Category Labs

Category Labs (formerly known as Monad Labs) is a team of systems engineers and researchers on a mission to design and build at the frontier of decentralized technology. We strive to design and build step-function improvements over existing blockchain solutions. Such greenfield systems include from-scratch databases, Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus mechanisms, JIT compilers for EVM bytecode, and much more. We recently raised $225M in series A funding, and are backed by Paradigm, Electric Capital, Dragonfly Capital, and others. Category Labs is building the next generation of blockchain infrastructure with Monad, an EVM-compatible layer 1 that dramatically improves performance. Deep optimization is needed across all levels of the stack - from the database layer, to the virtual machine layer, to the consensus and networking layer - in order to streamline EVM transaction processing. We are introducing these low-level optimizations, allowing consumer-grade hardware to deliver exceptional performance while maintaining a high degree of decentralization.