What happened when the two popular Layer 1 blockchains, Sonic and Monad, started arguing?

Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily

Market remains quiet, but the market has never lacked excitement.

This morning, two popular Layer 1 networks Sonic (formerly Fantom) and Monad suddenly exchanged barbs across the airwaves, even with their founders personally involved.

As the two most anticipated representatives of the current Layer 1 track, Sonic, which spun off from the once popular Layer 1 network Fantom and is now led by well-known DeFi expert Andre Cronje, was restructured under his guidance. Monad was born from the market-making giant Jump Trading, which last April completed a $225 million funding round led by Paradigm with a $3 billion valuation. From a competitive perspective, these two Layer 1 projects are naturally rivals, but it seems unnecessary to be so direct and confrontational. So what exactly happened last night?

The full story is as follows.

First, on January 12, Sonic’s official account posted a celebratory video announcing that the total value locked (TVL) on the new mainnet had surpassed $100 million. This is a routine marketing move by the project team and nothing unusual.

However, shortly afterward, Tunez, a core member of the growth team from Monad, suddenly made a snarky remark: “Almost as much as they lost in their cross-chain bridge.”

Tunez also shared an article from Forbes about the theft of the Multichain cross-chain bridge back in the day.

In July 2023, the Multichain cross-chain bridge was hacked, with initial losses estimated at around $126 million. Although Multichain’s services spanned multiple networks, Fantom was the primary cross-chain bridge used by Multichain, making it the most severely affected. Afterwards, stablecoins on Fantom experienced long-term de-pegging, and several ecosystem projects halted operations due to funding losses. This directly led to Fantom’s exit from the fierce competition among emerging Layer 1s.

Sonic was originally celebrating its rebirth happily, but Tunez’s comment hit a sore spot, which was understandably hard to swallow.

Several Sonic community members began retaliating against Tunez, with some even recalling his words from two days earlier: “As Monad becomes more popular, it will also face more attacks,” implying that Tunez’s remark was provoked by Sonic’s rising popularity.

Soon after, AC, co-founder of Sonic (formerly Fantom), personally responded to Tunez with the following:

• Monad did not conduct the most basic investigation; Multichain is an independent third-party cross-chain bridge. Among the more than ten affected chains, only Fantom is still seeking to recover funds.
• Monad’s narrative changes every few months. They initially claimed to develop a parallel EVM, but we found they couldn’t deliver the promised performance figures, and we warned that unless they built a separate database (DB), they would not meet expectations. Subsequently, Monad announced the launch of MonadDB, and it’s likely they will move on to creating supersets.
• Monad’s Devnet is just a fork of Avalanche, and they even forgot to rename the gas fee token from AVA (note: original text says AVA, not AVAX) to Monad.
• Monad has no cross-chain bridge, no technology, and nothing. Sonic has developed what Monad promised and is busy with the next iteration. Sonic also does not need $3 billion.

After AC’s response, Monad’s co-founders Keone Hon and James Hunsaker also responded, but perhaps feeling that Tunez’s provocation was unjustified, their tone was much more peaceful and did not further escalate the conflict.

Keone Hon first denied points 2-4 of AC’s criticism regarding Monad, emphasizing that such rumors are false. He also praised Sonic’s continued efforts to recover assets and AC’s contributions to the industry, finally wishing AC and Sonic a bright future.

James Hunsaker’s reply was more detailed:

• The parallel EVM actually works well, but introducing a high-performance, low-latency asynchronous database would improve performance further.
• Monad has never looked at Avalanche’s code, let alone forked it — Monad and Avalanche are even written in different programming languages.
• When the mainnet launches, Monad will also deploy a cross-chain bridge simultaneously.
• Monad has only used a small portion of the funds raised so far.

In summary, after Monad responded in a relatively peaceful manner to de-escalate the conflict, the verbal sparring temporarily subsided.

Market remains sluggish, and information flow is hindered. We are happy to see new projects competing in terms of technical pathways, application types, and adoption models, but it should not be in this manner. As the two most anticipated Layer 1 projects today, Sonic and Monad should serve as role models.