Exploring the encryption secrets of Monad: Can it help ETH regain its glory?

Author: 100y.eth Source: mirror Translation: Shanooba, Golden Finance

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

1. Lost Ethereum Village

Long long ago, in a small village called ETH Village, there lived a group of green Pepe. In this prosperous kingdom, the high level of Decentralization and strong security drove the prosperity of the village, and the economy flourished.

Villagers are deeply influenced by these principles and regularly elect leaders by holding equity to supervise the transaction blocks recorded every twelve seconds, in order to maintain the village’s vibrant economy. However, the ETH Block Village, which is no longer as glorious as it used to be, has been severely affected by the rampant meme virus, causing a great loss of vitality to the village. The green Pepes in the village are rushing around, and the village has become a desolate scene.

However, there are still some green Pepe in the village who cherish the dream of revival, and they have proposed the ‘L2 reform’ in the hope of revitalizing Ethereum. Through their efforts, the village has gradually regained some prosperity, and the scale of activities has reached unprecedented heights, bringing a touch of vitality back to the lives of the green Pepes.

However, the L2 reform has not completely solved the problem. Nearby Solana and Sui Village dealers, although young and often unstable, are developing rapidly under an unprecedented scientific revolution, making complex financial transactions simple and smooth, while Ethereum, despite undergoing reform, still struggles. There are rumors circulating in the village about relocating to these emerging village dealers.

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

2. The Arrival of Purple Pepe the Wizard

The wizard in the purple robe, with deep regret for the lost glory of the ETH village, is determined to build a new village called Monad.

One day, he stood in the square of the village and announced his grand plan to create Monad to the green Pepe’s, inviting them to express their expectations and dreams for the future.

Green Pepe 1 first said: “I hope Monad’s life can be like Ethereum. Although Ethereum lacks the scalability of Solana or SUI, its culture is unique, and I have never thought of leaving because the culture elsewhere is too different from ours.”

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

The wizard listened to their expectations, promising to integrate the rich culture of Ethereum into Monad, while also having the scalability of Solana and SUI. He began to contemplate how to use powerful magic to realize this vision: a village that retains the tradition of Ethereum, while also having the efficiency of new technology.

Subsequently, he shared this grand vision with the Pepe people who yearn for change, inspiring their hope for a new life that combines the advantages of both.

3. Secret Technique 1: latency execution

One limitation that restricts the scalability of the Ethereum village is that, when a new Block is created, transactions need to be processed in real-time during the Consensus process. In this village, the leader proposing the Block must calculate the results of all transactions before making the proposal, and the receiving validation Node must also calculate all transactions to verify the legitimacy of the Block and vote.

Due to the Consensus process requiring the villagers’ computation and communication, it greatly compresses the time for processing transactions, thereby limiting scalability. To address this issue, the Purple Pepe Wizard has cast a new magic called ‘latency execution’, separating the ‘Consensus’ process (transaction ordering) and the ‘execution’ process (computation results) of the villagers’ transactions.

In simple terms, it is no longer necessary for each Block to simultaneously perform Consensus and execution. Instead, when NBlock is performing Consensus, execution will process the transaction results in N-1Block.

This method allows execution to take full advantage of the block time, greatly increasing the number of transactions that can be processed at the same time.

Advanced Magic: latencyMerkle Root

In the ETH village, Node calculates before Consensus to ensure the legitimacy of Block. However, in the Monad’s latency execution system, Consensus and execution are separated, and Malicious Node may ignore previously confirmed transactions or tamper with the computational state.

To prevent this situation, Monad embeds the Merkle root (representing the computation result of the N-10 Block) into the proposal of the N Block. If more than two-thirds of the Nodes reach a Consensus on the N Block, it means that the computation result of the N-10 Block is also confirmed.

If a Node’s computation result does not match the Merkle root in the N-10th Block, the Node will be removed from Consensus, starting from the Nth Block. This ten Block Merkle root latency ensures that any computation errors can be detected in a timely manner.

It is worth noting that the Block time of Monad is 1 second, but this does not mean that the finality of Monad 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: Trading hash

The purple Pepe wizard is thinking hard about how to quickly spread the Block proposal to other Nodes in the village.

In the ETH village, it is customary to propagate a complete Block proposal, including all transactions, as a large package on the network. However, the wizards realized that if Monad Village also adopts this approach, broadcasting Block proposals containing a large number of transactions would be a difficult and slow task.

