Exploring Monad’s Cryptographic Secrets: Can It Help Ethereum Regain Its Glory?

Once upon a time, a purple Pepe wizard descended upon the village of Ethereum…

1. The Lost Village of Ethereum

A long time ago, in a small village called Ethereum, there lived a group of green Pepes. In this prosperous kingdom, high decentralization and strong security drove the prosperity of the village and the economy was booming.

The villagers are deeply influenced by these principles and regularly elect leaders through their stakes to oversee the transaction blocks recorded every twelve seconds to maintain the village's active economy. However, the Ethereum village is no longer as glorious as it once was. The rampant meme virus has severely damaged the village. The green Pepes in the village are in a hurry, and the village has become a scene of depression.

However, there are still some green Pepes in the village who dream of revival. They proposed the "L2 Reform" in the hope of bringing Ethereum back to life. Through their efforts, the village gradually regained some prosperity, the scale of activities reached an unprecedented height, and a touch of vitality appeared in the lives of the green Pepes again.

However, the L2 reforms did not completely solve the problem. The neighboring villages of Solana and Sui, though still young and often unstable, were developing rapidly under an unprecedented scientific revolution, making complex financial transactions simple and smooth, while Ethereum, despite its reforms, was still struggling. Rumors began to circulate in the village about moving to these emerging villages.

Just then, a purple Pepe wizard appeared in the Ethereum village.

2. The Arrival of the Purple Pepe Wizard

The purple-robed Pepe wizard, with deep regret for the lost glory of the Ethereum village, decided to build a new village called Monad.

One day, he stood in the village square and announced his grand plan to create Monad to the green Pepes, and invited them to express their expectations and dreams for the future.

Green Pepe 1 spoke first: “I hope life on Monad can be like Ethereum. Although Ethereum lacks the scalability of Solana or Sui, its culture is unique and I have never thought about leaving because the culture of other places is too different from ours.”

Green Pepe 2 also added: “It’s important to maintain the continuity of lifestyle and culture, but I also want to be as efficient as other villages. Although Ethereum is secure, it is not enough for projects that pursue speed and flexibility.”

The wizard listened to their wishes, promising to incorporate the rich culture of Ethereum in Monad, while also having the scalability of Solana and Sui. He began to think about how to cast a powerful magic to realize this vision: a village that retains the traditions of Ethereum and has the efficiency of new technologies.

He then shared this grand vision with the Pepes who were eager for change, inspiring their hope for a new life that combined the advantages of both.

3. Secret Technique 1: Delayed Execution

One limitation that constrains the scalability of the Ethereum Village is that transactions are processed in real time during the consensus process every time a new block is created. In this village, the leader who proposes a block must calculate the results of all transactions before proposing it, and the validator nodes that receive the block also need to calculate all transactions to verify the legitimacy of the block and vote.

Since the consensus process requires villagers to calculate and communicate, this greatly compresses the time to process transactions, thus limiting scalability. To solve this problem, the Purple Pepe Wizard cast a new magic called "delayed execution" to separate the "consensus" process (i.e. transaction sorting) of villagers' transactions from the "execution" process (i.e. calculation results).

Simply put, it is no longer necessary for each block to undergo consensus and execution at the same time. Instead, when consensus on N blocks is being conducted, execution will process the transaction results in N-1 blocks.

This approach allows execution to utilize the full block time, greatly increasing the number of transactions that can be processed in the same amount of time.

Advanced Secret Technique: Delayed Merkle Root

In the Ethereum village, nodes perform calculations before consensus to ensure the legitimacy of the block. However, in Monad's delayed execution system, consensus and execution are separated, and malicious nodes may ignore previously confirmed transactions or tamper with the calculation status.

To prevent this, Monad embeds the Merkle root (representing the calculation result of block N-10) into the proposal of block N. If more than two-thirds of the nodes reach a consensus on block N, it means that the calculation result of block N-10 is also confirmed.

If a node’s calculation result at block N-10 does not match the Merkle root in block N, the node will be removed from the consensus, starting from block N. This ten-block Merkle root delay ensures that any calculation errors can be detected in time.

It is worth noting that Monad’s block time is 1 second, but this does not mean that Monad’s finality requires 10 seconds. With Monad’s unique MonadBFT system, the finality of a single block can be achieved within 1 second.

4. Secret Technique 2: Transaction Hash

The purple Pepe wizard thought hard about how to enable the leaders in the village to quickly propagate block proposals to other nodes.

