Mega ETH vs Monad | Super Fast Ethereum

Today we're talking EVM, specifically how Mega ETH and Monad are planning to make Ethereum SUPER fast. We answer: 1 - Which is faster, more decentralized, and more censorship-resistant? 2 - How did Monad and MegaETH build large communities before even launching a testnet, let alone a mainnet? 3 - What are their thoughts on criticism that building with the EVM is like building on quicksand? Could this eat at Solana's value proposition? ------ 🌊 KELP | Deposit ETH with Gain today https://kelpdao.xyz/gain/?utm_source=Bankless ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum https://%E2%81%A0https//bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐 OBOL | STAKE ON DVs, SCALE ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/obol 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT https://bankless.cc/toku ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/54?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 Start 00:05:48 Intro To Monad 00:11:47 How Does Monad Fit Into Ethereum? 00:14:08 What is Mega ETH? 00:18:31 Similarites and Differences 00:21:38 Architectual Impact 00:28:58 Decentralization - Monad 00:34:56 Decentralization - Mega 00:39:43 Who's More Decentralized? 00:49:27 In Summary 00:57:24 Software Effeciency 01:06:50 Monolithic vs Modular 01:15:11 Community 01:28:37 Why Choose The EVM? 01:33:07 When Mainnet? ------ RESOURCES Lei Yang: https://x.com/yangl1996 Keone Hon: https://x.com/keoneHD ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Bank List, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And today on Bank List, we are exploring the frontier of the Ethereum virtual machine from two different architectures. Two different blockchains are on the show today. Monad, representing the Layer 1 camp, and Mega ETH, representing the Layer 2 camp. Both are using the EVM and really turning the EVM up to 11 to see how far it can go, but with very different paths to actually getting there. On this episode, we compare and contrast each of these respective blockchains with the respective founders of each of the respective blockchains. So some of the topics that we talk about, which one is faster? Which one's more decentralized? Which one is more censorship resistant? All of the technical properties that we enjoy talking about in the blockchain world. Also, how

• 0:48David Hoffman?

  did both Monad and Mega ETH attract such large communities ahead of actually shipping a testnet? That's right, not a mainnet, a testnet. And then also, what do they think about Anatoly's claim that building with the EVM is building through quicksand? What do they think about that? And why, of all EVMs, did they choose to build on the EVM? All of these and other topics as well. Before we get into the episode, though, a message from our friends and sponsors over at Kelp Dow, which just introduced Gain, a new product to help you maximize your rewards on your ETH. You can deposit ETH, RS ETH, or other LSTs into Gain to access rewards from multiple Layer 2 networks, restaking platforms, and other DeFi opportunities. And for those who enjoy the Pendle games, they're already live on Pendle, Balancer, and more. But that's not all. If you deposit

• 1:33David Hoffman?

  into the Gain Vault, you also don't give up your liquidity. You receive a G ETH from Kelp to unlock multi-chain DeFi strategies. There is a link in the show notes to getting started today. Ryan, what did you think about this episode?

• 1:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I think it's a relevant topic. You know, this discussion of, you know, whether Ethereum is going to find its way, how it holds up to things that maybe the SVM, the Solana community is kind of kicking out, right, with the FireDancer client. And I think the superfast EVM, superfast Ethereum approach that both of these respective teams are trying to build is kind of like one answer to that. In particular, the most interesting part of the discussion was over this decentralization word, like which approach is more decentralized. And of course, we all know that decentralization is just a means to an end. It's about security. It's about settlement assurances. It's about censorship

• 2:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  resistance. But they've both taken a different architecture to that. One is a layer one, the other is a layer two. And so this was maybe the most contentious part of this discussion when we asked the question of, okay, which approach is going to lead to more decentralization? One element I feel like we didn't discuss, which is worth more investigation, is the concept of economic security as it relates to this. There's a lot of time spent on kind of technical requirements to run a node in this conversation of what is a full node? We didn't talk as much about distribution of stake. And I think that's maybe a follow up conversation. Anyway, lots, lots jam packed in here. One disclaimer before we get in, both David

• 3:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  and I hold angel investments in Monad and nothing in Mega ETH. There's always a link to all disclosures at bankless.com/disclosures. All right, guys, we're getting right into the episode. But before we do, we want to thank our friends over at Kraken. If you want a super fast trading experience, go open a Kraken account and get started.

• 3:27David Hoffman?

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• 4:11David Hoffman?

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• 4:55David Hoffman?

  Easily onboard to the extension using the Uniswap Mobile Wallet to begin managing your assets across platforms and take advantage of smooth seamless synergies with the Uniswap Web App. So go and download the Uniswap extension today by clicking the link in the show notes. Just another way Uniswap is helping you swap smarter. Launching a token? Don't let complex legal and tax issues slow you down. Toku provides specialized support to optimize your launch and ensure that you as a founder and your team and your investors get the most tax efficient outcomes. The Toku team understands the crypto space inside and out and will ensure your token launch is fully compliant while maximizing tax efficiency. Toku can connect you with the best attorneys if you need them to make sure that you have the best advice. And Toku can help optimize your taxes so you pay the least possible amount of taxes while still maintaining legal compliance.

• 5:38David Hoffman?

  With Toku's guidance, you can concentrate on building your company while Toku handles the logistics. Token launches don't have to be complicated. Talk to Toku today to get a free initial token valuation. Bankless Nation, super excited to introduce you to Keone Han, the founder and CEO of Monad Labs, the creators of the Monad chain. Keone, welcome to Bankless. Hey, thank you so much for having me. And we also have Lei Yang, the founder and CTO over at Mega ETH. Lei, also, welcome to Bankless.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Happy to be here.

• 6:07David Hoffman?

  Okay, so two brand new high-performance chains coming onto the scene, both leveraging and juicing up the EVM to I think really see how far we can take the EVM. Different ways of actually using the EVM that I don't think we've seen be used in the Ethereum ecosystem or its layer twos ever before. And so this is kind of a new frontier. For this tech stack that we call the EVM that I think we all want to explore a little bit here on the podcast today. Let's go and take some time to introduce your guys' respective projects. And really, what are the key aspects, the key features of your guys' respective projects as it relates to the EVM? I think Mega ETH was, excuse me, I think Monad was founded first.

• 6:50David Hoffman?

  So that means we'll start with Kiony and then we'll go in with Mega ETH second. Kiony, explain to us Monad and what is doing differently in the space of blockchains?

• 7:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank you for having me. My name is Kiony Han, co-founder and CEO at Monad Labs. We're building Monad, which is a reimagining of Ethereum from the ground up by redesigning both execution and consensus layers to introduce four major improvements and more generally deliver a really high-performance version of Ethereum, offering over 10,000 transactions per second of throughput. And Monad is doing that by introducing a completely new database that's built from scratch called Monad DB, by introducing optimistic parallel execution so that many transactions can be executed in parallel.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  By introducing asynchronous execution where consensus and execution kind of run in separate swim lanes to massively raise the budget for execution. And lastly, through Monad BFT, which is a really performant consensus mechanism that allows hundreds of nodes that are fully globally distributed to stay in sync with each other. So overall, it's an effort to go really low level and apply systems engineering techniques to build a really performant reimagining of Ethereum.

• 8:18David Hoffman?

  One thing I want to bring up, Kiony, about the way Monad works is I think there was a lot of excitement about Monad after the Solana virtual machine, Solana, and the parallelization of the SVM got everyone excited about as parallelization. And then there was like some technical pushback from very smart people who said it's actually not paralyzed execution that is really the bottleneck. It's Paralyzed read access of a database, to which Keone of Monet had said, "Well, we've also paralyzed our database too." And then everyone was like, "Wow, that's pretty sick." Can you kind of walk us through that, like, part of an architecture of a blockchain? Why is parallelization of a virtual machine cool?

• 8:58David Hoffman?

  But then also, like, how does it boil down to needing to have parallel read access to a database, which you guys also have?

• 9:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great question. I think people kind of intuitively understand that parallel execution is of some benefit because our modern computers clearly have many processors and are running many tasks in parallel. You know, I have hundreds of browsers tabs open. It's kind of a bad habit, actually, but, you know, I have a whole bunch of different browser tabs, Spotify, Discord, all these things going on in parallel. And it's a little bit crazy right now that Ethereum and other EVM blockchains all are single-threaded and execute completely serially. So, parallel execution is

• 9:48Speaker 03

  the aspect of utilizing multiple threads or multiple processors on the host to run many pieces of work in parallel. And that's one of the improvements that ultimately can unlock performance. But when you do the benchmarking and when you look at what the real costs are, actually, the single biggest bottleneck for execution is not that CPU time. It's not like, you know, doing math or,

• 10:18Speaker 03

  you know, like executing individual instructions. The actual biggest bottleneck is state access. Because every smart contract depends on some

• 10:28Speaker 03

  residual state that's associated with that contract. For example, when you're making a Uniswap swap, you need the balances of the two assets in the pool. Say it's UniV2. You need to be able to look those up in order to actually, like, execute the swap and figure out what the new balances are. So, and that requires reading some data from disk. So, the biggest bottleneck for execution actually is state access and...

