The two popular Layer 1 public chains Sonic and Monad are quarreling. What happened?

Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily

The market remains silent, but the market never lacks excitement.

This morning, two popular Layer 1 networks, Sonic (formerly Fantom) and Monad, suddenly got into a fight with each other, and even the founders of both parties personally stepped down.

As representatives of the two Layer 1 tracks with the highest expectations in the market outlook community, Sonic was born out of the once popular Layer 1 network Fantom, which is now reset by the well-known DeFi guru Andre Cronje, while Monad was born out of the market-making giant Jump Trading, which was launched in April last year. In March, it completed a US$225 million financing led by Paradigm at a valuation of US$3 billion. From the perspective of competition on the track, there is indeed a natural competitive relationship between the two Layer 1s, but it seems that there is no need to be so direct in speaking to each other. So what happened last night?

The sequence of events is as follows.

First, Sonic officially released a celebration video on January 12 to celebrate the new mainnet’s total locked-up value (TVL) exceeding US$100 million. This is a routine marketing operation of the project side and there is no problem.

But shortly afterwards, Tunez, a core member of Monad’s team responsible for growth business, suddenly jumped out and said: “This is almost as much money as they lost in the cross-chain bridge.”

tunez also posted a Forbes article about the multichain theft incident that year.

In July 2023, the cross-chain bridge project Multichain suffered a hacker attack. At that time, preliminary estimates of the loss were approximately US$126 million. Although Multichain's services cover multiple networks, Fantom suffered the most serious damage because it uses Multichain as the main cross-chain bridge. Afterwards, the stablecoins on Fantom were significantly unanchored for a long time, and multiple ecological projects were suspended due to financial losses. This also directly caused Fantom to withdraw from the last round of fierce competition in the emerging Layer 1.

Originally, Sonic was happily celebrating his new life, but on such a great day, Tunez hit the hard spot, and naturally he couldn't bear it.

Many members of the Sonic community have begun to fight back against tunez. Some people also found out what tunez said two days ago, "As Monad becomes more and more popular, it will also suffer more and more attacks." The words are direct. tunez This move was spurred by the popularity of Sonic.

Later, Sonic (formerly Fantom) co-founder AC also personally responded to tunez, as follows:

• Monad did not do the most basic research, Multichain is an independent third-party cross-chain bridge. Of the more than 10 chains affected, only Fantom continues to seek to recover funds.
• The narrative of the Monad changes every few months. Monad first said that they would build parallel EVM, but we found that they could not deliver the promised performance numbers, and reminded us that they would not build another database (DB). After that, Monad announced that it would launch MonadDB, and then we would probably build supersets.
• Moand's Devnet is just a forked network of Avalanche, and even the gas fee token was forgotten to be renamed from AVA (Note: the original text is AVA, not AVAX) to Monad.
• Monad has no cross-chain bridge, no technology, nothing. Sonic developed what Monad promised and are busy working on the next iteration. Sonic doesn't need $3 billion either.

After AC's exit, Monad's two co-founders Keone Hon and James Hunsaker also responded one after another. However, perhaps because they felt that tunez's provocative behavior was unjustified, the language of the two co-founders was much calmer and did not further intensify the conflict.

Keone Hon first denied AC's criticisms about Monad on points 2-4 and emphasized that such rumors are incorrect. At the same time, Keone Hon also praised Sonic's continued attempts to recover stolen goods and AC's contribution to the industry, and finally blessed the future development of AC and Sonic.

James Hunsaker's response was more detailed:

• Parallel EVM actually works well, but it would be better if a high-performance low-latency asynchronous database is introduced;
• Monad has never seen Avalanche code, let alone forked it - Monad and Avalanche are not even the same programming language;
• When the Monad mainnet is launched, a cross-chain bridge will be launched simultaneously;
• Monad has only used a small portion of the funds it has raised for the time being.

All in all, after Monad weakened the conflict with a relatively peaceful response, the war of words between the two sides was temporarily suspended.

The market is bleak and market information is frustrated. We'd love to see new projects compete on technology paths, application types, adoption models, etc., but it clearly shouldn't be this way. As the two representative Layer 1 projects with the highest expectations from the community, Sonic and Monad seem to be the ones who should set an example.