Keone Hon: Wall Street And Degens Are Both Coming To Monad (Here Is Why)

Keone Hon’s case for Monad is that crypto’s consumer-oriented “degens” and institutional users do not need separate systems. Retail communities and firms such as asset issuers, exchanges, and banks may have different priorities, but he says both benefit from a network that can deliver strong execution, low slippage, and liquidity. He sees retail and institutional adoption beginning to reinforce one another through network effects.

Monad was founded in early 2022 to build a performant, decentralized system, at a time when much of the industry’s attention was on rollups. Hon says the team chose to build its architecture from scratch rather than take shortcuts, which made development take longer. Its design includes consensus and execution that are decoupled, parallelized work, and a rebuilt database.

The architecture is meant to provide a foundation for addressing difficult problems, including MEV and the tension between privacy and composability. Hon presents performance as part of that broader effort, not an end in itself: a system must execute effectively while supporting decentralized applications and the needs of users and institutions.

With Monad mainnet live for about 10 months at the time of the interview, Hon’s clearest lesson was that speed matters. Asset issuers, exchanges, and banks are interested in bringing activity on-chain, and he says Monad needs to solve their problems quickly. For asset issuers, one challenge is distributing assets and giving them more utility through decentralized systems, including enabling users to use leverage.

Hon’s view is that institutional adoption does not require abandoning crypto’s consumer culture, or vice versa. The opportunity depends on serving both groups’ practical needs while building network effects between them; the technical foundation and institutional interest alone do not guarantee that outcome.