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Only paralysing the execution, excuse me, only paralysing the computation without also paralysing reads to the database would be only a small improvement relative to the much bigger improvement that could be made by also allowing the database to be parallel readable. And that's exactly what our team has done with monad DB, which is a completely from scratch database that's specifically optimized for the problem of storing the Ethereum Merkel tree data really efficiently on disk. It's been a big endeavor to build this database. Everyone always, you know, the common computer science advice is don't write your own database because it's a big undertaking.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  But in this particular case, it's really needed and really impactful because we have high value state, AKA Ethereum state. We need to be able to access it as fast as possible.

• 11:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Kiony, one last question for you before we delay in the mega ETH side of things. And this goes to the kind of the word choice you were using and the phrasing you were using of you're talking about bringing this to Ethereum, this technology to Ethereum. And so like my question to you is like, what sense is that true and what sense is that not true? So certainly you are bringing this to the EVM, let's say, which is a virtual machine that Ethereum uses. But correct me if I'm wrong, monad still plans to kind of launch its own alternative layer one. So we maybe call that an alt layer one in common parlance, not as a layer two. And this gets to maybe one of the distinctions and differences. So in what sense are you bringing this to Ethereum? What sense are

• 12:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  you not bringing this to Ethereum? So you're not actually expanding Ethereum as a layer two, you're not doing this in mainnet, you're not doing this like, like you're doing this as an alternative chain to Ethereum. Is that correct?

• 12:46Speaker 03

  That's correct. Monet is a vanguard environment for proving out the capabilities of these different architectural improvements that our team thinks ultimately are really needed in Ethereum L1 as well. I think at the end of the day, the discourse around Layer Ones and Layer Twos is one that's evolved over time. And while when we first started in 2022, there was very, very strong feeling of like, you know, Layer Twos that all interact with Ethereum in the same way, utilizing Ethereum both for state commitments and for

• 13:26Speaker 03

  data availability. You know, these are very, there's like this one pattern of how Layer Twos interact with Ethereum. Now in 2024, that spectrum of sort of how Layer Twos interact with Ethereum and to what extent they're utilizing the services of Ethereum directly has evolved as well. And our team's belief is that there are many different ways to be contributing to Ethereum overall. And by focusing on a completely orthogonal direction of Ethereum scaling research that we think is really needed and wasn't being explored, we can also make a significant improvement, a significant contribution to the Ethereum ecosystem overall.

• 14:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, Lei, it's your turn. So let's talk about Mega ETH. And same question to you. Could you just tell us, what's the project about? And like, why are you here? Why is Mega ETH here?

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course. So yeah, again, my name is Lei Yang, and I'm a CTO and co-founder of Mega ETH. So just graduated with my PhD from MIT, worked for six years on blockchain consensus, and published a bunch of papers on security, performance, network aspects of blockchain. So, and now building Mega ETH. So Mega ETH is a performance optimized blockchain with full Ethereum compatibility. And I guess the key kind of differentiation here is that we are kind of unapologetically performance oriented, and we're single-mindedly performance oriented. And how that materializes, right? So first, we choose to be an Ethereum Layer

• 15:03Speaker 02

  Two. And the reason is really that we think it's kind of the only optimal architecture for performance engineering. We are really exploiting the architecture of being a layer two by building what we call the first real-time blockchain. So in other words, up to more than a hundred thousand transactions per second, real Ethereum transactions, not just payments, a block time of one to 10 milliseconds. So that's what we want to kind of achieve is really for DAPs to to be kind of as responsive and as feature and I mean logic reach as your normal VAP two applications, while also giving all the users the same benefit that they expect from a DAP,

• 15:47Speaker 02

  that is correctness of execution, freedom of censorship, et cetera, right? So a few kind of detailed are kind of technical optimizations. So first being a layer two allows us something called node specialization in the sense that in MegaEith, we try to cut down the redundancy of execution as much as possible to the degree that there's only one active sequencer at any given point working on executing every single transaction. And all the other nodes, while they subscribe to the state updates, while they try to keep updates, keep up to date with the current blockchain status, they do not need to execute the all of the transactions.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  And basically, that allows us to really jack up the performance and jack up the hardware configuration of the sequencer, which is executing all the transactions, and also maintaining the hardware requirement of the full nodes who are only interested in getting the getting the current state. And on the sequencer side, we have a few optimizations, including a new data structure that is feature, I mean, feature-wise being the same as a Merkle-Patricia tree, but being much more efficient in terms of utilizing the actual hardware, like SSDs and memory. We are going to compile in real time the Ethereum smart contracts from bytecode down to native assembly codes, down to native instructions.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  And we are also paralyzing the execution of the EVM. So yeah, these are some some highlights. And yeah, and we call the end product a real-time blockchain.

• 17:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Le, I'm curious, you heard Kioni's description of Monad, right? So I'm curious your perspective on similarities and differences, right? So, and maybe for the layman who's approaching this, the layman, let's call them a crypto native. So obviously, a similarity that probably stuck out is you're both looking to scale the EVM and parallelize execution. So that's ding ding ding, that's a similarity. Okay. And then a difference that I think we've heard from both these projects is MegaEthereum is using the Layer 2 architecture. So it's settling to Ethereum, it's using Ethereum for data availability, I would imagine. So is that correct?

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Actually, that's not correct. So we settle down to, I mean, we use EigenLayer as the data availability layer, but also we settle down to Ethereum. But also, a small nuance here is that we are not pushing parallelization as the flagship feature or the flagship optimization. We value single-threaded performance as much as parallelization.

• 18:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Ah, okay. Well, then, why don't you put it in your words? So what are the similarities and differences between the projects and your words?

• 18:40Speaker 02

  I think you summarized the similarities very well. The same focus on performance and trying to bring in the next generation of apps by giving them abundance of resources. But I think the difference here, first, as I mentioned, the different angle, I would say, towards parallelization. Because we, so my hot take is that actually, if you want to build, say, if you want, say, 100 copies of Uniswap, there's enough block space in EVM and Ethereum ecosystem for you to do that. But what we actually need is brand-new applications. And for these applications, our belief is that you have to get to a degree of really high, single-threaded performance.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  Because that is the actual performance that a single, individual application can use at the same time. So, yeah. So in other words, we're really pushing the frontier of single-threaded performance. The optimizations I mentioned, like the new data structure, the JIT compilation of smart contracts. And also this in-memory computation technique that I didn't mention, they are all for single-threaded performance. While parallelization, we viewed it as kind of a second step to push for after we got to a high enough single-threaded performance to enable brand-new applications.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  Although engineering and operation-wise, we're doing the same, we're doing the two at the same time. Another is, I would say, kind of a sharp focus on performance. We built a layer two by choice because we believe that it's the kind of the only optimal architecture for performance that enables you to really eliminate as much redundancy in terms of execution, in terms of consensus in the blockchain as possible. So I think that's a key difference that I want to highlight.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  Kieran, was there anything that Lei just said that sparked anything in you? I think one thing to mention is that Monad's goal and these individual architectural improvements that Monad is working on are designed to get the maximum performance out of the minimal hardware requirements. I think it's really important, from the perspective of decentralization, that anyone be able to run a node with commodity hardware. And in order for that to be possible, we need to make software improvements to get more performance out of the hardware, rather than strictly relying on really high hardware requirements. So I think that fundamentally, the two projects are probably just very different in the outset from the initial premise, which is,

• 21:22Speaker 03

  like in Monad, we're just really focused on getting the most performance out of hardware so that anyone can run a full node and have access to all of the state and keep up with the network and not have to trust, but instead just verify directly.

• 21:38David Hoffman?

