Interview - Joanita Titan

“Monad can handle the Black Friday peak of transactions and beyond”

We met with Joanita Titan in Hong Kong, as part of Consensus, the conference dedicated to digital assets. Based in New York City, this former Vice President at JP Morgan Private Bank now leads institutional growth for Monad, an emerging layer 1 blockchain that was in the works for years, with the goal of enabling a smart contract platform, such as Ethereum, to execute at the speed required by real-world transaction volumes. Co-founded by Keone Hon, Eunice Giarta and James Hunsaker, this network, which raised over $240M from venture capital, also completed the first-ever token sale hosted by Coinbase, raising an additional $269M from retail participants in late 2025.

At the time this interview was recorded, Monad's mainnet had just launched. While the price action of its native token (MON) has been affected, like almost every other digital asset, during a rough 2026, the activity on its network has kept increasing, as demonstrated by the $720M of value circulating across its applications as of August 2026, a 720% increase since the start of the year.

With its focus on institutions, Monad might be one of the few able to disrupt a sector populated by defunct networks and dominated by a handful of blockchains. Only time will tell, but it was important to The Node to discuss the potential of this new network.

The Node: What brought you personally to digital assets?

Joanita Titan: I learned about Bitcoin in 2012, and at the time it was very interesting. I grew up in emerging countries, so I've experienced firsthand what hyperinflation can do to households and individuals, the real impact of it. The idea of Bitcoin was fascinating. I remember thinking, well, money is a social construct. It has value because we collectively agree that it has value.

I kept track of its development, and in 2017 and 2018 I had the opportunity to take a deeper look. It was still going through waves of ups and downs, but it was reaching a more stable stage, with a lot more acceptance. In 2020 I had the chance to jump from the TradFi world into crypto, and I took it. I'm now head of institutional growth at the Monad Foundation. Before that I was at FalconX, one of the largest digital asset trading firms, building their custody and staking business, and before that at Anchorage Digital, building out the Asia business. So this is a little bit like coming home, in Hong Kong.

How would you describe Monad?

Monad is a layer 1, high throughput, low cost blockchain. It's very much like Solana, very fast and very low cost, but built on EVM, the dominant coding language. That unlocks a lot of the aspirational use cases we've talked about for years in blockchain. One of the things that attracted me to Monad as a project is the three co-founders, Keone Hon, Eunice Giarta and James Hunsaker, who came from very strong finance backgrounds. Keone and James met at Jump Trading and led teams there. It's a very strong caliber of founding team, and I was drawn to that.

Public blockchains have historically been used more by retail. Would you say Monad's purpose is first about institutions and big players?

The way Monad is high throughput and low cost, it lends itself really well to high frequency finance, to the trading of high velocity assets like equities, fixed income and commodities, but also to payments and stablecoins. Payments is a very clear use case with product market fit for blockchain. In the US, the highest transaction volume is on Black Friday, where peaks can reach 3,000 transactions per second. Put that on Ethereum, which processes about 12 transactions per second, and it breaks: congestion, gas fees skyrocket. Put it on Solana, which handles around 2,000 transactions per second, and it still breaks, because it's 3,000. Put it on Monad, and not only can we support Black Friday and its daily peak, we still have significant block space for the rest of the ecosystem, DeFi, prediction markets, gaming. We've been very focused on institutional use cases, from payments and stablecoins to the trading of financial assets on chain.

Attracting liquidity to a layer 1 is always a challenge, and there's a lot of competition. How will you attract players and liquidity to Monad?

The fragmentation of liquidity is real, and the most liquid chain is obviously Ethereum. This is where being EVM compatible has been crucial for Monad. It's also why the founders concluded there should be a high throughput chain that is EVM compatible. That way there's no vendor lock-in. There is so much liquidity already in Ethereum that an EVM compatible chain helps unlock it, and the ease of transfer is that much greater.

Monad has faced criticism over its tokenomics and for being funded by a lot of VCs. How do you respond, and do you think it's fair?

When you build anything, there's always some criticism. Here's how I think about it. Keone, James and Eunice founded Monad and built it from scratch, and that's not an easy feat. The team took three years, code by code, line by line. Category Labs is now the independent organization responsible for maintaining and developing Monad, and its engineers are the masters of that universe. They know exactly how it's built, and that requires resources.

There was a lot of interest from the VC community in the Monad fundraiser because they saw the caliber of the founders. But look at the mainnet launch in November: we were the first token to have a public token sale on Coinbase, and it was Coinbase's first ever token sale. Why? Because we wanted retail to have access, and the entry point was lower than for the VC investors. The sale was oversubscribed and reached over 85,000 individual investors in more than 70 countries. It's one of the most successful public token sales ever. There's always criticism, especially on crypto Twitter, but when you look at the reach of Monad, we really tried to be thoughtful about distribution, giving retail and investors a good entry and making sure it was widely distributed.

What should we expect from the Monad ecosystem in the coming months and years?

From an ecosystem perspective, we're very focused on growing DeFi, and there's a lot of development in prediction markets and AI. Given Monad's speed and low cost, it lends itself well to AI use cases and agentic payments. Within institutions, we're focused on payments and stablecoins, and on RWA and tokenisation. Monad lends itself very well to high velocity assets and the trading, lending and borrowing of those assets. We're really excited to keep growing.

Tokenisation is a big theme right now, especially for commodities and real world assets. How is Monad addressing that?

We see a lot of it. Many issuers have expressed interest in bringing their assets on chain. The challenge today isn't a lack of interest from issuers, it's how to solve for the utility and distribution of these assets. Within Monad, we take a proactive approach: bringing together allocators interested in these assets, unlocking utility in the borrow-lend market, and helping issuers solve distribution in markets they can't reach today in traditional finance. Doing that with them as a design partner, rather than building in a vacuum, has really resonated with a number of institutions. What is ultimately helpful to users on Monad is having a place where they can trade, generate yield and invest in the assets within the ecosystem.

Thank you, Joanita.

Thank you so much for having me.