Nitro Demo Day Nitro wrapped Cohort 1 Demo Day in NYC, with 100+ investors in attendance. Teams that pitched: @crshmarket - livestream prediction markets @BlinkCashX - stablecoin deposit layer for consumer apps @blend_money - compliance-focused account layer for platforms to build on @joinCero - an app where spending earns rewards and builds credit @TradeJanus - financial OS for global trade @40acres_Finance - an open market for credit @ForkastGG - Cursor for trading agents https://x.com/monad/status/2081751778756870633 Big things coming! Keep an eye on these teams. Applications for Cohort 2 are coming soon. Mera Category Labs introduced Mera, an open-source library for passkey onboarding: https://mera.category.xyz/ Mera allows apps to prompt users to create a crypto account using only a passkey, without relying on smart accounts or any backend logic. The goal is simple: let apps onboard users with the same flow people already know from Face ID and Touch ID. Ecosystem Activity The Monad Economy update showed $800m in TVL, 30+ fiat onramps, institutional lending and RWA markets, and $15B in DEX volume: https://blog.monad.xyz/blog/monad-economy-eight-months-in A few more highlights: The App Hub passed 130 listed apps, with new listings this week including @ethena and @saturn_credit. There are now five Prop AMMs duking it out on https://mpamm.wtf/. Metric has the highest 7d volume, followed by Hanji and LFJ POE. @pendle_fi got up to $150M in deposits on Monad, while @avantprotocol hit $150M globally, a large amount of which is on Monad. The @aave Monad market is up to $500M in total deposits, h/t @Token_Logic @KuruExchange's Agent Arena concluded, with @0xCal1 winning the championship. Seven-day averages: Daily transactions: 3.82M TPS: 44.23 Active wallets: 14,960 Stablecoin marketcap: $506M Spot daily volume: $33M Perps daily volume: $60M Builder Shipping DeltaV's weekly shipping update had more of the same builder motion: Accountable launched its first AUSD vault on Morpho and put YieldApp live on Binance Wallet, LeverUp reported $35.77M in 7-day volume and $2.39M TVL, and Sentry set a public beta date. Check out the full updates: https://x.com/DeltaV_xyz/status/2082837299113398454 Category Research at SBC Category Labs was highly active at the Science of Blockchain Conference, with 6 of the 34 talks at SBC (including 3 of the 4 in the Consensus track) and a presentation at the MEV Workshop. Category research was also the topic of a Whitepaper Reading Club session - on Cadence, Category's new MCP protocol. Lastly, Category's @liobaheimbach chaired the DeFi session at SBC. Here are all of the papers: Forget-IT: Optimal Good-Case Latency For Information-Theoretic BFT [paper] (talk by @komasito55) Timing Games in Responsive Consensus Protocols [paper] (talk by @kalpturer, PhD student and former Category intern) MonadBFT: Fast, Responsive, Fork-Resistant Streamlined Consensus [paper] (talk by @MohammadMJalal1) Weighted Batched Threshold Encryption with Applications to Mempool Resilience [paper] (talk by Amit Agarwal) Blockspace Under Pressure: An Analysis of Spam MEV on High-Throughput Blockchains [paper] (talk by @0xWenhaoWang) Multiple Sides of 36 Coins: Measuring Peer-to-Peer Infrastructure Across Cryptocurrencies [paper] (talk by @liobaheimbach) Cadence: Extreme Pipelining with Multiple Concurrent Proposers [paper] (whitepaper reading club) EVM Workloads in the Wild: Evidence for Multi-Dimensional Gas Metering, State Growth, Delayed Execution, and Parallelism [paper] (talk by @liobaheimbach) Category Labs is making rapid strides in research that will improve transaction execution fairness, performance, and latency. https://x.com/category_xyz/status/2081415033204903963 v0.15.2 Rolled out to Testnet Monad version v0.15.2 was rolled out to Testnet this week; changelog here. This release includes more preparatory work for MIP-8 and Deterministic Raptorcast.
MOST for Independent Developers The Monad Foundation also announced MOST (Monad Open Source Track), an effort to support independent developers who are actively shipping open-source code by subsidizing AI tokens: https://x.com/monad_dev/status/2081765376904614331 BuildAnything @buildanythingso wrapped up its first hackathon last week. Over 600 projects were submitted! https://x.com/buildanythingso/status/2080660114122449077