  There's something really interesting about having both of you guys on the same podcast, which is why we wanted to do this podcast where you guys have the same goals, which is a very fast EVM. And but like the way that you guys have gotten there are like almost polar opposites towards each other, whereas Mega ETH is going for the layer two single sequencer or very low number of sequencer routes. And Monad is going for a layer one blockchain with a very wide distributor validator set. And then technically speaking, under the hood, you guys have architecture to match these end desires. I'm wondering, since the end goal is the same, which is having a very fast EVM, does, do you think that the apps that will manifest on each one of your guys' respective

• 22:22David Hoffman?

  blockchains will also kind of be the same? Or do you think each one will kind of have an ecosystem that will emerge differently because of the underlying architecture? I guess the question is, how does the underlying architecture, how do you think it will impact the application landscape that comes to be built on top of each respective blockchain? Or maybe it does not do that. Le, let's start with you.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  Okay, so I think it would be very different because, I mean, first, we are, as I mentioned, we're a single mindedly focused on performance. So that actually allows us to reach a much lower latency and I would say higher throughput as well for our system. And I really want to highlight the latency part because it's exactly as you mentioned, we use a single sequencer at the same time. So the sequencer can just execute the transactions in a stream fashion and it really minimizes the kind of the wait time and this block packaging time for transactions to get their feedback. In other words, we expect the kind of the turnaround for an transaction from it arriving

• 23:27Speaker 02

  at the sequencer to it being executed and packaged and the state being updated is one millisecond. So I would say, to me, at least from my background of consensus research, this is not possible for any system where a consensus algorithm sits in the critical path of the of the system. Because for a consensus, for a consensus algorithm to really function, a message has to travel at least across all of the nodes. And if they're globally distributed, then it means that it has to fly around the world. Although at Almost light speed, it still takes several hundreds of milliseconds. And even not to mention that usually you need at least two or three rounds of messaging to do that.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  So that goes to maybe six to 700 milliseconds. And that is your minimum latency for a layer one or even a layer two with kind of a decentralized sequencer using a consensus-based approach. So this low latency, I think, would be really useful for some applications. For example, imagine like on-chain Minecraft, right? You do not want your avatar to kind of take a 600 millisecond wait before it can take the next move. And for really high-frequency trading, I think it would be very interesting because actually the market makers and the traders can actually choose to co-locate with our sequencer.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  So these kind of real-time applications, I think, would be our unique ecosystem projects. Yep.

• 25:02David Hoffman?

  Keon, same question to you, yeah?

• 25:03Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Wondering about the decentralized Minecraft situation? Because that's only going to be low latency if you happen to be close to where the sequencer is.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  Yes, of course. So I would like to distinguish two parameters. One is the tick time or the block time. In other words, the fidelity or the resolution of the movements. Like every one millisecond a movement can happen. But for the user to actually get a feedback, of course, we are not, we're not really breaking physics here. So the user has to, kind of the action has to travel from the keyboard of the user to the sequencer, back to the user's display. However, that is already happening with any kind of online, I mean, MMO RPG games. So actually, that part of latency is fine. What really matters is if you bring in consensus into a critical path, you have this three-round, I mean, I mean, three messages around the globe situation.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  And that's 600-plus milliseconds, which is much higher than the typical latency, I mean, the raw network latency from the user to a centralized sequencer.

• 26:07David Hoffman?

  Keon, what's your attitude or belief about the way that the application ecosystem will come to be born on top of Monad? Is there any differences or any things that you guys are focusing on specifically?

• 26:19Speaker 03

  I think the beauty of the EVM is that it is really this dominant standard that has incredible network effects. There are so many libraries that are built for the EVM. There are so many applications. There's a lot of applied cryptography research, all being done in the context of the EVM. And so being fully bytecode EVM equivalent, Monad offers developers who are already building with the EVM, the best of both worlds between performance and portability. And Monad continues to do that while preserving decentralization, which I think fundamentally will just be like,

• 27:01Speaker 03

  you know, a bit of a crossroads between Monad and Maga ETH in the sense that our team just thinks it's really important to have decentralized block production from the perspective of censorship resistance and, you know, all these other properties that the crypto community has grown to cherish and deeply value. It's really important to preserve that full consensus, even if, you know, there is an overhead from consensus that, like you said, is literally inevitable due to, due to speed of light, unless we can find a way to speed up the speed of light.

• 27:43David Hoffman?

  Maybe said differently, Kiony, if I'm understanding you correctly, you're kind of saying that there is like a certain level of responsibility that one has when one builds a layer one because of the ethos of crypto that comes alongside with it. So like, what's the point of building a layer one if you don't have censorship resistance? What's the point of being, building a layer one if you can't like meaningfully decentralize your validator set? And so in addition to having some of this, the very strong architecture improvements from the Monad EVM and the Monad DB, you also have to do kind of like, you have to do all the things that are required in order to call yourself like a legitimate blockchain effort, which is like all the things that we value as like the crypto industry. Is that kind of what you're saying?

• 28:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. It's, you know, it really comes from the social layer as well that's enforcing these values. You know, decentralization is important from a hardware requirements perspective, from a number of nodes participating in consensus perspective. You know, from a stake weight distribution. So these are all properties that have to be evaluated for for any network. And beyond that, there also needs to be a really strong social layer that reinforces those values.

• 28:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can we get into that? Maybe that's a good jumping off a topic. I was gonna ask another question, but since you brought it up, Kiony, the the D word decentralization. This is sort of a sacred word in crypto, and I imagine Lay would be saying something similar. Hey, the reason we're deploying is a layer two is because of this word decentralization and censorship resistance. So can you kind of like maybe start by talking about the the monad position with respect to decentralization? Because I think this will be sort of counterintuitive to an Ethereum audience. It's just like, hey, if you're gonna try to maximize decentralization, why wouldn't you be a layer two rather than a layer one? And it appears like you are arguing the opposite, right?

• 29:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I think for a typical like Ethereum, their perspective is that, okay, Ethereum has had many years of tested Lindy effect decentralization. Like, that's the thing that it's best at, right? It's like not very good as an execution environment, you know, 10 to 15 transactions per second, kind of sucks at a lot of things. But one thing it gets right is almost near Bitcoin level, or maybe even better than Bitcoin. I said it, oh, decentralization properties, right? And so why forsake all of that and move to a layer one? Yet you were saying your design choices in in monad are optimizing for decentralization.

• 30:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  So maybe first talk about how you view the the word decentralization and why the the architecture kind of like promotes that for for monad. And then I'd love to get Lay to weigh in as well.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  Sure thing. I think the first thing to point out is that for any

• 30:42Speaker 03

  for any choice of sort of network parameters, there's

• 30:49Speaker 03

  you know, we should strive to get the maximum performance from that. So if we have a network with 10,000 nodes that are fully globally distributed, where the hardware requirement is, you know, a particular level of requirement, I think in the case of Ethereum, it's the and it's a bit of a meme, but I'll say it anyways, like you have to be able to run it on a Raspberry Pi. So like certain hardware requirements, certain number of nodes, then we should strive to get the maximum performance out of that requirement. And if, you know, the requirement is a little bit higher, but still like very reasonable. So in the case of Monad,

• 31:34Speaker 03

  32 gigs of RAM, a two terabyte SSD, 100 megabits of bandwidth, and a like a pretty cheap CPU, we should try to get as much performance out of that level of hardware and that network setup. I'm sorry, I forgot to also say number of nodes. So 200 to 300 nodes participating in consensus that are fully globally distributed for that parameter set, like we should try to get the most performance out of that.

• 32:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  And by the way, is that hypothetical or is that the exact parameter set? Is that basically the specification?

• 32:11Speaker 03

  That's the parameter set.

• 32:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  So basically, is that, is that's kind of like a consumer grade laptop? Like, you know, like MacBook Pro, sort of what you described and like sort of a, you know, broadband, typical broadband consumer internet connection is sort of the hardware requirement and then 200 to 300 nodes?

• 32:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a laptop you could get at Costco.

• 32:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, and you think that this is, and is this decentralized enough? Or is it as decentralized as Ethereum? Or how would you even kind of like have that like conversation? Or would you include other actors in the, in the space as well? Because of course, it's not just the nodes, the validators, there are other actors with respect to how a block is, is created? Block builders and such, there's an entire supply chain around this. Anyway, how like, would you say that Monad's design parameters are going to be more decentralized than Ethereum? Or yeah, how would you even have that conversation?

• 33:07Speaker 03

  Right, so I think the thing that I was getting at is for a given set of parameters, we should strive to get the most performance out of that setup as possible. And the only way you can get maximum performance is through software improvements. So the improvements that our team is pioneering within Monad with this particular configuration, some of those improvements will make an improvement to a different setup that, you know, more like Ethereum L1 right now, where there are 10,000 nodes. It's like literally a different number of nodes and the hardware requirement is a little bit different. It's still a benefit to have this new database.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Like the new database isn't designed for a specific SSD size, like it works for any SSD size. So at the end of the day, it's really just about getting max performance with very reasonable hardware requirements. And so my point is that if you constrain the network to like only having one node really,

• 34:09Speaker 03

  then, and you don't constrain the hardware requirements at all, or you allow really high RAM, like there are going to be potentially some different performance characteristics that you could get from that.

• 34:24Speaker 03

  Maybe even just for free, just from like not having to go to SSD, like keeping all of the state in, in memory. So at the end of the day, it is like, no matter what, the job of the team that's doing the engineering work should be to get the maximum performance out of any kind of hardware setup. But like, everyone always chooses one particular sort of starting point for the hardware and then gets the most out of it. And our view is that this is a really good anchor point where the hardware is still very reasonable and we can get a lot of performance out of it.

• 34:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Lee, what's your take on the D word decentralization? What's Megaeith's position on it? Either similar or in contrast to what we were just hearing?

