Monad’s Keone Hon outlines ecosystem push as TVL reaches $800 million and Nitro teams pitch in New York

Monad co-founder Keone Hon has released a broad ecosystem update spanning user onboarding, on-chain activity, and protocol research, laying out what the network has built over the past eight months. On the startup side, the first Nitro cohort held its Demo Day in New York with more than 100 investors in attendance, as seven teams presented products ranging from prediction markets and stablecoin on-ramps to open credit markets and AI-assisted trading tools. On the product and adoption front, Category Labs introduced Mera, an open-source Passkey onboarding library that lets apps create crypto accounts for users through familiar biometric flows such as Face ID and Touch ID, without relying on smart accounts or backend logic. The latest Monad Economy figures show TVL at $800 million, more than 30 fiat on-ramps, live institutional lending and RWA markets, and cumulative DEX volume above $15 billion. App Hub now lists more than 130 applications, while Aave’s Monad market has reached $500 million in deposits. The update also highlights developer shipping, academic research, and infrastructure work. Category Labs accounted for 6 of 34 talks at the Science of Blockchain Conference, the testnet has deployed v0.15.2 in preparation for MIP-8 and Deterministic Raptorcast, and the Monad Foundation has launched MOST to subsidize independent open-source developers with AI tokens. BuildAnything, meanwhile, said its first hackathon drew more than 600 project submissions.