In the Ethereum Village, the custom is to broadcast a complete block proposal, including all transactions, as one giant package across the network. However, the wizard realized that if Monad Village also took this approach, broadcasting a block proposal containing a large number of transactions would be a difficult and slow task.

To this end, Purple Pepe Wizard proposed the concept of "transaction hash". Since all transactions submitted by villagers have been propagated in the network, each node retains the transaction records of Monad Village in its own transaction pool.

Wizards take advantage of this so that leaders don’t have to pass a full list of transactions with every block proposal. Instead, leaders can just reference those transactions and send a hash.

In this way, Monad's block proposal remains compact, containing only the hash value of each transaction. When other nodes receive the proposal, they only need to compare these hash values ​​with the transactions in their own records to easily find the referenced transactions.

5. Secret Technique 3: MonadBFT

In Monad Village, the order of transactions within each block and the consensus of block generation are governed by MonadBFT, a high-performance consensus mechanism based on HotStuff. This two-phase Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) algorithm can reach consensus in two steps.

The leader of the block is determined by probability selection based on the staked share of each participant. In Monad, the creation process of each block is more efficient than Ethereum Village because the proposal of each block N is passed along with the legal certificate (QC) of the previous block N-1, indicating that more than two-thirds of the nodes have verified the block.

Here’s how the process unfolds:

• Leader N publishes a proposal for block N, along with the QC of the previous block N-1.

• The validators then validate block N and send their votes to leader N+1.

• Leader N+1 publishes a proposal for block N+1, along with the QC for block N.

However, even with QC N, the validator cannot finalize block N immediately because the nature of the blockchain cannot ensure that all participants are online simultaneously.

To fully ensure the security of block N, validators need to send their "yes" vote for block N+1 (which contains QC N) to leader N+2. When leader N+2 generates QC N+1, this confirms the successful completion of round N+1, making block N final.

Through his wizardry and vision, Purple Pepe the Wizard has ushered in a new era for Monad Village, where every block is created not only quickly and securely, but elegantly, in line with the vision of a truly scalable, collaborative village.

6. Secret Technique 4: Parallel Execution

In the Monad world, to handle a large number of villager transactions, the Purple Pepe wizard designed a new spell so that transactions are not processed in a serial manner in the Ethereum village, but in a powerful parallel stream.

With deferred execution, execution begins only after consensus is reached on the order of transactions in a block. The monad village consists of many skilled executors, each of whom is responsible for processing transactions, independently calculating their inputs and outputs and creating a list to be processed.

These inputs and outputs do not immediately change the state of the village, but wait in suspended magic, ready to be committed in an order determined by consensus. This commitment involves merging the outputs into the current state one by one, just like magic threads weaving a seamless and orderly tapestry.

However, there’s a twist. Parallel processing introduces the possibility of transaction conflicts — something that’s rare in the orderly village of Ethereum, but presents a new challenge here.

For example, if one transaction (transaction b) shows that villager A gave 1 ETH to villager B, and another transaction (transaction c) shows that B spent this ETH at the village inn, then their order is critical. If transaction c tries to execute before transaction b, the transaction will fail. In these cases, the conflicting transactions are rescheduled, and transaction c waits for transaction b to complete before executing again.

Thus, in a monad, the essence of parallel execution is sequencing: results are computed in parallel, but state updates are merged in the exact order required.

7. Secret Technique 5: MonadDb

Purple Peppa Wizard didn’t stop there. He created MonadDb, a custom database unique to Monad Village, specifically designed to store the state of the blockchain. Ethereum relies on the complex Merkle Patricia Trie, a structure known for its resilience but also for its inefficiency for external clients, and MonadDb adopts it natively, taking advantage of its full power and efficiency.

MonadDb is designed with parallel execution in mind, supporting multiple simultaneous reads and writes with high precision. Unlike traditional databases that require each task to complete before moving on to the next, MonadDb has asynchronous I/O magic that allows tasks to overlap seamlessly, opening the door to true parallel transaction processing.

8. Come visit Monad Village!

Through a series of wonderful spells and complex magic, the purple wizard Pepe created Monad Village - where Ethereum's trusted accounts, cryptography, transaction formats, languages, and wallets merge effortlessly with Solana and Sui's incredible scalability. Now, Monad thrives with dreams of 10,000 transactions per second and sub-second completion.

Born out of wisdom and hope, can Monad Village save the world plagued by the meme virus and help Ethereum regain its glory and become a trustworthy partner? Only time will tell us the answer.