tl;dr
Alexander Spiegelman, Director of Research at Aptos, has accused Monad of copying key technologies without acknowledgment. The allegations surfaced after Monad's testnet launch on X (formerly Twitter). Spiegelman claims that Monad replicated elements of Aptos’ execution models and consensus mechanis...
Aptos Director accuses Monad of technology theft
Dispute over alleged replication of key elements
Monad's co-founder refutes the claims
Despite allegations, Monad makes significant strides
Alexander Spiegelman, Director of Research at Aptos, has accused Monad of copying key technologies without acknowledgment. The allegations surfaced after Monad's testnet launch on X (formerly Twitter). Spiegelman claims that Monad replicated elements of Aptos’ execution models and consensus mechanisms. In response, James Hunsaker, co-founder of Monad, denied the claims and stated that Monad properly cites any consensus-related work. Despite the allegations, Monad has made significant progress, raising $225 million in funding and recording a successful testnet launch.
For context, Monad is a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain compatible with Ethereum (ETH). According to the official documentation, Monad introduces key optimizations in four critical areas: MonadBFT, Asynchronous Execution, Parallel Execution, and MonadDb. Spiegelman called out Monad for allegedly replicating several key elements of Aptos’ execution models and consensus mechanisms. While acknowledging that open-source frameworks allow for shared innovation, he criticized Monad’s failure to attribute Aptos’ engineering and research efforts properly.
The core of the dispute revolves around the technical underpinnings of Monad’s blockchain infrastructure. Spiegelman alleged that Monad’s MonadBFT seems to have copied AptosBFT, an upgrade of the Jolteon consensus mechanism. According to him, Monad supposedly copied the pipelined design from Diem, which later became Aptos. Spiegelman also compared Solana’s (SOL) static parallel execution with Aptos’ dynamic parallelism via BlockSTM. While Monad altered BlockSTM’s execution, he stressed that the core ideas came from Aptos.
In response, James Hunsaker, co-founder of Monad, refuted the claim and denied any copying. He argued that optimistic concurrency control was discovered in 1979. Hunsaker further explained that he worked on software transactional memory (STM) in the Haskell context, which predates Aptos. Furthermore, he noted that BlockSTM is simply a straightforward extension of these earlier concepts. Lastly, he clarified that Monad properly cites any consensus-related work in its documentation and papers.
Nonetheless, Spiegelman doubled down on his claims. He emphasized that BlockSTM stands as one of the rare software transactional memories (STMs) ever deployed in production. Despite the allegations, Monad has been making notable strides. According to CryptoRank, the project successfully raised $225 million in a funding round led by Paradigm. The testnet launch has also been highly successful, with 334 million Remote Procedure Call (RPC) requests recorded within the first 12 hours. Furthermore, over 8.8 million active Ethereum addresses received testnet tokens following the launch, signaling a strong community and developer interest.