Monad Accused of Copying Aptos Technology Without Credit

Alexander Spiegelman, Director of Research at Aptos, has condemned Monad for copying key technologies from Aptos without proper acknowledgment. 

The allegations surfaced through a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter) following Monad’s testnet launch.

Aptos vs Monad: Allegations of Technology Theft Erupt

For context, Monad is a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain compatible with Ethereum (ETH). According to the official documentation, Monad introduces key optimizations in four critical areas: MonadBFT, Asynchronous Execution, Parallel Execution, and MonadDb.

Spiegelman called out Monad for allegedly replicating several key elements of Aptos’ execution models and consensus mechanisms. While acknowledging that open-source frameworks allow for shared innovation, he criticized Monad’s failure to attribute Aptos’ engineering and research efforts properly.

“I really don’t understand why it takes so much time for Monad to copy Aptos tech,” Spiegelman posted. 

The core of the dispute revolves around the technical underpinnings of Monad’s blockchain infrastructure. Spiegelman alleged that Monad’s MonadBFT seems to have copied AptosBFT, an upgrade of the Jolteon consensus mechanism. 

According to him, Monad supposedly copied the pipelined design from Diem, which later became Aptos.

Spiegelman also compared Solana’s (SOL) static parallel execution with Aptos’ dynamic parallelism via BlockSTM. While Monad altered BlockSTM’s execution, he stressed that the core ideas came from Aptos.

“One day, in 2029, when they finally release their code we will all see,” he stated.

In response, James Hunsaker, co-founder of Monad, refuted the claim and denied any copying. 

“I’ve never looked at any Aptos code, in fact I never think about Aptos except when you post nonsense like this,” he said.

He argued that optimistic concurrency control was discovered in 1979. Hunsaker further explained that he worked on software transactional memory (STM) in the Haskell context, which predates Aptos. Furthermore, he noted that BlockSTM is simply a straightforward extension of these earlier concepts.

Lastly, he clarified that Monad properly cites any consensus-related work in its documentation and papers. Nonetheless, Spiegelman doubled down on his claims.

He emphasized that BlockSTM stands as one of the rare software transactional memories (STMs) ever deployed in production. Although thousands of research papers have been published on the topic, Spiegelman noted that no approach was capable of achieving true scalability until the advent of BlockSTM.

Despite the allegations, Monad has been making notable strides. According to CryptoRank, the project successfully raised $225 million in a funding round led by Paradigm. The testnet launch has also been highly successful, with 334 million Remote Procedure Call (RPC) requests recorded within the first 12 hours.

Furthermore, over 8.8 million active Ethereum addresses received testnet tokens following the launch, signaling a strong community and developer interest.