The two popular Layer 1 public chains, Sonic and Monad, have gotten into a dispute. What happened?

Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily

The market remains quiet, but it is never short of excitement.

This morning, the two popular Layer 1 networks, Sonic (formerly Fantom) and Monad, suddenly exchanged barbs, with even the founders of both sides getting involved.

As the two most anticipated Layer 1 representatives in the market, Sonic is a rebirth of the once-popular Layer 1 network Fantom, now being restructured by the well-known DeFi expert Andre Cronje. Monad, on the other hand, was born from the market-making giant Jump Trading and completed a $225 million funding round led by Paradigm last April at a valuation of $3 billion. From a competitive perspective, the two Layer 1s indeed have a natural rivalry, but it seems unnecessary to be so direct in their exchanges. So what exactly happened last night?

Here’s the timeline of events.

First, on January 12, Sonic's official account released a celebratory video announcing that its new mainnet's total locked value (TVL) had surpassed $100 million. This is a routine marketing operation by the project team and poses no issues.

However, shortly after, tunez, a core member of Monad's growth team, suddenly jumped in with a comment: "That's almost as much as they lost in the cross-chain bridge."

tunez also shared a Forbes article about the Multichain hacking incident from that year.

In July 2023, the cross-chain bridge project Multichain suffered a hacker attack, with preliminary estimates of losses around $126 million. Although Multichain's services covered multiple networks, Fantom was the most severely affected as it had made Multichain its main cross-chain bridge. In the aftermath, stablecoins on Fantom significantly depegged for an extended period, and several ecosystem projects announced shutdowns due to financial losses, which directly led to Fantom's exit from the fierce competition of the last emerging Layer 1 wave.

While Sonic was happily celebrating its rebirth, tunez's comment hit a sore spot, which naturally couldn't be tolerated.

Multiple Sonic community members began to retaliate against tunez, with some recalling tunez's earlier statement from two days prior: "As Monad becomes more popular, it will also face more attacks," directly implying that tunez's actions were provoked by Sonic's popularity.

Subsequently, AC, the co-founder of Sonic (formerly Fantom), also personally responded to tunez, stating:

• 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. Monad initially claimed to create a parallel EVM, but we found they couldn't deliver the promised performance numbers and reminded them that unless they created a separate database (DB), Monad then announced the launch of MonadDB, and next, they will probably create supersets.
• Monad's Devnet is merely a fork of Avalanche, and they even forgot to rename the gas fee token from AVA (note: the original text is AVA, not AVAX) to Monad.
• Monad has no cross-chain bridge, no technology, nothing at all. 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 two co-founders, Keone Hon and James Hunsaker, also stepped in to reply, but perhaps feeling that tunez's provocative behavior was unjustifiable, their language appeared much more moderate and did not further escalate the conflict.

Keone Hon first denied AC's points 2-4 regarding Monad's criticisms and emphasized that such rumors are incorrect. At the same time, Keone Hon praised Sonic for continuing its efforts to recover funds and acknowledged AC's contributions to the industry, ultimately wishing AC and Sonic future success.

James Hunsaker's response was even more detailed:

• The parallel EVM is actually running well, but it would perform better with the introduction of a high-performance low-latency asynchronous database;
• Monad has never looked at Avalanche's code, let alone forked it—Monad and Avalanche are not even in the same programming language;
• A cross-chain bridge will launch simultaneously with the Monad mainnet;
• Monad has only used a small portion of the funds raised so far.

In summary, after Monad responded in a relatively calm manner to downplay the conflict, the verbal sparring between the two sides has temporarily ceased.

The market is bleak, and information is hindered. We are eager to see new projects compete in terms of technological paths, application types, and adoption models, but clearly, it should not be in this manner. As the two most anticipated Layer 1 representative projects in the current community, Sonic and Monad seem to have a greater responsibility to set an example.