The founder personally intervened, why did the two popular L1s, Sonic and Monad, engage in a war of words?
Original Title: "Two Major Layer1 Networks Exchange Insults, How Did Sonic and Monad Start Quarreling?"
Original Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
The market remains quiet, but the cryptocurrency industry never lacks excitement.
This morning, two major Layer 1 networks, Sonic (formerly Fantom) and Monad, suddenly engaged in a war of words, even involving the founders of both projects.
As the two most anticipated Layer 1 networks in the future market, Sonic, born from the once-popular Layer 1 network Fantom and now revamped by the well-known DeFi guru Andre Cronje, and Monad, born from the market-making giant Jump Trading and received a $2.25 billion investment led by Paradigm at a $30 billion valuation in April last year. From a competitive standpoint, the two Layer 1 networks indeed have a natural rivalry, but it seems they don't need to be so direct in their confrontation. So, what exactly happened last night?
Here is the background of the event.
First, on January 12, the Sonic team officially released a celebratory video announcing that the network's Total Value Locked (TVL) had surpassed $100 million on the mainnet. This was a standard marketing move by the project team and did not seem problematic.

However, shortly after, a core member of the growth team at Monad, known as tunez, suddenly made a provocative comment: "This is almost as much as they lost in the cross-chain bridge incident."

tunez also shared a Forbes article about the cross-chain bridge Multichain being hacked in a previous year.
In July 2023, the cross-chain bridge project Multichain fell victim to a hacker attack, with initial estimates of losses around $126 million. Although Multichain's services spanned multiple networks, Fantom, as the primary cross-chain bridge, suffered the most severe consequences. Subsequently, the stablecoin on Fantom experienced long periods of significant de-pegging, multiple ecosystem projects announced shutdowns due to fund losses, ultimately leading to Fantom's exit from the intense competition among the previous generation of emerging Layer 1 networks.
Sonic was originally celebrating the newborn happily, but the good day was directly hit by tunez, which naturally could not be tolerated.
Many Sonic community members immediately began to retaliate against tunez, with some even bringing up tunez's words from two days ago, "As Monad becomes more popular, it will also face more and more attacks," directly pointing out that tunez's actions were provoked by Sonic's popularity.

Subsequently, Sonic (formerly Fantom) co-founder AC personally responded to tunez, with the following content:
· Monad did not do the most basic investigation; Multichain is an independent third-party cross-chain bridge. Among the more than 10 affected chains, only Fantom is still seeking fund recovery.
· Monad's narrative changes every few months. Monad initially said they would do parallel EVM, but we found that they could not deliver the promised performance numbers, and reminded them that unless they do another database (DB), and then Monad announced they would launch MonadDB, and next they will probably do supersets.
· Moand's Devnet is just a fork network of Avalanche, and they even forgot to rename the gas fee token from AVA to Monad.
· Monad has no cross-chain bridge, no technology, nothing. Sonic developed what Monad promised, and is busy with the next iteration. Sonic also does not need $3 billion.

After AC's response, Monad's two co-founders, Keone Hon and James Hunsaker, also responded successively. However, perhaps feeling that tunez's provocation was unjust, the language of the two co-founders seemed to be much milder and did not further escalate the conflict.
Keone Hon first denied AC's criticisms of Monad points 2-4 and emphasized that such rumors are all incorrect. At the same time, Keone Hon praised Sonic's continued efforts to trace the funds and AC's contributions to the industry, and finally wished AC and Sonic the best for their future development.

James Hunsaker's response was more detailed:
· The parallel EVM is actually running well, but introducing a high-performance, low-latency asynchronous database would yield better results;
· Monad has never seen Avalanche's code, let alone forked it—Monad and Avalanche are not even written in the same programming language;
· Monad will launch a cross-chain bridge when its mainnet goes live;
· Only a small portion of the funds raised by Monad has been temporarily utilized.

In conclusion, after Monad took a more moderate approach to mitigate the conflict, the verbal battle between the two parties has temporarily ceased.
The market is bleak, and market information is hindered. We are eager to see new projects compete in terms of technical paths, application types, adoption patterns, and more, but clearly not in this manner. As the two most highly anticipated Layer 1 representative projects in the current community, Sonic and Monad should seemingly set an example.
You may also like

I tested with $10,000: zero wear and tear, annualized 8%, and can earn points (with complete tutorial + screenshots)

Blockchain Capital Partner: The structure of on-chain dual-layer capital is still in the early stages of value discovery

Secured over $60 million in funding from Dragonfly, Sequoia, and others, learn about the on-chain derivatives protocol Variational | CryptoSeed

The financial changes under the new SEC regulations: Opportunities and regulatory red lines behind "tokenized stocks"
Cheers, Charts & AI: A Recap of WEEX Labs' Openguin Party Energy at ETHMilan 26

SpaceX officially submitted its prospectus, unveiling the largest IPO in history

Insiders: DeepSeek is forming a Harness team to compete with Claude Code

Morning Report | SpaceX reveals it holds approximately $1.45 billion in Bitcoin; Nvidia's Q1 financial report shows revenue of $81.6 billion; Manus plans to raise $1 billion for buyback business

IOSG Founder: Please tell Vitalik the truth, let the OGs who have enjoyed the industry's dividends enlighten the young people

Morning Report | Deloitte acquires crypto infrastructure company Blocknative; stablecoin company Checker completes $8 million financing; a16z may have become the largest external institutional holder of HYPE

Interpretation of xBubble SOP: Packaging Vibe Coding for non-technical users

From Followers to Price Setters: The Role of the Crypto Market is Reversing

a16z invested $356 million to aggressively acquire HYPE, surpassing Paradigm to become the largest external holding institution

Google officially declares war

Coinbase stuffed USDC into Hyperliquid; who made money from this transaction?

It is Bankless that needs Ethereum, not Ethereum that needs Bankless

