By Keone Hon, Co-Founder, Monad
Public, or private? Open, or cloistered? Shared, or kept? This dichotomy is as old as human history, even more so since when the internet began connecting the world. Today, this topic is the central debate in the world of blockchain. Will the network effects end up primarily on open, public networks, or will they mostly be on corporate chains, i.e. permissioned networks controlled by a single company?
This debate will be settled by user and builder adoption, but I can make a strong prediction now. Open networks will win. Open networks, where every builder may compete on a level playing field, are the best environment for the most ambitious builders.
Like how the internet was more powerful than the walled gardens of CompuServe or AOL, like how Wikipedia delivered a more useful product than Encarta, open networks are where the innovation that drives the space forward will happen. Blockchain growth is a network effect business, and open networks are best poised to cultivate real network effects.
The recent rise of corporate chains
Earlier this month, SWIFT announced that its blockchain-based ledger is ready for use. The Clearing House, owned by JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citi, and Wells Fargo, is building a competing tokenized deposit network of its own. Stripe has its own blockchain, as does Robinhood. So do a growing list of payment companies racing to put “blockchain” in the same sentence as their name.
It’s great that there is renewed interest among fintechs, banks, and payment companies in realizing the benefits of blockchain: fast settlement, flexible money movement, DeFi, and general coordination.
But reality is also starting to set in. Most traditional companies don’t want to run their own blockchain – it’s a lot of work to support a whole ecosystem, and they still have their existing business to run. At the same time, they also don’t want to utilize a network run by their competitor.
The problem with corporate chains is that there is an anchor tenant who is incentivized to favor themselves when it matters.
I spent ten years building trading systems in high-frequency trading. What was clear then is still clear now – traditional finance is not a level playing field. Proximity to data, access to bespoke opportunities, and relationships affect the outcomes. Crypto’s founding claim was that this doesn’t have to be true, and that anyone can get access to the same assets and opportunities. Corporate chains are rebuilding traditional finance, but the real value comes from the growth of the open financial system. That will only happen on an open network.
The fork ahead
The defining debate of the next few years for the crypto industry is whether the financial internet settles on public, neutral blockspace, or on chains owned and operated by corporations.
Each bank and payment-company chain is individually reasonable as they each solve real problems for themselves as builders. But collectively, they quietly recreate the intermediary that crypto was supposed to route around. Infrastructure that a single institution owns and operates means that institution decides who gets access, whose transactions clear first, and what the rules are tomorrow. That’s not just a technical detail, it’s the whole ballgame.
Settlement layers are sticky. Whatever the world’s assets converge on will be as hard to dislodge as SWIFT’s messaging network has been for fifty years. If that convergence happens on captive infrastructure, the industry will have spent a decade rebuilding the old system with better databases, but no new vision for the future.
Traditional finance already learned this lesson, twice. When a single American bank’s proprietary messaging protocol threatened to become the de facto standard for international payments in the early 1970s, competing banks didn’t build their own rival protocols. They formed SWIFT: a shared, neutral cooperative that replaced bilateral links entirely, and which every serious bank in the world still runs on today. A few years later, the U.S. securities industry made a similar call on clearing and settlement, consolidating a mess of proprietary, error-prone processes into what became the DTCC, a single shared utility that now settles nearly every trade in the market. Both times, the industry converged on neutral infrastructure not out of idealism but because competing proprietary rails didn’t scale and nobody wanted to settle on a rival’s terms. It’s a strange moment to watch it happen again, one proprietary chain at a time, with some of the very institutions that once made this same trade-off now on the other side of it.
The part crypto still has to earn
To be fair to those launching corporate chains right now, crypto hasn’t exactly made the neutral case easy to trust. A market where frontrunning is routine isn’t open in the way that matters, even if they market other permissionless aspects. On Ethereum today, a single block builder constructs roughly half of all blocks and the top three build about 80% of them. That’s not decentralization, it’s a private auction with extra steps, and it’s a legitimate reason institutions have looked at public blockchains and decided to build their own instead.
That problem is solvable. Chains can be built so that transaction ordering is fixed before anyone, including the operator, can see what’s inside it. Nothing to see means nothing to extract, and nothing to extract means no auction for block production to consolidate around. Fairness becomes a property of the system rather than a promise from whoever runs it. When that’s true, “neutral” stops being a slogan and becomes something institutions can actually underwrite.
If you believe in open markets, the belief has to show up at every layer, including the ones that constrain you. The principle also has to hold at the deepest layer: the protocol itself.
This is Monad’s mission. Open access to financial markets on neutral ground is the north star, and we intend to be held to it in public. This carries real moral weight — few technologies get the chance to deliver something this consequential.
What would make this credible?
If public blockspace wants to accommodate the needs of institutions – and it should – then the case has to be made on their terms. Open source is a requirement so the rulebook is verifiable and not simply trusted on reputation alone. Blockchain data must remain open, so throughput, adoption, and reliability are legible to anyone doing due diligence.. If we end up in a world where favored partners get quiet advantages over everyone else building on the same rails, then we have created no meaningful advancement in the financial system.
The irony is that the strongest argument for open infrastructure isn’t idealism, but rather the same logic that’s currently pushing banks toward proprietary chains, headlined by control, reliability, and trust. Public blockspace can offer all three without the lock-in. Someone has to make that case loudly while SWIFT’s pilot banks and the Clearing House consortium are still deciding what “standard” means for the next fifty years. Because once it’s decided, it won’t be revisited.
The north star of open networks
Crypto’s founding promise was open access to a fair and public financial system. Open networks of significance have made gradual progress toward this goal. The first open network to get traction – Bitcoin – offered a medium of payments and a store of value, but halted at supporting stablecoins or real-world-assets (RWAs). The second major open network, Ethereum expanded on that promise by enabling smart contracts, stablecoins, and RWAs, while facing limitations in scale, throughput, and trade execution fairness. The next open network will be the one that solves trade execution fairness and throughput, enabling global markets to actually move on chain.
Keone Hon is a co-founder of Monad and general manager at Monad Foundation, best known for developing Monad, a high-performance, parallelized Layer-1 blockchain compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
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