Monad hires former FalconX, BVNK and Optimism executives

The Monad Foundation has hired three senior executives from Optimism, FalconX and BVNK as it expands its focus on institutional adoption following its November mainnet launch.

Urvit Goel joins as vice president of go-to-market from the Optimism Foundation, Joanita Titan becomes head of institutional growth after leading custody and staking at FalconX, and Sagar Sarbhai joins as head of institutions for Asia-Pacific, most recently at BVNK.

The three executives previously held roles at JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Anchorage Digital, Fireblocks and Amazon, bringing backgrounds in traditional finance and institutional crypto infrastructure.

According to an announcement shared with Cointelegraph, the new hires are expected to focus on capital markets strategy, brand building and institutional adoption across Asia-Pacific jurisdictions including Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and South Korea.

Monad launched its public mainnet in November along with a token sale on Coinbase. Since launch, the network has reached about $450 million in stablecoin market capitalization and more than $200 million in total value locked across decentralized finance protocols, according to the foundation.

Source: Monad

The network says it can process up to 10,000 transactions per second with sub-second finality while remaining compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. The foundation said the design targets use cases such as high-frequency trading and payments.

In 2024, Monad Labs, the development company behind the network, raised $225 million in a funding round led by Paradigm. The Monad Foundation now oversees ecosystem growth following mainnet launch.

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Recent layer-1 launches see steep token declines

While 2021–2023 saw a surge of layer-1 blockchain launches, including Avalanche (AVAX), Near (NEAR), Aptos (APT), Sui (SUI) and others, the pace of new mainnets has slowed over the past year. Even so, Monad is not the only layer-1 blockchain to enter the space recently.

In late 2024, ZetaChain launched its mainnet with a focus on connecting multiple crypto networks without bridges or wrapped assets, and in February 2025, the Berachain Foundation went live with its EVM-compatible layer-1, distributing nearly 80 million $BERA tokens to eligible users in an airdrop valued at about $632 million.

In February 2026, decentralized exchange Aster announced its layer-1 testnet had gone live for public users, with a mainnet launch targeted for the first quarter. The roadmap outlines plans for fiat on-ramps, open-source code releases and broader ecosystem development throughout 2026.

But not all investors are convinced the latest wave of layer-1 blockchains will endure. In November, crypto investor Arthur Hayes said most new L1 networks are likely to fail, predicting that only a small group, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Solana (SOL) and Zcash (ZEC), will remain relevant over the long term.

Recent token performance underscores the challenges facing new chains.

According to CoinMarketCap data, ZetaChain’s (ZETA) native token is down about 98% from its all-time high, while Berachain ($BERA) has fallen about 95%. Monad’s token (MON) is trading around 52% below its peak, at the time of writing.

Source: CoinMarketCap

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