Keone Hon: Wall Street And Degens Are Both Coming To Monad (Here Is Why)

Keone Hon (0:00)

Everyone wants good execution, everyone on their trading, everyone wants access to the best opportunities. And I think, you know, right now, the Monad network is just starting to accumulate some network effects.

Robbie Klages (0:13)

My name's Robby and you're watching The Rollup. And today I'm asking you to please subscribe, comment, like and support our channel. We interview some of the best and brightest minds in digital assets, digital finance and tokenization. We are doing this for you. So please sit back, relax, enjoy the show. And thank you so much for all your support. Last but certainly not least, back live Keone.

Thank you for having us out. It was a pleasure.

Keone Hon (0:41)

Thank you for being here.

Robbie Klages (0:42)

And I mean, what a great event. We kicked it off. This is our start to the Token 2049 week. And no better way to start it off. So you threw a great event. And now we've got some bass kicking out there. I mean, several people that came off the stage, you had them up here at kind of announcing partnerships and doing quite a few things here. They came right off stage. They came over here, shared it with us.

And so thank you so much for having us out.

Keone Hon (1:13)

Thanks for being part of this. This is our first, this is our inaugural open event. And we hope to be doing this for a long time, bigger and better every single time. But yeah, thanks for kicking it off.

Robbie Klages (1:26)

Absolutely.

Keone Hon (1:27)

That's at a high bar.

Robbie Klages (1:28)

Well, it's a pleasure to be here. I mean, we talked a little bit about the permissionless nature of the ecosystem.

I spoke with several founders that are in the ecosystem talking about how we've got both a very consumer-centric vibe to the brand and some of the applications in the app layer, but then also a deep institutional liquidity focus. And we've got tokenized stocks. And it feels like in order to survive as a blockchain in 2026, you need both sides of the barbell. You guys have been able to master this approach. Maybe you can just speak to the vision that has brought these communities together.

Keone Hon (2:08)

Yeah, for sure. I think the Monad community has played a huge part in the success of the project. And that's very in touch with the culture of crypto.

But at the same time, I think it's also, at the end of the day, deliver value to users, value to businesses, and that means interacting with the real world. And a lot of the real world is people wearing suits, or at least people being very rigorously about slippage and liquidity and those. So I think it's very possible to blend the two together. There's no contradiction. Everyone wants good execution, everyone on their trading, everyone wants access to the best opportunities. And I think right now, the Monad network is just starting to accumulate some network effects, but those come both from institutional adoption and from retail adoption.

Robbie Klages (3:14)

And I take it there's probably some through lines here, openness being one of them, permissionless, some of the principles and the core tenets of the industry of digital assets, of finance in general, and of this up and coming wave of adopters. Maybe you can just speak to, what are some of those core tenets that you've held through your journey of starting founding and now building Monad that continue to proliferate and guide you through for the next decade of Monad's journey? What are some of those core tenets?

Keone Hon (3:45)

Yeah, we started Monad in early 2022

At that time, I think there was sort of a different market feel about the direction of the industry. There was, you know, everyone was just saying the rollups are gonna be the big thing. And I think there's definitely a place for rollups in the overall crypto ecosystem, but there's much less like unilateral, you know, banging the drum all in one direction.

When we started Monad, the goal was just to deliver a really performant and decentralized system. And we thought that the engineering challenges of solving those two problems together were just exciting and compelling, and we never wanted to cut corners. So what that meant is that there was a longer development period from the time of starting to launching the main net about 10 months ago now. But the good news is that now I feel we have just very strong foundations moving forward where the system is built completely from scratch. The core engineering team knows it like the back of their hand. There's a lot of improvements that we think are sort of the right way for blockchain architectures to work and that includes decoupling consensus and execution. It includes parallelizing the work. It includes kind of rebuilding like the database from scratch and all these other things. But now with that really solid technical foundation, it actually allows us to do a lot more and to solve other really fundamental problems that I think are still outstanding in crypto, including solving MEV and sort of squaring the circle around the seeming contradiction between privacy and composability that currently exists right now in the space.