Aptos Research Director, Alexander Spiegelman, has accused Monad of plagiarizing key technologies without acknowledgment.
The controversy unfolded on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) following Monad’s testnet debut.
Aptos vs Monad: Claims of Technology Theft Spark Controversy
Monad, a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain compatible with Ethereum (ETH), boasts optimizations in MonadBFT, Asynchronous Execution, Parallel Execution, and MonadDb.
Spiegelman criticized Monad for allegedly mirroring elements of Aptos’ execution models and consensus mechanisms without proper credit, despite the opportunity for collaborative innovation through open-source frameworks.
Questioning the motive behind Monad’s adoption of Aptos tech, Spiegelman highlighted similarities between MonadBFT and AptosBFT, suggesting a resemblance to Jolteon consensus mechanism upgrades.
He also pointed out similarities in Monad’s pipelined design to the one originally seen in Diem, later evolving into Aptos.
Drawing a comparison between Solana’s static parallel execution and Aptos’ dynamic parallelism using BlockSTM, Spiegelman emphasized that Monad derived its core ideas from Aptos but made modifications to BlockSTM’s execution process.
In response, Monad co-founder James Hunsaker denied the allegations, asserting no exposure to Aptos code and citing the long-established nature of optimistic concurrency control. He detailed his earlier work with software transactional memory (STM) in a Haskell context predating Aptos and explained that BlockSTM is an extension of these prior concepts.
Hunsaker defended Monad’s citation practices for consensus-related work and dismissed Spiegelman’s persistent claims.
Despite the ongoing dispute, Monad remains focused on advancements, having raised $225 million in funding led by Paradigm. The successful testnet launch garnered 334 million Remote Procedure Call (RPC) requests within 12 hours and distributed testnet tokens to over 8.8 million active Ethereum addresses, indicating strong community and developer engagement.