• 35:08Speaker 02

  Of course, so I would like to first address this kind of performance per hardware unit, if I may point. So of course, Megaeith is also working to maximize the performance per hardware unit or per gigabyte of RAM, per CPU core, per gigahertz of CPU frequency, right? So but also, so basically, all of our optimizations can be can be kind of neglected if we can just jack up the hardware configuration to the infinity, right? But unfortunately, there is no such hardware that has an infinite number of CPU cores and infinite amount of memory. Actually, it's so actually, it's also the limitation of even the latest generation,

• 35:53Speaker 02

  the top, the top of the line server hardware that requires us to also do hard engineering work to to really maximize the efficiency. The word that the word should be the efficiency, the kind of the the performance per unit, like compilation, like like the new data structure, right? So back to decentralization. So the point here is that actually, we also have lightweight nodes. So with our full node has eight to six gigabyte of memory, terabytes of SSD, but not the server grade, just the consumer grade, four to eight cores of CPU.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  So it's kind of relatively the same order of magnitude of configuration like Ethereum execution nodes and the S-Monad nodes. But the key difference, the reason, I mean, the real highlight here is that the sequencer has to shoulder most of the work by executing all of the transactions. But being but being on layer two allows us to kind of maintain the hardware requirement for the full nodes who are interested in getting the latest states, the entire latest states. So that actually boosts decentralization by being by being a layer two. And also have verifier nodes who literally can run off and resupply, no storage, and

• 37:15Speaker 02

  just obtains the states needed for verification and also the transactions needed for verification from a network on the fly and just.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  Kind of verify the blockchain at kind of byte size, right? So actually, so we value decentralization a lot. And node specialization is our answer to kind of, I mean, Kuhn's observation that, yes, if you require everyone to use really beefy hardware, then there's no decentralization to start with because no one can afford a server and no one wants a server humming. I literally have a server next to my desk and it's noisy as hell when I do an upgrade or when I do a reboot and no one wants that at their home. So we are really conscious about that and node specialization is our answer.

• 38:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wait, wait, is node specialization just basically L1 and L2? Is that kind of like?

• 38:13Speaker 02

  No, no, no. So it's basically you have different kinds of nodes of different hardware configuration doing different job in within a layer two system. So you have sequencer executing all the transactions. You have full nodes subscribing to the state updates. And you have verifiers who statelessly verify the chain state. But yeah, but on the topic of decentralization. So although we kind of, we are really conscious about it by really minimizing hardware configuration for full nodes and verify nodes. We actually believe that decentralization is just means to an end, right? What you want is, I would say, correctness of execution. You want finality, you want censorship tolerance.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  I don't think anyone, I mean, most important people coming from VAP2 to look for something called decentralization when they enter the crypto space. I think what they want is assurance of correctness. They want to not to trust any single entity to run their important applications. And decentralization, as we saw, which worked really well for layer ones, is just one means to an end. And now that a layer one has been built, which is Ethereum, which really As much decentralization as one can ask, I would say.

• 39:31Speaker 02

  I, we think it's time to move on. So Ethereum has done the decentralization part for us. And now it's, it's time for us to really optimize for performance. Piggybacking on the, on the decentralization that Ethereum has achieved.

• 39:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Do we get to have one of those back and forth conversations of like, you know, let's not use the word decentralization, but let's use it as a proxy for all of the properties you just mentioned, Lee, which is like censorship resistance, settlement assurances, all of these things, right? It's like, we understand decentralization is just a means to the end. But I think what listeners want to know is, okay, which of your, uh, the super fast performant EVMs are more decentralized? So is it MegaEthereum or is it Monad? I, you know, uh, what's your answer to that, Lee? And then we'll go to, uh, Kiony.

• 40:19David Hoffman?

  Also, how do we even like, think about that? How do we even understand that, that question?

• 40:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, very good point, very good point. So, um, we can try a few different angles, like hardware configuration, which I mentioned, the full nodes and the verifiers for MegaEthereum are on the same magnitude of, um, same order of magnitude of hardware configuration as Ethereum and the modern nodes that is for full nodes, MegaEthereum and verifiers, literally rest re-pygrade and, uh, just downloads, uh, the information of the, of the wire as needed. So that is hardware configuration, right? Right? So I can, I mean, the, the, the takeaway is that you do not need anything that is beefier than your existing Ethereum execution nodes to download the latest, and also maintain the latest MegaEthereum state.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  In terms of the number of nodes, yeah, go ahead.

• 41:13Speaker 03

  Sorry, sorry. It was just, you keep calling them full nodes, but, I mean, are they, like, is that an abusive terminology at all? Because I think pretty much everyone else in the blockchain space uses full node to mean a node that.

• 41:30Speaker 03

  executes all the transactions, like verifies the correctness of the outcome of those transactions. And I think what you're referring to when you say full node is like something kind of different.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, I can answer that question. So if you go to say Ethereum's website and there is instructions for syncing up a full node. And actually, the default option is, uh, I forgot it's called snap sync or fast sync. I think they changed the terminology a lot, but basically is the default is one that just downloads the latest snapshot of the state. And such a node does not really verify the transactions before, uh, kind of start to serve you, uh, the state which is downloaded, right? Because the logic is that it just downloads the latest copy of the state and then starts working. And then probably it will, it will probably optionally, um, verify the backlog, but it may not do so.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  So my point or our understanding, I think it's, it's important that we bring this up, but our understanding of, uh, of a full node is one that maintains and keeps track of the latest blockchain state. Um, yeah, so that's our understanding. And of course it's, it's the terminology is up for debate and it would be great if the industry can agree on the same set of terminologies.

• 42:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, we've, we've been arguing on what's a full node since the Bitcoin versus Ethereum.

• 42:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 42:58David Hoffman?

  It'll ever be fully answered. Keon, how would, how would you define, uh, how does your idea of a full node differ, differ from Lays? Yeah. Why'd you bring that up? What's the, what's your thinking there?

• 43:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I mean, I think if you are running a, a node of some sort and it's not,

• 43:19Speaker 03

  you know, it has to trust a centralized party, then it's not very good, right? Like the whole point of blockchain is that we don't have to trust, we could just verify. And so that's, you know, whether we call it a full node or not, I mean, I'm, I'm calling out the use of the terminology full node in the sense that like it's being compared to like other things. But I think what we really care about is, you know, if I'm a, You know, a small business owner and I'm accepting payments.

• 43:54Speaker 03

  And, you know, someone sends me a payment. And I let the, you know, the person like walk out of the store with like, I don't know. A laptop or a diamond ring or a Tesla or something like I need to be able to know that that payment actually went through. And so the whole premise in my mind of blockchain is that, you know, that small business owner could actually literally just run a node. And when they see that payment, they verify that it actually happened. And they know that they're not just trusting like a single centralized intermediary. So that's really the nature of my question. I guess I don't care whether you're calling it full node or not really.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  But I really care about the question of knowing for sure, rather than just having to trust your single centralized sequencer.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Yep. So, um, so I think you mentioned that, um, don't, don't trust, don't trust verify, right? So if I may, I want to kind of append the following to it. So basically don't trust verify, but even better, let someone else verify it for you, which is the case of rollups, both optimistic and ZK rollups. So in the particular case that you mentioned, right? I, I'm the seller of a laptop. Someone paid me on mega ETH, say $5,000. And I'm deciding whether I should hand over the laptop. So the thing here is, um, the sequencer, the single sequencer, yes, at the, at the moment, we are trusting the single sequencer to correctly order the transaction and to execute the transaction.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  But the important thing here is that the single sequencer is under kind of a social and economic contract. So I think the debate is really about crypto economic security. So imagine that, because the thing is that if the sequencer ever cheats in the sense of retracting, I mean, excluding the, the transaction or just giving me an incorrect balance update. Every information, every piece of information that the sequencer told me when I was deciding whether to hand over the laptop was signed by the sequencer. And if the sequencer did any shenanigan here, this is kind of a proof that we'll get the sequencer slashed.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  So yes, the sequencer may lie to me, but the sequencer has to probably lose ETH that is worth maybe a thousand Teslas or a thousand laptops, which is not, not, not, kind of not worth it, right? I mean, yeah, I think this really boils down to crypto economic security. And I mean, being a project in the Ethereum ecosystem, I myself got from, so I started working, I started my research in blockchain from proof of work. I think it's beautiful, but then I got to know kind of proof of stake and the crypto economic security mode, more importantly, day by day. And I think it really, it really works. Yep.

• 46:44David Hoffman?

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• 48:38David Hoffman?

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• 49:22David Hoffman?

  Visit arbitrum.io and get your journey started in one of the largest Ethereum communities. Can I try and summarize the bit of conversation that we've been up to so far, just so I can make sure that I'm kind of keeping up with the issues? And I agree with you, Kiony, like my definition of a full node, and I think the consensus definition of a full node in Ethereum land at least, is that like, I am a listener of the blockchain, I'm keeping a copy of the ledger, but I'm also doing my duty of verifying the validity of incoming transactions and incoming blocks. And so sometimes, maybe, a block comes to me and it's invalid, and I reject it, and I start listing for a different block coming from someone else. And I don't actually just automatically accept that invalid block.

