Aptos accuses Monad of plagiarism, robbing technology or catching traffic?

Author: Ashley , BlockBeats

Perhaps due to the official announcement of HyperEVM, Monad, a competitor in the L1 track, finally couldn't sit still. Just one day after HyperEVM went online, the project led by Paradigm to raise $225 million in April was finally launched on the test network.

However, among the community cheers and various airdrop tutorials, another L1 rival Aptos posted a message directly on social media platform X to plagiarize Aptos technology. So a war of words began.

The beginning of the debate

This battle for technological originality was first opened by Alexander Spiegelman, head of Aptos research, and said: "I don't understand why Monad has to spend so much time copying Aptos' technology. It's all open source and has many peer-reviewed ones. Instead of hiding the paper, it is better to plagiarize it directly. "

It was the big day of Monad, and naturally, James Hunsaker, who was unable to resist someone coming to make a good deal, directly responded in the comment section: "Optimistic Concurrency Control (OCC) was discovered in 1979, when your parents had not met yet. I I've been working on software transactional memory (STM) in a Haskell environment long ago, and you're still wearing diapers. BlockSTM is a simple extension of these things. I've never seen any Aptos code, and in fact if you didn't post these nonsense , I can't even think of Aptos. We will correctly cite anything related to consensus in documents and papers."

Seeing Hunsaker refuse to admit it, Spiegelman once again puts facts and reasons: "There is no need to be wrong with people. We all know how and why Monad was created. BlockSTM is one of the very few, if not the only, STMs to go into production. Before BlockSTM, nothing could really be efficient. With your background, you should know this. Although there are thousands of papers, nothing can really scale. BlockSTM is a breakthrough, and BlockSTM v2 is the future. "After saying that, he did not forget to show off his qualifications: "By the way, I don't know how you are, but when I was a baby, I didn't have diapers."

Seeing that the gunpowder smell became stronger and stronger, Hunsaker skipped the technical problem and replied, "Did you pull it on the ground before?" At this time, Spiegelman was speechless and had no choice but to fight back, "You know the read and write locks and mutex locks." Is it a difference? "Hunsaker opposite this time did not reply again.

Later, Spiegelman joked in the comment section again: "I think we will all know the truth when you finally go online in 2029." He said: "Monad is copying our technology if they can admit it and give it to you." Our hard work in research and engineering is recognized as it deserves, and that may be acceptable."

The frequent occurrence of new public chain plagiarism incidents is "a

special open source culture in the currency circle"?

The plagiarism disputes of new public chains are common in the cryptocurrency field. Sonic's high-performance design has been questioned to imitate Solana's PoH and pipeline architecture; Sui and Aptos's similarity to Diem, Move language and parallel execution have triggered a "brother dispute" ;Aleo's zk-SNARKs are accused of copying zkSync's ZKP framework; Berachain's modular architecture and IBC functions are regarded as "deluxe version fork" by the Cosmos community; and Mantra's RWA tokenization model is believed to be borrowing from Ondo Finance's Successful experience.

The crypto industry advocates the spirit of open source, and most projects will make the code public. In the current crypto market, which fully reflects the sensible saying "time is money", the phenomenon of "fast fish eats slow fish" is common. Open source culture has spawned some projects with direct code Ctrl C+Ctrl V in such an environment. Even in the non-encryption field, early development of the Linux kernel has caused disputes over the ownership of code contributions.

This open source culture greatly lowers the entry threshold for new public chains, allowing new projects to iterate quickly on the shoulders of giants. In the debate between Monad and Aptos, Aptos's BlockSTM open source provides a reference for the industry, and Monad may learn from it. However, Hunsaker argues that its technology is based on earlier OCC and STMs that are derived from the industry’s progress, reflecting the universal logic of the new public chain: open source results are public resources, and reference is taken for granted. Open source culture allows new public chains to launch high-performance solutions in a short period of time, but also makes the problem of original ownership difficult to solve.

The fight is just around the corner when the test network is online, grab

technology or traffic?

The debate took place a little while just in time. Monad Test Network was also a bit subtle. The testnet is an important moment for Monad to attract developers, verify technology and consolidate community trust, and Aptos’ allegations just turn the focus away from Monad’s technology presentation to the confrontation.

As an emerging L1 that has not yet been launched on the main network, Monad has accumulated a lot of community expectations with Paradigm's $225 million investment and the narrative of "Ethereum High Performance Evolution". For this test network, the Monad team also made sufficient preparations. As soon as it was launched, it triggered a set of combos to maintain community attention and favorability. Monad officially announced on social media that it has sent test coins to more than 8.8 million active Ethereum addresses. At the same time, Backpack wallet has been the first to support Monad Test Network, and Wormhole has officially launched Monad Test Network.

For Monad, online testing networks is not only an opportunity for technical verification, but also a key window to attract EVM developers and users. If the promise of 10,000 TPS is fulfilled, Monad will be expected to gain a foothold in the L1 track and may even threaten the market position of high-performance chains such as Aptos. On the X platform, the community's expectations for the test network have pushed up popularity. Some users call it "a project for scientists to pick up money", and a large number of airdrop tutorials are emerging one after another. And this momentum is exactly the narrative capital that Monad needs to protect and amplify.

On the other hand, Aptos, research director Spiegelman, chose to initiate the allegation on the test network on the same day, perhaps due to market competition. Although it is still unclear who is the original technology, Aptos' choice to launch an attack when Monad gains a large wave of traffic this time has obviously achieved results. Aptos' native token APT showed a strong price increase while the community was watching. As of writing, according to market data, APT has increased by 7% in the past 24 hours, hitting US$7 in a short period of time.

Aptos may win more than just the coin price in this wave of operation. In the crypto market, attention is a scarce resource. Since the Coinbase Coin Listing Roadmap added the Aptos network USDC in January , there has been no new news on Aptos this year. This accusation has brought market attention to Aptos' open source contribution and technical authority to a certain extent, and poured cold water on the hot Monad backhand.

Faced with this storm, neither Monad nor Aptos' official accounts have made any statements, and BlockBeats will continue to track the progress of the incident.