Monad

Logo

Inspiration

The USD is the world's reserve currency and has established network effects as a universal measure of account. As such, there is overwhelming demand to transact in this unit of account on-chain. Stablecoins have tried to fill this demand, but each of them comes with protocol design flaws that prohibit mainstream adoption. The following is a specification of the first provably safe and decentralized stablecoin with a novel gold-standard governance structure built for the Solana Sealevel runtime.

What it does

Monad (LEI) is a stablecoin collateralized 1:1 by other stablecoins with an associated DAO, Gottfried. The mechanics of the Monad token are simple: Stake 1 stablecoin and receive 1 Monad and some GTM tokens as a reward. If you want your stablecoin back, then you can swap your Monad for the stablecoin. This redeemability ensures that Monads will always trade at or above 1 USD.

So what's the innovation here? If it's just a stablecoin backed stablecoin, could we just spin a basket of stable tokens on Solana using Symmetry? Well, instead of a person, organization or otherwise vulnerable entity deciding the makeup of the basket of stablecoins, the Gottfried DAO implements a novel governance structure based on Sybil-resistant quadratic voting that is provably safe, decentralized and censorship resistant. More importantly, the governance structure promotes the proliferation and diversification of on-chain custodial stablecoins that are backed by real world dollars, so that we all dont have to hope and pray that a single bank account will not be compromised.

How we built it

Anchor & Rust & Solana

Challenges we ran into

Rust is tricky to reason about and learn. Anchor also does not enough documentation just yet (but it's accelerating super fast and I appreciate that!).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Honestly, most of the toil was designing the system and writing the litepaper. Feel pretty good about the game-theoretic guarantees in the system design, but I wish we could've shipped more on-chain program by the deadline.