Perhaps influenced by the official launch of HyperEVM, Monad, a competitor in the L1 track, finally couldnt sit still. Just one day after HyperEVM went online, the project, which was led by Paradigm and raised $225 million in April last year, finally launched its test network.
However, amidst the cheers from the community and various airdrop tutorials, another L1 competitor, Aptos, directly posted on social media platform X that Monad plagiarized Aptos technology. Thus, a war of words began.
The controversy
The dispute over the originality of the technology was first started by Alexander Spiegelman, director of research at Aptos: I dont understand why Monad spent so much time plagiarizing Aptos technology. Its all open source and there are already many peer-reviewed papers. Instead of trying to hide it, they might as well just plagiarize it openly.
It was Monads big day, and co-founder James Hunsaker naturally couldnt stand someone ruining the good thing, so he directly hit back in the comment section: Optimistic Concurrency Control (OCC) was discovered in 1979, before your parents met. I was already studying Software Transactional Memory (STM) in the Haskell environment, when you were still in diapers. BlockSTM is a simple extension of these things. I have never seen any Aptos code, in fact, if you hadnt published this nonsense, I wouldnt have thought of Aptos. Anything related to consensus will be properly cited in our documents and papers.
Seeing Hunsaker refused to admit it, Spiegelman once again presented facts and reasoned: There is no need to blame people. We all know how and why Monad was created. BlockSTM is one of the very few (if not the only) STMs put into production. Before BlockSTM, nothing was really efficient. With your background, you should know this. Although there are thousands of papers, nothing can really achieve scale. BlockSTM is a breakthrough, BlockSTM v2 is the future. After saying that, he did not forget to show off his qualifications: By the way, I dont know about you, but when I was a baby, I didnt even have diapers.
Seeing that the tension was getting stronger and stronger, Hunsaker simply skipped the technical question and retorted: Did you poop on the ground before? Spiegelman was speechless at this time and had no choice but to fight back: Do you know the difference between a read-write lock and a mutex lock? This time, Hunsaker on the opposite side did not reply.
Later, Spiegelman joked in the comment section: I think we will all know the truth when you finally go online in 2029. He also muttered: Monad is copying our technology, which may be acceptable if they can admit it and give us due recognition for our hard work in research and engineering.
Plagiarism incidents among new public chains are frequent. Is this a manifestation of the open source culture unique to the cryptocurrency world?
Plagiarism disputes over new public chains are common in the field of cryptocurrency. Sonics high-performance design was once questioned for imitating Solanas PoH and pipeline architecture; Sui and Aptos are derived from Diem, and the similarities in Move language and parallel execution have triggered a brotherly dispute; Aleos zk-SNARKs was accused of copying zkSyncs ZKP framework; Berachains modular architecture and IBC function were regarded by the Cosmos community as a deluxe fork; and Mantras RWA tokenization model is believed to have drawn on the successful experience of Ondo Finance.
The crypto industry advocates the spirit of open source, and most projects will make their code public. In the current crypto market, where the saying time is money is fully reflected, the phenomenon of fast fish eat slow fish is common. In such an environment, open source culture has spawned some projects where the code is directly Ctrl C+Ctrl V. Even in the non-crypto field, the early development of the Linux kernel caused disputes over the ownership of code contributions.
Related reading: Blast is accused of plagiarizing OP code, is there a mess behind Pipeline L2?
This open source culture has greatly lowered the entry threshold for new public chains, allowing new projects to iterate quickly on the shoulders of giants. In the debate between Monad and Aptos, Aptos BlockSTM open source provided a reference for the industry, and Monad may learn from it. However, Hunsaker argued that its technology was based on the earlier OCC and STM and was derived from the progress of the entire industry, reflecting the general logic of new public chains: open source results are public resources, and reference is a matter of course. The open source culture allows new public chains to launch high-performance solutions in a short period of time, but it also makes the issue of original ownership difficult to resolve.
The quarrel happened when the test network was launched. Are they fighting over technology or traffic?
The timing of this dispute coincided with the launch of the Monad testnet, which was a crucial moment for Monad to attract developers, verify technology, and consolidate community trust. Aptos accusation shifted the focus from Monads technology demonstration to the confrontation between the two.
As an emerging L1 that has not yet been launched on the mainnet, Monad has accumulated a lot of community expectations with the $225 million financing led by Paradigm last year and the narrative of Ethereums high-performance evolver. For this testnet, the Monad team has also made sufficient preparations, triggering a set of combos as soon as it went online to maintain community attention and goodwill. Monad officials announced on social media that they have sent test coins to more than 8.8 million active Ethereum addresses. At the same time, Backpack wallet has taken the lead in supporting the Monad testnet, and Wormhole has also officially launched the Monad testnet.
For Monad, the launch of the testnet is not only an opportunity to verify the technology, but also a key window to attract EVM developers and users. If the promise of 10,000 TPS can be fulfilled, Monad will be expected to gain a firm foothold in the L1 track, and may even threaten the market position of high-performance chains such as Aptos. On the X platform, the communitys expectations for the testnet have pushed up the heat. Some users call it a project for scientists to pick up money, and a large number of airdrop tutorials are emerging. And this momentum is exactly the narrative capital that Monad needs to protect and amplify.
On the other hand, Aptos research director Spiegelman chose to launch the accusation on the day of the testnet, perhaps due to market competition considerations. Although it is still unclear who is the original technical creator, Aptos choice to launch the attack when Monad was gaining a lot of traffic has obviously paid off. As the community watched, Aptos native token APT showed a strong price increase. As of writing, according to market data, APT has risen by 7% in the past 24 hours, briefly reaching $7.
Aptoss move may not only win the price of the coin. In the crypto market, attention is a scarce resource. Since Coinbase added Aptos network USDC to its coin listing roadmap in January , Aptos has not made any new moves this year. This accusation has, to a certain extent, drawn market attention to Aptos open source contributions and technical authority, and poured cold water on the popular Monad.
In the face of this incident, the official accounts of Monad and Aptos have not yet made any statement. BlockBeats will continue to follow the progress of the incident.
