Keone Hon: Bridging DeFi and TradFi

In 2020, while leading high-frequency trading at Jump Trading, Keone Hon ventured into crypto following the COVID crash. His investing deepened at Jump Crypto in 2021, where he led blockchain research and Solana DeFi development.

This experience of combining institutional trading expertise with high-performance blockchain development led Hon to spot a market gap — the need for trading infrastructure that could match traditional finance's efficiency, while staying within Ethereum's developer ecosystem. In early 2022, during the crypto winter, Hon left Jump to co-found Monad Labs.

That vision attracted $225 million in funding in 2024 — one of the year's largest crypto raises. Monad's technical specs tell the story: while Ethereum processes 15 transactions per second (TPS) with $10 to $50 fees, and Solana handles 2,600 TPS with sub-cent fees, Monad is aiming to execute 10,000 TPS at just $0.001 per transaction. Currently, DeFi's daily trading volume remains in the billions, a fraction of traditional finance's trillion-dollar daily volume.

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Why Ethereum?

The blockchains’s MonadBFT consensus mechanism aims to achieve these gains in efficiency and cost through pipelined consensus and parallel execution, while maintaining EVM compatibility. "We chose to build on Ethereum because almost all developers are building for the EVM," Hon said in an interview with CoinDesk. "By making the EVM a lot more performant, we're giving developers the best of both worlds."

This addresses a critical limitation of DeFi: "In traditional finance, the typical costs of execution are single digit basis points... whereas in DeFi right now, people are very used to paying 30 basis points or 50 basis points or 1%,” Hon notes.

As 2025 approaches, Monad's focus on institutional-grade infrastructure and fully on-chain order books suggests a shift from crypto's speculative era toward rebuilding traditional finance's core systems. With mainnet launch planned for early 2025, the crypto world will be watching to see if Hon's Wall Street-meets-Web3 experiment can help bridge the gap between DeFi and traditional finance.

“A fully on-chain order book can do what traditional finance does, but with a fraction of the cost and greater transparency,” says Hon. “That’s the future.”

This profile is part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year's nominees, click here.