Original author: Grapefruit
原文来源：ChainCatcher
4月9日，Layer1网络Monad开发方Monad Labs以30亿美元估值完成2.25亿美元融资，本轮融资由Paradigm领投，Electric CapitalAmber Group、Animoca Ventures、Bankless Ventures、Coinbase Ventures、Wintermute Ventures等知名机构参投。
The recent Monad financing is the largest cryptocurrency financing so far in 2024, with more than 50 institutions and investors participating in the investment, becoming another one-day king-level project to watch in the crypto community, and also setting off a "parallel EVM" hype boom.
Monad is a high-performance Layer 1 network that focuses on the concept of "Parallel EVM", and hopes to improve and improve the execution efficiency of the Layer 1 network by introducing "parallel processing" at the execution layer.
However, Monad's mainnet won't be deployed until the end of this year, and the testnet is not yet available to the public, so current users can only participate by joining its Discord community. However, its main concept of "parallel EVM" has also become popular again with Monad's large financing.
"Parallel EVM": optimizes the execution efficiency of the EVM and scales the performance of the blockchain horizontally
"Parallel EVM" can be regarded as the technical fusion of "parallel + EVM compatible", which is an optimization of the execution layer of the existing EVM network, and is essentially a special optimization of the performance of each component of the EVM, so as to increase the number of transactions (TPS) or computing tasks processed per unit time of the network, and solve the current inefficiency problem of EVM due to the execution of transactions in sequence.
In a traditional EVM environment, such as Ethereum, each transaction on the chain is executed sequentially, that is, when a user submits multiple transactions, they need to be queued up in chronological order of submission, and only after the transaction submitted first is confirmed, the transaction submitted later will start to be processed.
Most high-performance Layer 1s such as Solana, Aptos, Sui, etc., are essentially designed their own optimization solutions based on the defects of the inability to process transactions in parallel on the Ethereum chain, but everyone pays more attention to the innovation of consensus algorithms and ignores the technological innovation of the execution layer. However, in order to obtain a high-performance public chain, the consensus algorithm and the execution layer need to cooperate with each other, the consensus algorithm can ensure node cooperation and maintain network security, and the execution layer needs to improve the efficiency of processing transactions and executing smart contracts.
Parallel EVM hopes to partition or group all pending transactions, and then rely on scheduling algorithms to effectively manage the synchronous processing of transactions in each region or group, and its ultimate goal is to allow multiple independent transactions to be executed in parallel at the same time, thereby improving the transaction execution efficiency of the overall Layer 1 network.
For example, Ethereum's EVM is like a one-way street, where cars, electric vehicles, bicycles, people, etc. are gathered on the same road, driving one after the other in the order of queuing, which is very congested and chaotic, but the parallel EVM technology can divide this one-way street into motorized lanes, non-motorized lanes, cycling lanes, sidewalks and other lanes at the same time, improving efficiency and alleviating congestion.
Parallel execution in the blockchain is to process unrelated transactions at the same time, such as dividing or grouping transactions on the chain such as DEX, NFT, GameFi, etc., so that they can execute transactions independently in parallel, which also means that different transactions can be executed on different processing units at the same time, instead of being queued in chronological order, which greatly improves efficiency.
Solana's SVM, Aptos' STM, and others, which are known for their high performance, use similar parallel execution processing logic.
Regarding the improvement of blockchain performance by "parallel EVM", community user Liu said: If the Layer 2/Layer 3 network scales the performance of the Layer 1 network vertically by layering up and down, then the parallel EVM is executed at the same time in the form of different transaction classifications or partitions on the chain, which horizontally expands the network and ensures that the network security and liquidity are unified.
As early as 2022, Polygon PoS announced that it had completed the parallel EVM upgrade, tripling its network speed, and BSC had already collaborated with NodeReal to develop parallel EVM technology.
It's just that at that time, people didn't pay much attention to the technology of "parallel EVM", and paid more attention to the consensus algorithm of the blockchain network and the Rollup scaling method.
Until the end of 2023, Georgios Konstantopoulos, CTO of Paradigm, Haseeb Qureshi, partner of Dragonfly Capital, Jaynti Kanani (JD), former founder of Polygon, and others have said that "2024 will be a year of parallel EVM" when looking forward to the industry trend in 2024.
Among them, JD, the former founder of Polygon, said that in 2024, every L2 will be labeled as "parallel EVM" and rebranded.
The public support of the top VCs has led to a wave of EVM compatible with Layer 1s such as Sei, Monad, Polygon, etc., which has also made the concept of "parallel EVM" a new hot spot in the crypto community.
In March this year, the news of "Solana EVM solution Eclipse received $30 million in financing" caused Jay, the founder of Sei, to be dissatisfied, questioning its excessive hype and the difficulty of ecological development. It sparked a public and heated debate on the topic of "EVM parallel scaling" by Eclipse founder Neel Somani and Fantom founder AC, making the "parallel EVM" narrative the focus of the community again.
What are the representative projects of parallel EVM networks?
According to data from the encrypted data platform Rootdata, there are 7 "parallel EVM" concept projects that have been included, including Monad, Sei, Canto, Artela, Neon, Eclipse, Cipherem, etc.