• 50:03David Hoffman?

  I actually do my role of making sure that I'm adding only valid blocks with only valid blocks. Transactions to the blockchain. And this is how, if everyone is doing this role, this is how blockchains preserve decentralization while also having correctness. And then, and so what you're saying is that if you're just listening to a trusted source of these blocks, a single, a centralized sequencer, that actually is less of a role of what a full node does. Because if you're just automatically trusting the validity of these blocks as a full node, that makes you like less of a full node. I think that was the point of contention that you brought up. And then Lei's response is like, well, if the sequencer is signing transactions and there's an economic bond that would result in the sequencer getting slashed a very large amount,

• 50:47David Hoffman?

  then we are perhaps not the same full node as I was describing earlier, but there is a large amount of economic security here, and that's our new trust assumption. Has, that's been the conversation so far?

• 51:00Speaker 02

  Yep. And, yeah, exactly. And I would say, I think the type of node that you mentioned is kind of a combo of a full node and also a validator in Ethereum terminology. Because usually people don't expect a full node to really sign, I mean, mine blocks. You have to be also staking. In other words, if a node does not stake, should it be called a full node? I think so. So I think kind of the type of, the type of node that you mentioned is kind of something that's much more than a full node. Yeah.

• 51:33Speaker 03

  Sorry. So just to verify, you said when, or Lei, you said that when the, or if the sequencer were to like post an invalid state root? Like, is there, like, how would, how would they get slashed?

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Right. So it's basically standard optimistic and ZK proofs. So the, the way it works is that the sequencer, by posting the state updates, is kind of accountable proof that the, the sequencer has said something like this, which is incorrect. Right? So later, these transactions, the block, they are going to be posted to EigenDA and the state root posted to Ethereum. And For optimistic proof, there are usually seven days for verifiers, which I meant the Raspberry Pi's, to come and re-execute those transactions. So importantly, people in Mega ETH, they do re-execute transactions. The important thing is that an individual node does not need to re-execute every transaction.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  So this makes them lightweight. But again, people re-execute every single transaction collectively. So if they find anything that is incorrect, they submit something called a fraud proof or an optimistic proof to the Ethereum smart contract, which slashes the sequencer automatically. And in the case of the ZK proof, it's even simpler. Basically, the sequencer is responsible for kind of proving the state transitions in real time before, in the future, before even it posts the state updates. So yeah, that's how, yeah, that's how we verify the state roots.

• 53:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, also, nothing exotic here. This is all standard Layer 2 FAIR, basically.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is not anything different about Mega ETH. This is just Layer 2 101.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, if I, yeah, if I miscommunicated, I'm sorry. But yeah, it's, as I mentioned in the beginning, it's just standard OP and ZK rollups.

• 53:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  So.

• 53:32Speaker 03

  But just to verify, those are two different mechanisms. So which, have you guys decided which one you're going to use?

• 53:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're using optimistic proofs for now. Yeah, because we believe that the ZK proof is not kind of efficient enough as of this point for our level of throughput.

• 53:50Speaker 03

  Oh, I see. Okay, but you were just mentioning ZK as like a future, maybe, possibility.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. I was trying to kind of just introduce the kind of validity proofs on a high level.

• 54:02Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah, that makes sense. But then for the optimistic, like for other people to verify, they'd also have to have a lot of RAM.

• 54:09Speaker 02

  And that is incorrect because I think I mentioned repeatedly that the verifier only needs to be SBB, S. Raspberry Pi. So the secret sauce here is something called stateless verification. So again, disclaimer, we didn't come up with this idea. So it roots from Ethereum's stateless client discussion, I think, a few years ago. But we are basically adapting the technology.

• 54:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Kiony, I'm curious your take on this. So it's this line of discussion around full nodes and everything we just talked about started with the prompt of, okay, Lei, who's more decentralized? And again, we're using that word as a proxy for many, many things. Censorship resistance, all of these features that make blockchain special. So I want to turn that same question to you. How do you think about that question? Like, which is more decentralized? What's the path to getting there?

• 55:09Speaker 03

  For me, decentralization means that anyone can run a full node. And by full node, I mean a node that has access to all the state and that executes all the transactions.

• 55:25Speaker 03

  So Monad is pioneering these different architectural improvements so that anyone could, without raising their hardware requirements very much, run a node and keep up with the tip of the chain, execute all the transactions and have access to the full state.

• 55:45Speaker 03

  I think that's really important to decentralization.

• 55:49Speaker 03

  I think that there are other architectures which,

• 55:54Speaker 03

  you know, which trade like some aspects of decentralization and censorship resistance for, you know, being able to move execution off of the layer one. And that's, that's interesting. I think there's a lot of merit there. But I think from the perspective of having a system with, I mentioned before, a couple hundred nodes participating in consensus, but even more than that, like thousands or tens of thousands of full nodes that have access to that full state. It's just really important that node requirements be reasonable. And then, you know, downstream, that also has an effect on kind of the economics of the blockchain.

• 56:37Speaker 03

  I know this is kind of a hot topic, but in blockchains where The hardware requirements are really substantial. It means that the cost to run a node is quite high, which then has a centralizing effect as well.

• 56:53Speaker 03

  And, you know, we see that with some other high-performance blockchains that have really high hardware requirements, that it's just not economical for a small staker to actually run a node, because it'd just be too expensive if it's like $10,000 a year or something to run a node. So I think that efficiency, you know, efficiency matters and efficiency has knock-on effects. And it's just really important to have really high software efficiency so that we can have the most decentralized network possible.

• 57:24David Hoffman?

  Going back to something that you said about Monet Kiony about software efficiency is that just like one transaction should cost the least amount of just like total compute from all of the nodes around the world as possible. And I think that's kind of like where you're spawning efficiency from. Can you talk about those like knock-on effects? Like if you are optimizing for reducing the total compute costs of planet Earth to run the Monet blockchain, what does Monet get out of that? What's the juice that you can squeeze from that feature?

• 57:53Speaker 03

  So just to mention one thing, like, I think it's, I think it was actually Lay that was saying that like efficiency means like the least amount of compute expended to do something. But, you know, like, that's, that comes from like having one sequencer that does it. So, yeah, like in the Monet network, if one reduced the number of nodes participating in consensus, there would be less, I guess, like in some sense, electricity expended for that. But that's not, that's not totally like the metric that our team is optimizing for. Like, we just want per unit of verification, like for a full node, that cost to be as

• 58:37Speaker 03

  low as possible, so that then it is as cheap as possible to run a full node and keep up with this entire global state that's progressing through time.

• 58:47Speaker 03

  So just wanted to clarify that.

• 58:49David Hoffman?

  Sure. Maybe I'm missing something about the way Mega ETH runs. I'm going to make an assumption here and yay, like shake your head violently if I'm wrong. But like since the whole idea about like Mega ETH is that it goes really, really fast. Like we're centralizing all the compute, we're centralizing all the resources in order to have like this realtime server that like people ping. And it goes really, really fast. And then in contrast to that, Monad is like a layer one blockchain with consensus and like individual, like hopefully solo stakers. And because of that architecture, like in full nodes, people who aren't staking but are still listening to the blockchain can keep up with the Monad blockchain. Because you know, the stakers have to be meaningfully decentralized and that means you have to reduce the hardware requirements from these stakers.

• 59:33David Hoffman?

  Is your claim, Kiony, that like because of like the more centralized sequencer that that Mega ETH has, that like it has like a lesser claim on decentralization and censorship resistance in comparison to Monad? Is like a statement that you would agree with?

• 59:51Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, that's a statement I agree with.

• 59:53David Hoffman?

  Because of, and like my logic is sound there, right? Like because you guys have individual solo stakers, you can therefore also have individual full nodes. And then you have like kind of the complete blockchain stack to preserve like decentralization, incredible neutrality and censorship resistance.

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:00:09David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Yeah. Lay, how would you respond to that?

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  So I think it's important to realize that we anchor our kind of finality, the correctness and censorship resistance on Ethereum. So instead of hundreds of nodes, there are 10th of thousands of nodes that are a kind of backing, that powering the censorship tolerance guarantees. So by that definition, by the particular definition that you stated, I would say Mega ETH is more decentralized. So I'm personally, I'm against kind of comparing decentralization of two products like without really clearly defining it. But in the way that you defined it, in terms of the number of nodes that. Provides the final guarantee of finality correctness and censorship tolerance.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  Then I think it is objectively true that MegaEve is more decentralized.

• 1:01:00David Hoffman?

  Okay, cool.

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  Because again, we're kind of cheating here, right? Because we built on Ethereum, but that's exactly, that's a conscious choice.

