Thinking Crypto News & Interviews
Thinking Crypto News & Interviews

Can Monad Save & Scale Ethereum? | Eunice Giarta

May 29, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In 2014, MIT gave every student $100 worth of Bitcoin. Eunice Giarta, now co-founder of the Monad Foundation, graduated the year before and missed it. She went on to trade rates exotics at Bank of America, then worked in product management at a fintech and Shutterstock, then had a quarter-life crisis and became a pastry chef at Jean-Georges. The pandemic ended that detour, and by early 2022 she joined former MIT classmate Keone Han to start Monad. The mission from day one: scale Ethereum — not as a layer two, but as a new layer one.

What Monad Is and How It Works

Monad is a separate layer-one blockchain that is fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. It is not a rollup or a sidechain. The key innovation is that Monad wrote a net new execution client (in C) and a net new consensus client (in Rust) from scratch, rather than forking an existing codebase. This lets the team tap into the performance advantages of those languages and redesign the fundamental plumbing.

The consensus mechanism is called Monad BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerant). It follows standard BFT security guarantees: the network can tolerate up to F faulty nodes as long as 2F+1 nodes are honest. The validator set currently has about 200 active validators, geographically distributed around the world, which provides genuine decentralization and security.

Breaking the Blockchain Trilemma

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (04:03) **Guest Introduction** - Host Tony Edward welcomes Eunice Giarta, co-founder of the Monad Foundation, to discuss the Monad blockchain protocol
  • 2 (04:38) **Eunice's Background & Path to Crypto** - Eunice shares her circuitous route from MIT computer science to traditional finance, a stint as a pastry chef, and eventually into crypto
  • 3 (10:04) **What Is Monad? Mission & Uniqueness** - Monad's core mission is to scale Ethereum, achieved through fundamental performance improvements via net new technology
  • 4 (11:45) **Is Monad a Layer 2? How It Scales Ethereum** - Clarifies Monad is a separate Layer 1, not a Layer 2, but is EVM-compatible
  • 5 (12:38) **Monad BFT Consensus Explained** - The consensus mechanism is Byzantine Fault Tolerant, ensuring network resilience against attacks
  • 6 (14:04) **Achieving 10,000 TPS While Maintaining Security** - Explains how Monad overcomes the blockchain trilemma through net new technology
  • 7 (16:00) **Vitalik's Rollup Tweets & Monad's Position** - Discusses recent Vitalik Buterin tweets about rollups and L2s, and how they may validate Monad's L1 approach

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Eunice Giarta, Co-Founder and General Manager at the Monad Foundation, joined me to discuss how Monad, as a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain, is aiming to address the scalability limitations of existing networks such as Ethereum. Recorded on February 5th, 2026.
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⏰ Time Stamps ⏰
00:00 Intro
03:33 Eunice background
07:02 MIT Crypto
34:21 Wrap up questions 
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