Aptos and Monad’s plagiarism battle: The game between innovation boundaries and open source ecology

Author: Luke, Mars Finance

In February 2025, a fierce debate broke out in the blockchain field over technological originality and open source ethics. Alexander Spiegelman, director of Aptos research, publicly accused Monad of plagiarizing its core technology, especially the BlockSTM dynamic parallel execution framework, and believed that Monad did not fully recognize Aptos' open source contribution during its development process. He pointed out that Aptos' technology (such as pipeline design, decoupled execution architecture) has been published through several peer-reviewed papers, and Monad's BlockSTM is "highly similar to AptosBFT", and even suggests that Monad "spends a lot of time in reverse engineering rather than original development." .

In response, Monad co-founder James Hunsaker strongly responded, saying that the underlying logic of BlockSTM originated from software transaction memory (STM) and the optimistic concurrency control (OCC) theory proposed in 1979, and emphasized that he had studied related technologies in the Haskell environment. Aptos code has never been referenced. He sarcastically said, "I wouldn't even think of this project if Aptos hadn't caused the dispute."

Technical comparison: BlockSTM vs. AptosBFT

The core differences between BlockSTM and AptosBFT can be analyzed from three aspects: design philosophy, technical traceability and performance indicators:

Design philosophy——AptosBFT is optimized based on HotStuff consensus algorithm, emphasizing the efficiency of dynamic parallel execution and state synchronization, and improving throughput through pipelined processing. BlockSTM adopts an optimistic parallel execution strategy, processes concurrently before transaction verification, and relies on superscalar pipeline technology to reduce hardware dependence, with the goal of achieving single-slot endpoint.

Technology traceability - Aptos argues that its technology originates from a deep transformation of the Move language and Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) mechanism; while Monad emphasizes that BlockSTM is an extension of traditional STM theory on the EVM-compatible chain and has no direct connection with Aptos.

Performance indicators - Aptos' current TPS is about 15,000, and Monad claims to reach 100,000, but neither of them fully discloses stress test data, and actual performance still needs to be verified.

Community Response: Schizophrenia and Reason

The controversy has triggered polarization in the blockchain community. The Aptos-enabled party believes that Monad's EVM compatibility solution has a "design coincidence" with Aptos' Move virtual machines, calling for stricter open source citation specifications. At the same time, Monad's supporters pointed out through testnet data that Monad's asynchronous I/O and state database optimization are significantly different from Aptos, questioning the originality of Aptos technology. Elena Stark, a researcher at the neutral school, wrote that the similarity between BlockSTM and AptosBFT reflects the convergence of industry technologies, calling for the open source ecosystem to focus more on collaboration rather than opposition.

Monad Project Progress: Ambition and Challenge Coexist

Despite the controversy, Monad's technical route and ecological construction are still steadily advancing. In the fourth quarter of 2024, Monad launched MonadDB, a custom database based on Patricia Trie, which improves state storage compression efficiency by 40%. In addition, Monad has implemented single-second block confirmation on the test network, and the hardware threshold for verification nodes is lowered to 16-core CPU + 64GB of memory, attracting participation from small and medium-sized mining pools.

In terms of ecological expansion, the Monad Foundation's ecological fund size has reached US$200 million, focusing on supporting DeFi and game applications. In January 2025, derivatives agreements NovaX and Chain Game MetaCivic announced the migration to Monad. At the same time, Monad's developer tool chain Monad SDK downloads exceeded 500,000, which are compatible with Hardhat and Truffle frameworks, reducing the cost of Ethereum developers' migration.

Industry Impact: Paradigm Reflection on Open Source Ecosystem

This controversy exposed three deep problems in the blockchain industry:

• Intellectual property definition of open source agreements: Does code disclosure mean that technical ideas can be copied freely? Spiegelman's allegation is essentially a battle for "technical influence attribution", while Hunsaker's rebuttal highlights the blurred boundary between academic theory and engineering practice.
• Sustainability of performance competition: Aptos and Monad both use high TPS as their selling point, but the market is more concerned with the maturity of the ecosystem than simply performance indicators. Aptos' developer growth rate in 2024 was 96%, while Monad's ecological applications were less than 100, reflecting this.
• Transparency in community governance: The Monad Foundation’s power is concentrated on the founding team, which has raised questions about “decentralization”; while Aptos adopts DAO governance, key decisions are still dominated by core developers.

Future Outlook: Competition or Symbiosis?

In the short term, the controversy may exacerbate the confrontation between Aptos and Monad. Aptos may consolidate its barriers by patenting some of the technologies, but this may affect its open source image; while Monad needs to accelerate ecological construction to prove its innovative capabilities. If the performance promise fails to deliver on, Monad could face a Core DAO-like dilemma.

In the long run, Aptos and Monad may move towards differentiation. Aptos will deepen its Move ecosystem and expand financial and compliance scenarios (such as cross-border settlement cooperation with Visa); while Monad will attract Ethereum developers with EVM compatibility and focus on high-performance demand areas such as high-frequency trading and gaming.

This controversy will eventually become a footnote to the evolution of blockchain technology, but the discussion on open source ethics it triggers will promote the industry to form a clearer technical traceability standard and collaboration framework. As Hunsaker said, "Code can be copied, but the ecosystem cannot be copied."