• 1:01:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Keone, do you have a response to this? I mean, this entire podcast quite clearly was just to bait you guys into the question of arguing about who's more decentralized. Let's just like, put that right out there. But what would you say? What's kind of the Monad claim on decentralization? How would you dispute what was just said there?

• 1:01:24Speaker 03

  I think it's important to be progressing toward.

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, maybe just to take a step back. You know, in Ethereum L1 land, there's discussion right now about,

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  you know, what improvements can we make to Ethereum itself to raise the execution throughput of Ethereum from 15 transactions per second, you know, AKA 1.5 million gas per second to something higher. And it's frustrating when there's the gas spikes on L1. And yeah, I just think that ultimately Ethereum, like it's of merit for Ethereum to become more performant. It's of merit to introduce software improvements that make Ethereum more powerful.

• 1:02:26Speaker 03

  And so that's sort of like the most fundamental guiding principle in how our team was designing Monad was to make individual architectural improvements that might actually be something that could slot into Ethereum L1 itself. So I think that, you know, if you, if we're going to sort of fall back on like, well, it uses Ethereum for some elements. And not for DA also, by the way, but like using Ethereum for like settlement.

• 1:03:00Speaker 03

  Like, I guess I would say all layer twos kind of can make that same claim of like, we're quote unquote more decentralized than Monad because we're all like using Ethereum directly for settlement. And I would just say like on the opposite side of the.

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  The diagram is just like, you know, Monad is trying to introduce tech that makes Ethereum more performant without requiring more hardware, which I think is good. And then, second of all, it's just that without kind of is like a more uniquely differentiated. That is a uniquely differentiated direction that I hope will be helpful to the overall effort to improve the impact of decentralized systems.

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we can definitely agree that we're all contributing tech to to the Ethereum ecosystem. But I think one small point, I think in terms of overall hardware consumption. So if we define the overall hardware kind of consumption of two chains as kind of the number of the amount of dollars that you need to buy servers and nodes to kind of let the system produce blocks correctly, right, then for MegaEve is so for MegaEve is one sequencer and for Monad it's several hundred of the full nodes. So I'm personally not sure if it's more kind of expensive to operate and to to purchase one like beefy sequencer,

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  probably thousands of dollars versus hundreds of like full nodes. I mean Costco laptops. So just one small point. Yeah. But overall, yeah, definitely.

• 1:04:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that's kind of a puzzling line of argument for me, though, because, you know, if the Monad network were only two nodes instead of hundreds, then it would be lower cost and it would from that perspective, from that metric, it would.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. But then the censorship tolerance and the finality, the correctness of execution of such a hypothetical and Monad system will be lingering on will be leaning on these two Monad nodes while for MegaEve it's still tens of thousands of Ethereum nodes. I think that's kind of an important that's kind of an important difference. But I think you mentioned something that's very important, which is all layer twos, all Ethereum layer twos can claim so, which we definitely agree. And again, it's we build a layer two by by choice. Yes.

• 1:05:26Speaker 03

  One thing I wanted to ask about actually, because you keep mentioning censorship tolerance. And you're choosing your words pretty carefully, which I think is interesting. Because you didn't say censorship resistance, you said censorship tolerance. Is there a difference there?

• 1:05:42Speaker 02

  Oh, so I, yeah, I usually use the two words interchangeably. I think the key difference here is whether you want like real time censorship tolerance. Or you want like eventual, or I mean censorship tolerance with a bounded latency. So by, so Magaith is offering the kind of censorship tolerance with a bounded latency. By allowing those to post their kind of sensor transactions directly to Ethereum, which guarantees inclusion. And then forces the layer, I mean, forces the sequencer to, to include it in the layer two blocks. But also for, but also there's, yeah, but also there is repercussion for the sequencer. If the sequencer fails to, to include a transaction, right?

• 1:06:26Speaker 02

  Because of the same economic security. So I would say it's kind of a combo of, I mean, hard, I mean, hard delayed censorship tolerance. And also crypto economic security.

• 1:06:39Speaker 03

  Right, so this is like the sort of standard OP stack.

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not Magaith technology. Yeah, it's just, I mean, layer two, yeah.

• 1:06:48Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 1:06:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  I, I just, I guess I have kind of a comment or take just sort of getting to the conversation so far. And this is just like much higher level than what we've been discussing. But it seems to me in being sort of an observer of the Ethereum ecosystem for a while. It seems to me that both of these projects at some level are kind of a, an innovation reaction to Solana at some level. To kind of what a high throughput SVM looks like. And Kiony, you may say, hey, no, Monad preceded Solana in terms of thinking about this. And you know, if that's the case, like point taken. But I think that's part of the narrative attraction to it.

• 1:07:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's like Ethereum really hasn't done very much innovation with respect to its virtual. Machine since inception like the Ethereum Foundation has not been focused there. It's been focused on other things. And so now both of your projects are like innovating the EVM and building new things, new possibilities from the EVM. And maybe Kiony, you would say like, hey, I'm like redesigning the entire database. So so mod add even more so than than mega ETH at this point. And I think that's all good for Ethereum. It also strikes me that like maybe Kiony, the the monad approach is more the monolithic, integrated type of approach where which is just like, let's put all kind of the state and

• 1:08:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  everything in kind of the full stack, you know, same same area, right? So we're not kind of, you know, moving execution and settlement and data availability across kind of multiple layers here with with multiple dependencies. Just all put it in one spot. So you are like bullish EVM and also of the monolithic religion, let's say, or integrated religion, if we want to any like better framing of that. Whereas mega ETH is also bullish EVM, but of the modular religion and like you like this idea of layer twos and keeping the decentralization properties of Ethereum, or maybe the ETH alignment, let's let's call it.

• 1:08:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  So is that a fair characterization of your two projects and where you come? Like both are innovating on the EVM, both good for the progress of Ethereum, especially to the extent that you're doing this in open in an open source way and, you know, giving us the code in a way that others can access it as well. But Kiony, your approach with monad is more on the monolithic integrated, whereas mega ETH is is kind of modular. I'm just trying to like pin down religions here, you know, because in crypto, we like to talk about architectural religions. Kiony, what's your reaction to that?

• 1:09:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would say that Monet is a full stack approach where all layers of the stack are being optimized and harmonized. Ethereum itself is a full stack, like Ethereum is amazing. There's this VM, there's consensus. It serves as a data availability layer for other, um, other blockchains. And I think when

• 1:10:04Speaker 03

  ultimately trying to make improvements to Ethereum, you would have to think about like how all those pieces fit together. And that's kind of like the thing that our team is tackling right now. You were talking about Solana, so I think one thing that's interesting is Monet is, one of the four innovations in Monet is asynchronous execution.

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  The easiest way of which to describe it is by remembering the movie Limitless, where the premise of the movie is like the aphorism that you only use 10% of your brain. Like, what if you could take a pill and use 100% of your brain? Like, think about how smart you'd be and how easy life would be for you. And, you know, in the movie, there's a guy who takes the pill, and of course, things are great, and then they become terrible because,

• 1:10:54Speaker 03

  you know, there's all, you run too fast. Yeah, exactly. Fly too close to the sun.

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  And that's a helpful analogy because in existing blockchains where consensus and execution are interleaved, which is how Ethereum works and how almost every blockchain works, the budget for execution is actually quite small because consensus takes up most of that time. And consensus is expensive because nodes are on opposite sides of the world. If it's a well-formulated blockchain, they're on opposite sides of the world, or they're completely globally distributed. So consensus takes up most of that block time, and so execution is actually only a small fraction of that block time.

• 1:11:36Speaker 03

  In particular, in Ethereum, there's 12-second block times, but the budget for execution is actually only 100 milliseconds, which is 1% of the block time, which is like a crazy. Dilating effect. So with asynchronous execution, Monad moves execution out of the hot path of consensus and runs it in kind of a separate swim lane, very slightly lagged relative to consensus. And that means that the entire block time can be allocated to execution. So this is a massive, actually, budget increase for execution. It's just coming from this different software architecture. So, you know, we've been, our team has been talking about this concept for quite some time now. And recently,

• 1:12:20Speaker 03

  I've seen other blockchains, including Solana, talk about, you know, kind of embrace like the idea of asynchronous execution and talk about ways to integrate that within these other blockchains as well. So I think it's just, that's only feasible if you're designing an entire system where consensus and execution are both considered, the way that they fit together is considered, and we optimize this full stack. So I think that that's, yeah, for sure, like Monad is aligned with the idea of trying to optimize the full system to deliver the most performance possible.

• 1:12:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're gonna confuse a lot of people when you, when you ship the Monad product for all the narrative shillers out there, because I'm not sure whether you're the Ethereum killer or the Solana killer that, you know, we have to have a killer if we're launching an alt layer one, or else, you know, we can't get the narrative off the ground. But, you know,

• 1:13:12Speaker 03

  Centralization killer.

