A balanced but raw take on Monad. We’ll start with the sugar and end with the salt. 1) The Monad tech is some of the best and most promising in the space. The greenfield of what Monad can do upon mainnet launch is drastically underestimated by the market. I don’t mean price—I mean the canvas they are laying out for themselves to add features in the future. I won’t go into the details here, but suffice it to say they can basically replicate most of Solana’s novel features, and some things even Solana can’t do without deep architectural changes. That’s insanely bullish. No other EVM is set up to do this today. 2) The Monad team is one of the highest-integrity and hardest-working teams in the space. It’s incredibly rare to find high-integrity teams in this space. I can’t tell you how many people have asked me, “How much did Monad pay for that, huh?” as a jab when a good partnership would announce or some marketing tailwind would occur. I’ve gotten into fights with people who didn’t believe me when I said we didn’t pay for any of it. Their minds simply couldn’t comprehend that sometimes you just get invited to things because people like and respect you. It’s really that rare in this space, and mad respect to the team for operating with such class. I disagree with plenty of the strategic decisions, but I’ll never say they didn’t make them with the highest level of integrity. 3) Monad got that dog in them. I don’t know if Monad will be successful in the short term. I think they still have a ton to learn and add as an ecosystem, and there are a lot of major changes I’d personally advocate for. Despite that, these mfers are not going to give up—and it’ll eventually pay off. I don’t know how to convince you of this it really comes from my personal experience on the team. 🤷🏽‍♂️ They are 110% playing long-term games with long-term people, and the short term may punish them for it. Fully think that’s a possibility. Personally, I view Monad as a next-cycle play and am very happy with that timeline. In my opinion, most of their competition will be irrelevant by then. The ecosystem will have had its flush-out of short-term-oriented people, and the tech and infra will be battle-tested and ready for the unicorn startups to be born. By that stage, I hope they will have gone through a few ecosystem identity crises, strategic reckonings, and cultural upheavals. You don’t become a strong ecosystem by everything always being happy and bullish. Ethereum had the DAO hack. Solana had FTX. I don’t think Monad needs anything that extreme, but periods of bearishness and being the hated one are healthy and good for building a real community. When you know the core team has that dog in them to fight through all of that and just drown out the noise, it gives the community the runway it needs to build the same conviction the core team gets by building and setting results consistently.