The Monad Pulse #040
Monad Ecosystem Updates, July 23 - 30
Phantom is ending Monad support on August 12, if you’re holding Monad assets there, this needs action before the deadline, not after. Testnet began the first phase of MIP-8’s dual database migration, rolling out through five validator cohorts. On the growth side: Monad’s RWA market cap grew nineteenfold since February, crossing $424.89 million, and Category Labs presented six papers at Stanford’s Science of Blockchain Conference, a second consecutive appearance at that scale.
User Action Required
Phantom Ends Monad Support August 12
Phantom will end support for Monad on August 12. Anyone holding Monad assets through Phantom needs to migrate to another EVM wallet before the deadline.
Keone Hon said Phantom made the decision while narrowing focus to its core business, noting that Phantom (unlike several EVM-focused wallets) doesn’t let users add networks independently. He pointed toward alternatives: MetaMask, Backpack, Rabby, Rainbow, Infinex, and Ambire.
If you or anyone in your community is holding assets in Phantom, this deadline is worth flagging directly rather than assuming they’ve seen it, wallet deprecations are easy to miss until the day funds become inaccessible.
Validator Action Required
Testnet v0.15.2 Begins MIP-8 Dual Database Migration
Monad testnet release v0.15.2 is the first preparation phase for the MIP-8 hard fork. Phase A requires two operator actions: installing v0.15.2 and completing the dual database migration.
Monad Foundation estimates roughly 10 minutes of node downtime for the combined process.
This is a cohort rollout: do not upgrade before your cohort’s announcement. Validators are moving through five cohorts, each instructed to wait for a specific Foundation announcement before beginning. Full-node, RPC, and archive providers are not subject to the cohort schedule and can complete the process independently.
Check your assignment in the validator cohort document before taking any action.
Validator cohort document | MIP-8 migration documentation
Ecosystem Updates
Category Labs Presents Six Papers at SBC 2026
Category Labs researchers, collaborators, and former interns presented work across consensus, MEV, encrypted mempools, and peer-to-peer infrastructure at the Science of Blockchain Conference at Stanford, matching the six-paper showing from earlier this year and reinforcing that this wasn’t a one-time result.
Jovan Komatovic presented Forget-IT, an information-theoretic Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus algorithm with optimal good-case latency and quadratic message complexity per view.
Kaya Alpturer discussed timing games in responsive consensus protocols, how MEV may incentivize validators to delay proposals, and dynamic block rewards as a possible mitigation.
Mussadiq Jalalzai presented MonadBFT, the consensus protocol underlying Monad.
Amit Agarwal covered improvements to batched threshold encryption, reducing computational cost from quadratic to quasilinear in the batch size.
Wenhao Wang presented research on spam MEV in high-throughput blockchains, why speculative transaction flooding emerges and how protocol parameters may reduce it.
A separate study measured peer-to-peer infrastructure across 36 cryptocurrency networks starting December 2024, finding wide differences in network size, geographic distribution, hosting concentration, and peer stability. Live measurements are available through the P2P Network Observatory, worth bookmarking if you’re thinking about validator geographic distribution across any network, not just Monad.
Monad RWA Market Cap Grows Nineteenfold
Monad’s active RWA market cap rose from $21.76 million on February 15 to $424.89 million on July 23, more than nineteenfold in five months.
Private credit accounts for $298.89 million of the July total, the network’s largest RWA category. Crypto and digital assets reached $106.04 million, up roughly 705% from $13.17 million in February. Precious metals grew from $8.59 million to $14.85 million, and bonds emerged as a new category entirely with $5.11 million in active market value.
This is the kind of growth curve that’s easy to state and hard to internalize, going from $22M to $425M in five months is not incremental ecosystem growth, it’s a category shift in what kind of capital treats Monad as viable infrastructure.
Monad Spot DEX Volume Reaches ~$46.4 Million
Spot trading volume across tracked protocols reached approximately $46.4 million for the day. Kuru led with $15.22 million, followed by Uniswap v4 at $10.66 million, Uniswap v3 at $4.20 million, Metric at $4.14 million across three pairs, and Hanji at $3 million. Balancer v3, Mento, PancakeSwap v3, Pendle, and LFJ each recorded more than $1 million.
The distribution matters as much as the total, activity spread across established exchanges, newer Monad-native venues, and specialized liquidity protocols rather than concentrated in one or two dominant venues.
Nitro Demo Day Brings Seven Teams Before 100+ Investors
Nitro concluded with a New York Demo Day attended by more than 100 investors. Seven teams presented, selected from a wider applicant pool:
Crush Market: livestream prediction markets
Blink Cash: a stablecoin deposit layer for consumer applications
Blend Money: a compliance-focused account layer for financial platforms
Cero: an application where spending earns rewards and contributes to credit building
Janus: a financial operating system for global trade
40 Acres Finance: an open credit market
Forkast: development tooling for trading agents
A wide spread across consumer finance, credit infrastructure, and developer tooling, worth watching which of these convert investor interest from Demo Day into shipped products over the next few months.
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