John

I am a technology optimist. I believe: 1. decentralization and censorship-resistance (real versions of these properties, not larps) matter to human freedom in the coming age of AI 2. self-sovereign money, implemented by code and maintained through decentralized consensus, is the final form of money. But it needs to be truly decentralized -- cut out every possible weakness, trust assumption, keeper, etc. Of course there will be connectors to the real world - harden those maximally 3. AI will write most smart contract code. Spec-driven development with Formal Verification will be how new contracts are written rigorously. FV will also be crucial to securing all the infra including the blockchain itself 4. AI will harden our surfaces, with some unfortunate hacks in the process, but ultimately the crypto and financial industries will come out stronger 5. properly-constructed and properly-indexed data lakes will enable agents to build software far more productively 6. governments will move to restrict AI usage in the future, causing true decentralization and CR to matter in dramatic fashion 7. quantum security will be a must for any ledger where people trust their assets. And specifically, blockchains will need to deliver quantum-resistance while retaining programmability and performance. Again, no larping 8. ZK will be an important part of the puzzle too, as it'll be increasingly important to prove off-chain computation and utilize the result on chain. But again, performance and effortlessness for users will be the differentiator 9. pragmatic and composable privacy will be the missing piece for real adoption. People will use apps that stack together stablecoins, DeFi, blockchain settlement, passkey or MPC authentication, and friction-free onramps, but the part that gets fintechs over the line is knowing that user balances will remain private while still being able to tap into shared liquidity 10. blockchain will serve as the global, universal marketplace, for anyone anywhere to get the best opportunities. For that we will need guarantees of fair execution, protection from frontrunning, and a convergence of all of the best assets At @category_xyz and the @monad Foundation, we are assembling all of these missing pieces in parallel with extreme urgency, and I hope this is clear from our actions. See you in the future

Ledger is supporting Monad staking. Nice!

Update on MIP-8 rollout As a reminder, MIP-8 introduces page-aware storage, reorganizing the Merkle trie to assign nearby slots to the same disk page. This is a huge efficiency gain since all db lookups are in units of pages. It is currently super inefficient that nearby slots hash to different disk pages, and MIP-8 solves this problem. Since the database structure is changing, nodes need to temporarily maintain both the old (slot-based) and new (page-based) databases in parallel, then at a later point need to phase out the old database. Software upgrades are planned to execute this transition in phases: - at the start of Phase A, both databases are maintained - at the start of Phase B, the page-based (new) database becomes the primary one (i.e. the node fails if the page-based database is not running), and MIP-8 takes effect - at the start of Phase C, the node stops maintaining the slot-based (old) database Phase A was implemented via v0.15.2. A supermajority of both testnet and mainnet nodes are on this now. Phase B is being implemented in v0.16.0 for testnet, gated by a specific timestamp. A supermajority of testnet nodes are on this now, with the timestamp set for 2026-08-12 at 14:30 UTC. After this point in time, MIP-8 will be in effect (lower gas costs for multiple state accesses touching the same page) on testnet. This post describes the migration: docs.monad.xyz/node-ops/upgr…