Issei

Today we are releasing Quantum Cadence, a post-quantum version of Cadence, our consensus protocol with multiple concurrent proposers. Quantum Cadence uses no quorum certificates, and its safety and liveness do not depend on signatures. Most modern consensus protocols, Cadence included, rely heavily on signatures and quorum certificates, which a large-scale quantum computer could forge. Simply replacing today's signatures with post-quantum ones would make certificates too large for every validator to send around in a high-performance blockchain. Quantum Cadence instead draws on Forget-IT, a recent signature-free consensus protocol co-developed by researchers at Category Labs. Quantum Cadence still keeps the overall architecture and core guarantees of Cadence, so our Cadence prototype was easy to carry over: an AI was able to adapt it to Quantum Cadence in a few hours, and an early prototype now runs on an internal test network. We designed Quantum Cadence to be practical for a high-performance blockchain. In our simulations, its latency is similar to Cadence's, and it scales better with the number of proposers. Interactive explainer: category.xyz/quantum-cadence. Full paper: arxiv.org/abs/2610.32803. Joint work by @MohammadMJalal1, @TobiasKlenze, and @komasito55

Risk management at scale PT-AUSD-17DEC2026 on @Aave V3 @Monad is live with dynamic risk parameter updates, enabling a market priced to @Pendle_fi’s implied rates. Powered by LlamaGuard.

ONyc is coming to @Monad through nONYC. Built by @onrefinance, ONyc gives onchain exposure to reinsurance-backed yield, with returns generated from underwriting premiums and collateral rather than crypto-native incentives. Until now, ONyc has been available only on Solana. nONYC packages the asset through Plume Vaults, making it deployable across supported EVM networks and opening access to new sources of capital and liquidity. With more than $225M deployed across Solana DeFi, ONyc has already established itself as a significant RWA onchain. Now, it’s moving beyond its original ecosystem. This is what RWA distribution looks like: taking institutional assets that already exist and making them accessible across the networks where capital is already moving.

MON trading is now live on @IBKR along with support for USDC deposits and withdrawals on the Monad network

One of the fastest growing networks is now live on Nook. You can now access USDC lending on @monad with @aave ✳️ + 🟪

Category Labs is proud to introduce Cadence, our multiple-concurrent-proposers (MCP) consensus protocol that matches the optimal good-case latency of single-leader consensus while supporting arbitrarily short block intervals. When combined with BTX, our design for encrypted mempools, this represents a significant step towards solving the problem of MEV at the protocol level. In nearly every blockchain today, a single party ends up in control of each block: it decides which transactions get in, and can reorder them at will. MCP is the natural fix, but most recent designs pay for it with a separate aggregation phase, adding two extra communication rounds per block. Cadence makes the proposers part of consensus itself. Its fast path finalizes in an optimal three communication rounds, even when proposers are offline. Cadence also offers speculative finality, similar to MonadBFT, after just two rounds, revertible only if a proposer provably equivocated. In a simulation using estimated network delays between Monad mainnet's 200 globally distributed validators, finalization takes 219 ms on average, speculative finality 167 ms. Cadence pushes pipelining to the extreme: each block is proposed and finalized in its own independent consensus instance, without waiting on preceding blocks. The block interval then becomes a protocol parameter that can be arbitrarily small. At our initial target of 100 ms, a transaction waits on average just 50 ms to enter a proposal, and oracle prices, liquidations, and auctions can update every 100 ms. Cadence dynamically throttles the opening of new instances to bound the number of outstanding slots even during periods of network instability. When the network is healthy (under synchrony), a transaction included by an honest proposer can be neither dropped nor deferred (short-term censorship resistance), and no proposer can see the others' proposals in time to react (hiding). We prove both, together with safety and liveness under partial synchrony at the optimal 3f+1 fault bound. The Cadence protocol is modular: each module is simple on its own, and any of them can be swapped out without touching the rest. Cadence also builds on components already being deployed: proposals are disseminated as erasure-coded chunks over Deterministic RaptorCast, now rolling out on Monad, and validators vote on proposal digests, so voting does not wait for the full data to arrive. Start with the interactive tutorial: category.xyz/cadence. Full paper: arxiv.org/abs/2607.02275. Joint work by Kushal Babel, Fatima Elsheimy, Lioba Heimbach, Mohammad Mussadiq Jalalzai, Tobias Klenze, Jovan Komatovic, Jason Milionis, Mike Setrin, and Victor Shoup.

We sat down for the first time with @ethereumJoseph, Founder and CEO of Consensys and Co-Founder of Ethereum, and @KeoneHD, Co-Founder and GM of Monad Foundation. A conversation about where the future of money is headed, AI, and the new @metamask Money Account. Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:46 What Joe thought the internet would do to money 7:00 Why a 16-year-old skips the bank entirely 12:52 Has crypto only helped people already doing fine? 15:47 How AI changed the way they build 19:47 Is traditional finance moving onto crypto, or is crypto redefining it? 22:47 What do TradFi institutions actually want? 26:51 What is the MetaMask Money Account? 29:43 Who is it for? 30:14 What does it take at the chain level? 31:48 Why did MetaMask chose Monad? 33:37 When will stablecoins go mainstream? 38:09 AI agents that move money on their own 43:35 The story that says it all