To this end, the purple Pepe wizard proposed the concept of ‘transaction hash’. Since all the transactions submitted by the 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 to allow leaders to not have to transmit the complete transaction list in each Block proposal. Instead, leaders only need to reference these transactions and send the hash value.

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 recorded in their own records to easily find the referenced transactions.

5. Secret Technique Three: MonadBFT

In the Monad village, the transaction order within each block and the consensus generated by the block are governed by MonadBFT, which is a high-performance consensus mechanism based on HotStuff. The two-phase Byzantine fault tolerance algorithm (BFT) can achieve consensus within two steps.

The leaders of the Blocks are selected by probability, based on the stake of each participant. In Monad, the process of creating each Block is more efficient than in ETH Village, because the proposal of each Block N is passed along with the Quorum Certificate (QC) of the previous Block N-1, indicating that more than two-thirds of the Nodes have verified the Block.

The following is the process of unfolding:

• Leader N proposed the proposal of Block N, accompanied by the QC of the previous Block N-1.
• Validators then verify Block N and send their votes to Leader N+1.
• Leader N+1 proposes Block N+1, while attaching QC of Block N.

However, even with QC N, validators cannot immediately finalize BlockN, because the essence of the Block chain cannot ensure that all participants are synchronized online.

To fully ensure the security of BlockN, validators need to vote ‘agreement’ for BlockN+1 (including QC N) to leader N+2. When leader N+2 generates QC N+1, it confirms the successful completion of round N+1, thereby finalizing BlockN.

Through outstanding sorcery and foresight, the purple Pepe wizard has led the Monad village into a new era. In this village, each Block can not only be rapidly created and secured, but also the process is elegant, in line with a truly scalable, win-win vision for the village.

6. Secret Technique 4: Parallel Execution

In the Monad realm, to handle a large number of villager transactions, the Purple Pepe wizard has designed a new spell that processes transactions not in the serial manner of the ETH Village, but in a powerful parallel stream processing.

With the help of latency execution, the execution will only start after Consensus on the transaction order of Blocks is reached. Monad Village is composed of many skilled executors, each responsible for processing transactions, independently calculating their inputs and outputs, and creating a list of transactions to be processed.

These inputs and outputs will not immediately change the state of the village, but will wait in the form of suspended magic, ready to be submitted in the order determined by Consensus. This submission involves merging the outputs into the current state one by one, just like weaving a seamless and orderly tapestry with magic lines.

However, there was a twist. Parallel processing introduced the possibility of transaction conflicts - something rare in the orderly Ethereum village, but a new challenge here.

For example, if a transaction (transaction b) shows villager A giving 1 ETH to villager B, and another transaction (transaction c) shows B spending this ETH at the village inn, then the order of these transactions is crucial. If transaction c tries to execute before transaction b, the transaction will fail. In these cases, conflicting transactions will be rescheduled, and transaction c will wait for transaction b to be completed before executing again.

Therefore, in Monad, the core of parallel execution lies in the sequence: the result is parallel computation, but state updates are merged in the required precise order.

7. Secret Technique 5: MonadDb

The purple Pepe wizard did not stop there. He conjured up MonadDb, a custom database unique to the Monad village, specifically designed to store the state of the blockchain. Ethereum relies on the complex Merkle Patricia Trie, known for its flexibility but also infamous for its inefficiency with external clients, while MonadDb natively adopts it, fully leveraging all of its features and efficiency.

MonadDb fully considers parallel execution in the design, supports simultaneous multiple reads and writes, and has high precision. Unlike traditional databases that require each task to be completed before moving on to the next, MonadDb has asynchronous I/O magic, allowing tasks to overlap seamlessly and opening the door to true parallel transaction processing.

8. Come and visit Monard Village!

Through a series of magical spells and complex magic, the purple Pepe wizard created the Monad Village—where the trusted account, encryption technology, transaction format, language, and Wallet of the Ethereum, seamlessly integrate with Solana and SUI’s incredible scalability. Now, Monad is thriving, dreaming of achieving 10,000 transactions per second and completing them within 1 second.

Born in the smart and hopeful Monad Village, can it save the world plagued by the meme virus, and help Ether square regain its glory and become a trustworthy partner? Only time will tell us the answer.