"One of the prerequisites for 'Parallel EVM' is that it is an EVM-compatible network, and although Solana, Aptos, Fuel, Sui, and other networks use parallel execution, they are not classified as 'Parallel EVM' because they are non-EVM networks," said developer Pignard. ”
Currently, existing parallel EVM networks can be divided into three broad categories:
First, the EVM was compatible with Layer 1, which did not originally use parallel execution technology, but later completed the EVM parallel upgrade through technical iteration, and all EVM networks can essentially do parallel EVM upgrades. For example, Polygon has completed the parallel EVM upgrade in 2022, and Fantom's Fantom Sonic upgrade network, which will be launched in April, has also introduced parallel execution technology.
Second, EVM with parallel execution technology is compatible with Layer 1, such as Monand, Sei V2, and Artela;
The third is that the Layer 2 network that adopts non-EVM Layer 1 parallel execution technology, such as Solana Neon, Eclipse, Lumio, etc., as the representative of the scalable layer2 EVM-compatible chain, abstracts the EVM into a pluggable execution module, and can select the best "VM execution layer" according to the needs, thereby realizing the parallelism capability, such as the Lumio settlement layer in Ethereum, the execution layer can choose to use Solana VM, Move VM, EVM, etc.
The parallel EVM track represents the project
1、并行EVM龙头Monad
Monad is a Layer 1 network zone dedicated to solving the scalability problem of traditional EVMs, aiming to increase the network transaction processing speed to 10,000 by optimizing the EVM by introducing parallel execution and pipeline architecture.
On April 9, Monad closed a $225 million funding round led by Paradigm at a valuation of $3 billion, and in February last year, it raised another $19 million in the seed round, bringing the cumulative funding to $244 million, making it the highest-funded and valued parallel EVM project to date.
Monad's team background is also interesting, with the founding team members from market-making giant Jump Trading. The founder, Keone Hon, was the head of research at Jump Trading and worked for the company for 8 years, and the co-founder, James Hunsaker, is a senior software engineer at Jump Trading and a core maintainer of Pyth Network.
In September last year, Monad revealed the network token MON in the project's technical documentation, but the introductory part of the document was later removed.
Monad has launched an internal testnet in March, and it is reported that the testnet will be available to the public in a few months.
2. Sei will launch Sei V2, a parallel EVM network, in the first half of the year
Sei is a Layer 1 network dedicated to trading, dedicated to providing advanced infrastructure for various trading applications such as DeFi, DEX, gaming, etc.
Last November, Sei announced that it would be completely upgrading its network with the launch of Sei V2, the first high-performance parallelized EVM, increasing its TPS to 12,500.
The Sei v2 parallel EVM testnet was launched in February this year, and applications that support EVM-based deployments can be migrated to the network with one click, and it is reported that its parallel EVM network can process thousands of transactions per second, and the mainnet is expected to be launched in the first half of this year.
In March, Sei announced the launch of the Parallel Stack open-source framework, which supports parallel processing technology for Layer 2 and Rollup networks.
3. Artela launched EVM++ dual virtual machines to improve the performance of the execution layer
Artela wants to unlock the scalability of Layer 1 networks by extending the EVM while supporting EVM parallel execution. It aims to unlock the performance of the EVM blockchain and improve the efficiency of network execution by building EVM++, that is, EVM+WASM, and the core members of the team are from AntChain.
The public testnet is now live, and it is reported that the Renaissance Plan, an ecological incentive program for Artela, will be launched in April.
4. Canto plans to introduce parallel EVM technology
Canto is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 network built on top of the Cosmos SDK, designed for DeFi applications.
In March, Canto announced plans to develop the Cyclone Stack, which aims to introduce parallel execution EVM technology to improve its network performance.
5、Neon:Solana EVM兼容方案
Neon EVM is a parallelized EVM built on the Solana network and the first Solana EVM-compatible solution, allowing Solidity and Vyper EVM developers to deploy their DApps onto the Solana network with one click and enjoy Solana's high throughput and low gas fees.
Specifically, Neon EVM can wrap EVM-like transactions into Solana transactions for operation, and then send them to the Solana network, where transaction data can be processed and executed in parallel, increasing transaction speed, and the network now has a TPS of up to 2000+.
To put it simply, the Neon EVM provides a software environment for Solana, through which EVM developers can migrate applications to Solana with one click, and transactions are executed in parallel with Solana.
6. Eclipse aims to bring SVM to Ethereum
Eclipse is a Rollup Layer 2 modular general solution supported by the Solana Virtual Machine SVM, that is, the transaction data of the Eclipse network is settled on Ethereum, and ETH is used as the gas fee on the chain, but the execution layer runs the SVM environment.
Faced with the problem of insufficient performance caused by the sequential execution of EVM, Eclipse's strategy is to introduce SVM to Ethereum, contrary to Neon's idea of introducing EVM to Solana.
In a nutshell, the logic of the Eclipse product is that transactions are executed in Solana's SVM and settled on Ethereum.
On March 11, Eclipse announced the completion of a $50 million Series A funding round led by Hack VC and others. Currently, Eclipse is in the testnet phase, and on April 9, the official announcement stated that the mainnet will soon be available to developers.
7、Lumio：模块化VM Layer2
Lumio is a modular VM Layer 2 network built on top of the OP Stack, known as SuperLumio because it is a member of the Optimism superchain, and aims to introduce high-performance VMs such as Aptos VM, Move VM, and Solana VM into the existing major Ethereum and Bitcoin Layer 2.
Similar to Eclipse in terms of product design logic, in simple terms, Lumio supports the use of Ethereum or Bitcoin as its settlement layer, and the execution layer can be parallelized using virtual machines such as Aptos VM and Solana VM.
Lumio is the mainnet that went live in February this year.