Monad is pushing on three tracks at once: onboarding capital and users, building real on-chain economic activity, and advancing the consensus and execution research that will shape its long-term ceiling.
That framing came in the latest ecosystem update from Monad co-founder Keone Hon. Over the past eight months, Nitro’s first cohort completed its Demo Day in New York with more than 100 investors in the room; Category Labs open-sourced Mera, a Passkey onboarding library that lets users create crypto accounts with Face ID; TVL reached $800 million; cumulative DEX volume passed $15 billion; App Hub grew to more than 130 listed apps; and Aave’s Monad market climbed to $500 million in deposits.
Nitro Demo Day brings seven teams to the stage in New York
Nitro wrapped up Cohort 1 Demo Day in New York, with 100+ investors attending. The teams that presented were:
- @crshmarket — a live prediction market
- @BlinkCashX — a stablecoin deposit layer for consumer applications
- @blend_money — a compliant account layer for platforms
- @joinCero — an app built around spending, rewards, and credit formation
- @TradeJanus — a financial operating system for global trade
- @40acres_Finance — an open credit market
- @ForkastGG — described as a Cursor-like tool for trading agents
Applications for Cohort 2 will open soon.
Mera uses Face ID and Touch ID for crypto account creation
Category Labs has launched Mera, an open-source Passkey onboarding library available at https://mera.category.xyz/ .
Mera allows apps to guide users into creating crypto accounts using only Passkeys, or biometric authentication, without depending on smart accounts or backend logic. The stated goal is straightforward: let apps onboard users through the Face ID and Touch ID flows they already know.
Ecosystem metrics: $800 million TVL and $15 billion in cumulative DEX volume
The latest Monad Economy update says the network has reached $800 million in total value locked, supports 30+ fiat on-ramps, has already launched institutional lending and RWA markets, and has recorded $15 billion in cumulative decentralized exchange volume.
The full update is here: https://blog.monad.xyz/blog/monad-economy-eight-months-in
Other highlights
App Hub now lists more than 130 applications, with @ethena and @saturn_credit added this week.
There are currently five proprietary AMMs competing on https://mpamm.wtf/ . Metric posted the highest trading volume over the past seven days, followed by Hanji and LFJ POE.
@pendle_fi deposits on Monad have reached $150 million. @avantprotocol has $150 million in global deposits, with a large share deployed on Monad.
@aave’s Monad market has reached $500 million in total deposits, according to @Token_Logic.
@KuruExchange’s Agent Arena has concluded, with @0xCal1 taking first place.
Average figures over the last seven days
- Daily transactions: 3.82 million
- TPS: 44.23
- Active wallets: 14,960
- Stablecoin market cap: $506 million
- Spot daily volume: $33 million
- Perpetuals daily volume: $60 million
Builder shipping update
DeltaV’s weekly update highlighted several launches and milestones:
- Accountable launched the first AUSD vault on Morpho and brought YieldApp to Binance Wallet
- LeverUp recorded $35.77 million in trading volume over the last seven days, with TVL at $2.39 million
- Sentry announced the launch date for its public beta
The full thread is here: https://x.com/DeltaV_xyz/status/2082837299113398454
Category Labs takes 6 of 34 talks at SBC
Category Labs had a notable presence at the Science of Blockchain Conference. Of the conference’s 34 talks, 6 came from Category, including 3 of the 4 talks in the Consensus track. The team also presented at the MEV Workshop.
Category’s research was also featured by the Whitepaper Reading Club, which discussed Cadence, Category’s new MCP protocol. In addition, @liobaheimbach served as chair of the DeFi track.
The papers and sessions listed in the update were:
- Forget-IT: Optimal Good-Case Latency For Information-Theoretic BFT — presented by @komasito55
- Timing Games in Responsive Consensus Protocols — presented by @kalpturer, a PhD student and former Category intern
- MonadBFT: Fast, Responsive, Fork-Resistant Streamlined Consensus — presented by @MohammadMJalal1
- Weighted Batched Threshold Encryption with Applications to Mempool Resilience — presented by Amit Agarwal
- Blockspace Under Pressure: An Analysis of Spam MEV on High-Throughput Blockchains — presented by @0xWenhaoWang
- Multiple Sides of 36 Coins: Measuring Peer-to-Peer Infrastructure Across Cryptocurrencies — presented by @liobaheimbach
- Cadence: Extreme Pipelining with Multiple Concurrent Proposers — discussed at Whitepaper Reading Club
- EVM Workloads in the Wild: Evidence for Multi-Dimensional Gas Metering, State Growth, Delayed Execution, and Parallelism — presented by @liobaheimbach
The update said Category Labs is moving quickly on research aimed at execution fairness, performance, and latency.
v0.15.2 goes live on testnet
Monad version v0.15.2 has been deployed to testnet this week. According to the official changelog, the release includes more preparation work for MIP-8 and Deterministic Raptorcast.
MOST will subsidize independent open-source developers with AI tokens
The Monad Foundation also announced MOST, short for Monad Open Source Track. The program will support independent developers who are consistently shipping open-source code through AI token subsidies.
Program link: https://most.devnads.com/
BuildAnything hackathon receives more than 600 submissions
@buildanythingso ended its first hackathon last week, drawing more than 600 project submissions.
Related post: https://x.com/buildanythingso/status/2080660114122449077