• 1:13:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go. There you go. Lee, what's your reaction to kind of like my framing of this, which is like you're both EVM megabulls, and your project takes the, the, you know, like modular approach versus Monad taking kind of the integrated monolithic approach?

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  Yep. EVM megabulls, we are there to enable new applications. And what our, our product design, as we saw, is just single-mindedly optimized for that, which is kind of allowing for better performance in terms of throughput, in terms of low latency, real time this, right?

• 1:13:52Speaker 02

  I don't remember kind of I mean modular versus monolithic, the discussion coming up even once in our kind of scoping, our design discussions back in the days. So I think at the end of the day, I totally agree with you that yes, we are on the track of a modular approach. But I would say we're not guided by the discussion, the kind of religious debate between monolithic and modular. It's really just because we built an layer two. And yeah, so yeah, that's my that's my conclusion. And I guess in terms of the kind of engineering approach, like we are performance, we are

• 1:14:37Speaker 02

  kind of, I would say if Monad is like a full stack approach, we are kind of a focused approach on on on performance. And we're reading, we're willing to kind of make sometimes controversial and and interesting design decisions. But yeah, here we are.

• 1:14:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  So if you're not willing to pick a religion, are you willing to pick a killer? Are you an ETH killer or are you a Solana killer?

• 1:15:04Speaker 02

  Well, centralization killer, definitely not ETH killer. And yeah, I cannot say more.

• 1:15:12David Hoffman?

  Guys, one thing I that's I think pretty interesting about each of you guys' respective blockchains is the magnitude of the community that has risen around each one, despite I think both of you not having a testnet. Is that raise your hand if you have a testnet?

• 1:15:28David Hoffman?

  No one.

• 1:15:28Speaker 03

  We have an internal, we have an internal one, but nothing.

• 1:15:31David Hoffman?

  Internal testnet. Okay, so incoming soon TM. It's actually pretty amazing that the brands that you guys have elevated for yourselves has attracted builders. So there's already people building on Monad. There's already deals going around of people building on Monad. Same thing with Mega ETH, there's this thing called the Mega Mafia. Mega ETH has this hat that every single person wants in Ethereum. I wonder just how, what's it like to do community management, business development for an EVM chain? Because there are roughly. I don't know, 30, 40, 50 EVM chains that are out there. Yet somehow, these two ecosystems that we have on the podcast today have done a very

• 1:16:15David Hoffman?

  good job of actually building a community and started building a community of builders as well. I'm wondering, like, what's your guys' trick? How did you guys do this? What was the strategy for getting this done? Kiony, do you want to start? I think we both have hats that you guys are about to show us.

• 1:16:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, show us your stuff. The merch.

• 1:16:31Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 1:16:32David Hoffman?

  Oh, the Melandak. I want a Melandak.

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's awesome.

• 1:16:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  He's sitting on Kiony's shoulder right now. It's a purple stuffed animal for you podcast listeners that can't see this.

• 1:16:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. I'm actually in a hat factory here. I'm in a hat storage room, but I wanted to show you this Melandak. Yeah, the community, the Monad community is honestly incredible. It's just the result of amazing individuals who have, who are really passionate about crypto, really passionate about DeFi, follow along with the lore and the memes and the fun of crypto Twitter every day. Many of whom were not, actually, pretty much all of whom were not, like, famous on crypto Twitter or anything like that, but are just people who have been following along and found a home in the Monad community and found opportunities to contribute, to take on

• 1:17:32Speaker 03

  leadership opportunities in terms of organizing initiatives, contribute their art, contribute. I don't know, we have a lot of fun initiatives going on, like the Monad Run Club, which initially was seeking to run 10,000 kilometers collectively and hit that pretty quickly. So now they're doing, I think, 80,000, which is like the circumference of the Earth. I probably got those numbers wrong, sorry. Or Monlingo, which is an effort to learn a new language. So people are doing Duolingo together. There's just a lot of incredible energy and it's all just driven by individuals. So I think it's similar to, it's really consistent with the ethos of crypto, where individuals matter and everyone can make a difference.

• 1:18:17Speaker 03

  And also, you know, it's a environment of opportunity, both for application builders as well as for folks that have just been, are really switched on and really following along.

• 1:18:30David Hoffman?

  How do you keep them engaged when only so many of them are actually like playing around with the it's an internal monad testnet. So like, what are they doing in there? They are going on runs together, which is kind of sick. But what about just like, I don't know, more like crypto native stuff?

• 1:18:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, we've, I mean, it's evolved over time. Initially, it was really just people hanging out,

• 1:18:56Speaker 03

  commiserating during the bear market. I think that a lot of things are path dependent, but it was pretty rough back there. And a lot of our really OG members were just people who were scrolling the timeline and decided to take shelter, if you will, from the negativity and and over time, that's evolved into more specific initiatives. But there are folks in our community who are getting job opportunities in the monad ecosystem. For builders, it's amazing because they can, you know, meet really talented community managers or marketers or people who just have really good instincts for,

• 1:19:38Speaker 03

  you know, putting some wind in the sails of the project from a community or marketing perspective. So overall, I think it's just a very nascent, but growing and, you know, environment with a lot of opportunity.

• 1:19:54David Hoffman?

  So inside, if you are a consumer of monad lore, you'll notice that there's not just a molan deck. There's a few other animals as well. There's a molan fish,

• 1:20:07David Hoffman?

  another of other creatures. I don't know how they work. Where does this lore about the molan, monad animals come from?

• 1:20:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's actually a great question, great anecdote. When we first started opening up the community, Bill Monday, our community lead, and I spent a lot of time brainstorming, like trying to come up with the right mascot. And so I have this notion page now of prospective mascots and all of the ideas are really bad. Like every next one is worse than the previous one. And I think, you know, what it really, because we were thinking about it too hard. We were like, okay, monad is really fast. So like, what's the thing that's fast? Okay, like a cheetah or a A car or some. Anyway, the point is, we were, we were absolutely mid-curving it.

• 1:20:58Speaker 03

  And at the end of the day, the, the, the creatures that have ended up becoming like unofficial Monad mascots are all just community-driven. Like, you know, a person just uploads an image and then that one through community curation like floats to the top just through people reusing it. There's no formal voting process or anything like that. It's all just, you know, which things kind of stick in people's heads and end up recurring. And now there's a super deep lore with Bolandac and Mokadell and Salmonad and Moyaki. Yeah, I'll send you the photo later, but he's, he's really cute, really funny, really hopeless, I would say.

• 1:21:41Speaker 03

  And he has a whole lore around him. Like, he's, yeah, he, he doesn't have a house like all the other animals have houses and, um, I don't know.

• 1:21:50David Hoffman?

  Salmonad doesn't have a house.

• 1:21:51Speaker 03

  Salmonad doesn't have a house.

• 1:21:54Speaker 03

  That, yeah, I guess because he's migratory, but, but actually just because he, he always kind of gets the short end of the stick in, um, in Monad lore.

• 1:22:02David Hoffman?

  Sorry, buddy.

• 1:22:03Speaker 03

  There's Mooch, who's a fly. He's French. He was created by the French Nads. Shout out to French Nads. There is Spidermon, who's a spider created by the Turk Nads. He's creepy but funny. Anyway, yeah, there's just so much like depth to, and it's just really fun. Like, at the end of the day, if you're not, if you're in crypto and you're not having fun, then something is wrong.

• 1:22:29David Hoffman?

  Something's wrong, yeah. And of course, the Monad community is called the Nads as well. Lei, uh, tell us about the MegaEthereal apparel brand. Uh, how did you guys start this?

• 1:22:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, um, yeah, we actually see a kind of an astonishing growth of our community because we literally just came out of stealth, I mean, less than half a year ago. So, um, our thrust, uh, kind of our brand is called Mega Mafia. It's our kind of flagship viewers program, incubation program.

• 1:22:59Speaker 02

  So what we look for is those zero-to-one applications that are only possible on, on MegaEthereal, um, a real-time blockchain, right? And, um, so, I mean, what we're looking for are the people, are the kind of the founders who, um, I think actually the kind of our cohort, I think they share a kind of a common personality. So they were drawn into crypto by, they probably read something on the internet saying that, kind of promising them that, hey, you can build this, you can build that decentralized and trustless application on crypto. They came to crypto, realized that, hey, it's a lie. There's not enough resource, there's not enough infra to build what I wanted to do.

• 1:23:43Speaker 02

  However, so we are kind of offering them, we're kind of telling them that, hey, there is a new kind of wave of infra, in particular mega ETH, that you should try to kind of redo what you, what actually initially brought you into crypto, the initial dream, the initial chase, again, right now. So that's how we got to most of our builders. So we have, like I mentioned, on-chain Minecraft. We have on-chain VPN, which is infinitely scalable. And we have, of course, the usual DeFi applications, DEX, ProDex, but based on other books, but not on AMMs.

