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About Category
Category Labs (formerly Monad Labs) completed a $225M funding round led by Paradigm in April 2024, laying the resource foundation for building Monad, a high-performance EVM Layer 1.
In December 2024, Monad Labs rebranded to Category Labs and established the independent Monad Foundation to drive protocol governance and ecosystem development, marking a new stage in organizational governance.
In April 2025, Category Labs introduced MonadBFT, a consensus protocol that addresses tail-forking and supports 10,000 TPS with sub-second finality—a key technical milestone in balancing performance and decentralization.
On November 24, 2025, the Monad public mainnet launched, marking the transition from research and development to live operation; Category Labs continues as a core contributor iterating on open-source clients.
Major progress:
On 2026-08-12, MONAD_TEN (MIP-8 page-encoded storage) activated on testnet via v0.16.0, requiring dual-db Phase A completion. Mainnet activation followed at 2026-09-02 14:30 UTC with mandatory v0.16.1 upgrade; nodes without a page-encoded timeline will fail to start.
On 2026-07-07, Category Labs unveiled Cadence, a multi-proposer consensus protocol that deterministically merges parallel block proposals, removing single-leader transaction ordering and curbing MEV. Simulations across 200 validators showed 219ms average finality, targeting 100ms block intervals. It pairs with BTX encrypted mempool as an in-protocol MEV solution; currently a research proposal.
Formal verification advances: Category Labs is verifying the Monad execution client. Completed proofs cover optimistic execution equivalence to sequential execution and reserve balance. Next targets include the EVM-to-x86 compiler, TrieDB, and consensus safety/liveness, aiming to fully verify the client.
Future focus:
- Progress Cadence toward mainnet, with supporting components like RaptorCast already in production.
- Expand formal verification across the entire execution client and consensus layer.
Recent team change: Jan Camenisch joined the Monad development team as Staff Researcher in May 2026. He is a renowned cryptographer and former CTO of DFINITY, with extensive experience in privacy-preserving technologies and blockchain.