines the Governance Process
QEDK presented MIP-1, which serves as the procedural foundation for Monad Improvement Proposals and Monad Requests for Comments. Rather than changing the protocol directly, MIP-1 defines how proposals should be written, reviewed, categorized, discussed, and advanced.
MIP-1 is now in last call, final community feedback is being collected before it becomes the reference framework for future proposals.
Not Every Idea Needs a MIP
A useful clarification from the MIP-1 discussion: the MIP process is for changes that affect the protocol, sit close to the protocol, or need broad ecosystem coordination. Community projects, dashboards, and validator tools that don’t require protocol-level action can start with a forum post.
For validators with ideas: start on the forum when scope is unclear, gather feedback, and only move toward a formal MIP if the idea truly belongs in the protocol process.
MIP Categories Are Being Formalized
MIP-1 separates proposals into distinct categories: process-oriented, hard fork MIPs that bundle multiple protocol changes, core, networking, interface, informational, and MRC-style proposals. That structure prevents the MIP process from becoming a general suggestion box and gives contributors a clearer route for deciding what kind of proposal they actually have.
MIP-10: Deterministic RaptorCast
Mussadiq from Category Labs presented MIP-10, introducing deterministic RaptorCast v1.
The change makes RaptorCast data dissemination more verifiable and consistent. When a validator receives enough information to reconstruct a block, the protocol guarantees every other validator reconstructs the same block. It also ensures that if a certificate forms for a chunk or block root, the data needed to rebuild that block remains available.
Why it matters: Current dissemination involves two rounds. Deterministic RaptorCast enables voting earlier — using the chunk commitment — because validators can rely on reconstruction consistency. That saves one round of dissemination and creates a path toward lower latency in future consensus improvements.
Security benefit: Without deterministic encoding, a leader could theoretically construct chunks to force higher compute during reconstruction. MIP-10 closes that opening.
The tradeoff: Chunk proofs grow from roughly 100 bytes to about 280 bytes. Category Labs testing showed the overhead doesn’t materially affect performance. Signature verification also becomes lighter, validators verify one signature rather than multiple across chunk groups.
MIP-10 has already been implemented and tested internally and is ready to roll out.
MIP-12: Faster Vote Pace
Bharath from Category Labs presented MIP-12, reducing consensus vote pacing from 400 milliseconds to 300 milliseconds. Since vote pacing sets the minimum block time, this lowers it by 100 milliseconds.
Block parameters scale proportionally: Transaction limits, proposal gas limits, and proposal byte limits move to about three-quarters of current values. Block rewards decrease from 25 MON to 18 MON per block, the network produces more blocks over the same period, so token issuance stays broadly consistent.
Execution layer unaffected: MIP-12 is a consensus-level change. The execution layer is opaque to these parameters and doesn’t need to change. A hard fork will be required, likely scheduled around a consensus round.
Testing results: Category Labs has been testing internally for several months. Average block times moved closer to the 300-350 millisecond range. Block time won’t always sit exactly at 300ms — a leader in Asia relative to other regions will see slightly higher dissemination latency; geographically closer validators should land closer to target.
Release order: MIP-12 is expected to land before the active set expansion (MIP-9) and priority fee distribution changes (MIP-11). The vote pace reduction may be the next hard fork.
Ecosystem Updates
Pendle Goes Live on Monad With AUSD Pools
Pendle is now live on Monad, starting with two AUSD-based pools:
Agora AUSD: maturing October 8, 2026. A USD-pegged stablecoin backed by cash, overnight repos, and short-term U.S. Treasury bills.
Upshift earnAUSD: maturing October 8, 2026. The AUSD vault on Upshift, allocating AUSD across lending optimization and basis trades.
Pendle support introduces PT for fixed yield, YT for future yield exposure, and LP positions with zero impermanent loss when held to maturity. Incentives began June 20, with up to $100,000 in weekly rewards available.
Agora AUSD pool | earnAUSD pool
Blend Money Introduces Neobank Stack on Monad
Blend Money introduced its Neobank Stack on Monad, combining earning functionality, ramps, wallets, and compliance tooling for teams building onchain financial products. Portal adds non-custodial embedded wallet infrastructure, allowing applications to offer wallet functionality without exposing users to blockchain complexity directly.
Monad Foundation Joins Global Neobank Alliance as Selection Contributor
Pods Finance announced that Monad Foundation is joining the Global Neobank Alliance as a Selection Contributor, helping review applicants and supporting neobank teams building on Monad.
Monad Introduces Ultrafuzz for Solidity Smart Contract Fuzzing
Monad introduced Ultrafuzz, an agentic orchestrator for Solidity smart contract fuzzing. A single command launches a cluster of agents that map protocol actors and flows, enumerate properties, run more than 20 fuzzing strategies in parallel, adjudicate findings, and generate a report. Draws on open-source material from Certora, Trail of Bits, Runtime Verification, a16z crypto, Recon, and others.
Jovan Komatovic Wins PODC Doctoral Dissertation Award
Jovan Komatovic won the PODC 2026 Doctoral Dissertation Award for his thesis, “Optimal Byzantine Agreement with Little Cryptography”, another recognition milestone for Category Labs research following the six SBC papers at Stanford and the IEEE S&P Distinguished Paper Award.
Keone Hon on AI, Automation, and Knowledge Work
Keone Hon’s view: better automation shifts human work toward higher-level management, direction, and problem selection rather than eliminating human judgment. Learning and experimenting with new tools is becoming part of the job description for knowledge workers.
Keone Hon on the Low Carb Crusader Attack and Ethereum PBS
Keone Hon pointed to the April 2023 Low Carb Crusader attack as a case study for how low-level technical details create major downstream effects. He clarified that Monad does not use Ethereum PBS — Monad has its own consensus mechanism and block propagation system.
Read the Ethereum research post
Perpl Market Data Feed
Perpl shared details for developers building parsers for Perpl order books. Every update is emitted as an EVM event, with all exchange events available in the Perpl DEX SDK. Perpl reported roughly 800,000 updates over the previous day.
Tom Dwan and Daniel Cates on AI Poker
Tom Dwan and Daniel Cates held a fireside chat on AI agents in poker — how agents approach imperfect-information games and what poker reveals about strategic decision-making under uncertainty.
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