• 1:24:25Speaker 02

  We have real-time prediction markets, we have real-time game shows, etc. So I think I'm basically wearing the Mega Mafia t-shirt. So, yeah, this is kind of our centerpiece of our community. And now they were talking about rabbits, the mega ETH bunny. So if Monet is kind of mid-curve in it, then we're really kind of left-curve in it. Because we picked bunny really just because, yeah, I'm holding a Jellycat. It's not a mega ETH Jellycat, it's just a generic Jellycat, I just like to hold it. So, yeah, so we picked bunny really just because I love bunny. So I was having my first chat with our...

• 1:25:08Speaker 02

  With our co-founder and CBO Shu Ya in Denver. So she said, hey, we need to pick some animal. We need to pick a mascot. And I said, hey, I go to feed the bunnies on MIT campus almost every other night. And I really love bunnies. And she basically said, that's it. And that's why we pick bunnies. I think it worked well. It's not by community choice, but I think our community love bunnies. But I think our rule, our single rule for Discord management is that if you eat bunnies, you're banned forever.

• 1:25:46Speaker 02

  But other than that, I think, yeah, I think it's been going well. So we are seeing more and more people who are kind of really interested in the tech. So probably some listener may already saw our TikTok, I mean, our short format videos, basically explaining kind of, I would say, common misconceptions and interesting and lesser known tidbits in the crypto industry and in crypto research. Just break it down into kind of bite-sized pieces for our audience. I think that's been going well.

• 1:26:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, we do serious performance engineering. So we are also publishing a series of long-former tweets and also upcoming blog posts with kind of rigorous and more tactical content for those more techy people. Yeah, but I would say we just want applications. So that's kind of the centerpiece of our community building effort. We want people to rethink what is possible now on crypto with a real-time blockchain.

• 1:26:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Lay, is Mega an acronym? Like in the Mega ETH, does that? I heard a rumor that it stands for Make Ethereum Great Again. Is that right?

• 1:27:07Speaker 02

  It does stand for Make Ethereum Great Again. But interestingly, we realized it, I mean, almost a year, I think, into the inception of the company.

• 1:27:19David Hoffman?

  Okay. Oh, you did. So you went with Mega ETH first and then you realized, okay.

• 1:27:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. This is actually one of our genius investors. It's a, yeah. It's just a coincidence.

• 1:27:29David Hoffman?

  You could always do the red caps if you want to go in that direction, although that meme may already be taken by someone else.

• 1:27:34Speaker 02

  We, yeah, we do have red caps. So it's right on the, on the kind of, I'm hanging it on my door so that I can wear it whenever I go out home. Yeah.

• 1:27:45David Hoffman?

  And the, how many Mega ETH hats are there? Because I was told there were 50.

• 1:27:51Speaker 02

  Yes, there are 50, but I shamelessly took three. So there are three at my door and also I think two red hats. So.

• 1:27:59David Hoffman?

  How many unallocated hats are there?

• 1:28:03Speaker 02

  I think these three, so one for me and the other two are the only unallocated hats. That's my, that's my counting. But yeah, ask Shuyao.

• 1:28:10David Hoffman?

  High FTV, high flow, I guess. May I have one?

• 1:28:18David Hoffman?

  We'll talk after.

• 1:28:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, ask, ask our hat, hats are, Shuyao.

• 1:28:22David Hoffman?

  Okay. I already did. She said no.

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

  Oh, then, then, then unfortunately.

• 1:28:29David Hoffman?

  Sad. Okay, one last.

• 1:28:30Speaker 02

  I'm not allowed to tap into the, yeah, to tap into the reserve.

• 1:28:35David Hoffman?

  Okay, one last question I have for you guys. Recently, on a podcast we did with Justin Drake and Anatoly from Solana, Anatoly was talking some shit about the EVM. He was saying that it's just like building through quicksand. And while it's possible to like rebuild the EVM architecture to make it easier for builders, it's still really hard. And that's one of his like kind of bare scenarios for Ethereum. I'm wondering if you guys can give your takes. Both of you guys have chosen the EVM. Why did you choose the EVM? What are your guys' takes about the future role that the EVM has in the industry? I remember in 2021, there was a chant going around in the Ethereum crowd that like the EVM is at the center of all things because,

• 1:29:17David Hoffman?

  you know, even Ethereum killers were using the EVM, like Phantom, Avalanche, like etcetera, like five other chains that I've forgotten about because they've disappeared into history.

• 1:29:28David Hoffman?

  Just whatever your overall like takes about like building on the EVM, like why commit to the EVM? What do you guys think about it? Where does it go from here? Kion, you want to start?

• 1:29:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the EVM is actually a perfectly fine bytecode standard. There are some minor things that are a little bit quirky, like the the size of the individual storage slots, 32 bytes is pretty big. But I think fundamentally, it's a perfectly reasonable, very expressive standard. And we have high level languages like Solidity or Viper or Hough that are really powerful. So I think a lot of the hate is really misdirected or or just uninformed or just there for hot takes. And it's a great standard that can get better over time through continued improvements

• 1:30:22Speaker 03

  and support for new precompiles or opcodes. Like, it's it's an evolving standard, but there's actually nothing wrong with it at all. And that combined with the network effects of so many application developers that have already built apps for EVM, so many libraries, so much applied cryptography research, that it's just a no brainer, really.

• 1:30:43Speaker 02

  Lay, your thoughts? Yeah, I pretty much agree. There's nothing that is fundamentally wrong with EVM. So interestingly, we had Vitalik at one of our events in ECC. So it was kind of oriented for students. So one of the students asked Vitalik, hey, what's your, I mean, name, kind of, I think, three regrets of the technical choices of Ethereum? I think Vitalik didn't really mention EVM. I mean, he, I think he did mention that he would not start the slippery slope of precompiles, but nothing that is fundamentally wrong with EVM.

• 1:31:22Speaker 02

  And we definitely agree with him because, and also, I kind of realized that as an engineer and as a researcher, I think there's always the urge to kind of burn down everything and that start from scratch, clean slate, but there's always, as Kuni mentioned, right, there's always all those ecosystem tools, libraries, research, builders, most importantly, people, right? And they they are already accustomed to EVM. There's a reason that Intel doesn't really come up with a new ISA instructions standard every five years. There are reasons, because there is kind of accumulation of capital, of know how into a particular tech ecosystem. So nothing that is fundamentally wrong with EVM and

• 1:32:07Speaker 02

  100% EVM will keep flourishing.

• 1:32:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, but now I'm dying to know, what were Vitalik's two other regrets? You said pre-compiles is one. What are the other two? I must know.

• 1:32:15Speaker 02

  I honestly forgot.

• 1:32:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, no.

• 1:32:17Speaker 02

  I think the other two, yeah.

• 1:32:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  We'll have to ask.

• 1:32:19David Hoffman?

  I think that's preferable.

• 1:32:21Speaker 02

  I think someone tipped it. I think someone tipped it. Yeah.

• 1:32:25David Hoffman?

  All right, guys, this has been great. Kiony, one last logistics question. What's the future of everything that Monet has built and their open source nature? You got the Monet EVM, the Monet DB. Will these things eventually become open source?

• 1:32:42Speaker 03

  That's our plan.

• 1:32:44David Hoffman?

  Any sort of timeline? Or is that just something you guys will think about later?

• 1:32:49Speaker 03

  We'll think about it certainly as time goes on. And certainly before mainnet, the code will be, you know, completely open for people to read and verify. It's really important from an audit and safety perspective. So, yeah, no worries there.

• 1:33:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, wait, I can't believe we got this far in the episode and we haven't asked the question, when mainnet? Because usually, we don't do these conversations. Well, there's just test nets. We usually wait to mainnet. We broke the bankless rule because this is such an important conversation because you guys are like building this parallelized EVM thing, or I should say, high-performance EVM thing. So now let's ask the question. So when mainnet? Kiony, when is Monet coming to mainnet?

• 1:33:37Speaker 03

  Our team is working really hard on it. Can't give an exact date. My cheeky answer will be when Molendak comes out of this hat closet and doesn't see a shadow.

• 1:33:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay. Does that happen in February? Is that what we celebrate? All right, Lei, how about you? When mainnet for Megi?

• 1:33:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have been pretty open. So, end of the year slash early next year.

• 1:34:03Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 1:34:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  End of the year slash early next year.

• 1:34:06David Hoffman?

  Some new blockchains to play with coming your way, Bankless Nation. Kiony, Lei, this has been just fantastic. I've learned quite a lot on this episode. So thank you, guys, for spending the time with us. I hope that Bankless Nation has learned a lot because I certainly have.

• 1:34:17Speaker 02

  It's been such a pleasure.

• 1:34:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank you for having me.

• 1:34:21David Hoffman?

  Bankless station, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. New main nets will also be risky when they arrive. But nonetheless, we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.