MIP-12 reveals: How did Monad reduce block time to 300 milliseconds?

Monad's MIP-12 upgrade reduced network out-of-block time from 400 milliseconds to 300 milliseconds. The upgrade was officially activated on July 23, 2026 in the 89,758,000 round of blocks and reduced Monad's certainty finality from approximately 800 milliseconds to approximately 600 milliseconds. The change was led by Category Labs, the team that built Monad, and adjusted several other network parameters.

What is MIP-12?

MIP-12 (Monad Improvement Proposal 12) is a governance change that shortens Monad's consensus voting cycle by 100 milliseconds. After Category Labs released the draft, it was reviewed by the community and finally launched through the v0.15.1 client version. The proposal not only shortens the block-out time, but also reduces the reward per block from 25 MON to 18 MON to match the shorter production cycle; and also reduces the block Gas limit from 200 million to 150 million.

How did Monad achieve such a fast block output speed?

Monad's speed stems from the separation of two tasks that most blockchains complete simultaneously: transaction sequence confirmation and transaction execution. On Ethereum, verifiers must execute every transaction completely before voting, leaving only about 100 milliseconds of execution window in the 12-second block time. Monad decomposes them through a parallel pipeline: verifiers first reach consensus on the order through a mechanism called MonadBFT, and then execute transactions within the full block window. MonadBFT is a pipelined Byzantine fault-tolerant protocol with linear message complexity, which means a verifier does not need to communicate with all other verifiers on a regular path. The protocol also protects against tail forks, a flaw in early pipeline designs where malicious leaders could fork preceding blocks. It is this design that allows Monad to shorten the block time while maintaining the same throughput of 500 megabytes of Gas per second. To maintain this rate, the transaction limit per block has been reduced from 5000 to 3750 (calculated as the new limit of 150 million Gas divided by 40,000 Gas), and the Gas limit for a single transaction remains unchanged at 30 million.

What does faster finality mean in practice?

Finality refers to the critical point at which a transaction is irreversible (except in extreme cases). Before the MIP-12 upgrade, Monad needed two rounds of consensus to reach deterministic finalization (approximately 800 milliseconds) and one round to reach speculative finalization (approximately 400 milliseconds). After the upgrade, these two values dropped to approximately 600 milliseconds and 300 milliseconds respectively. For applications such as high-frequency trading or on-chain games, this gap is an optimization that users can perceive.

How does Monad compare with other L1 public chains?

The block-out time alone cannot reflect the whole picture, because each chain has different definitions of finality. However, the following comparisons can show Monad's current positioning: Ethereum (block out in 12 seconds, about 16 minutes final), Solana (block out in 400 milliseconds, target in 200 milliseconds), Base (block out in 2 seconds, about 13 minutes final), Arbitrum (block out in 250 milliseconds), Robinhood Chain (block out in 100 milliseconds), Monad (block out in 300 milliseconds, about 600 milliseconds deterministic finality). While remaining fully compatible with EVM, Monad runs on a set of validators covering more than 30 countries and employing consumer-grade hardware, which distinguishes it from chains that require dedicated infrastructure to achieve similar speeds.

What is the next step for Monad and MON?

MON tokens will fluctuate widely in 2026, and the current trading price is approximately US$0.025 to US$0.029. In late August, after the Monad Foundation announced plans to repurchase up to $60 million worth of locked MON from early investors at a discounted price, the token rose more than 44% in a week, from approximately $0.020 to $0.029. During the same period, the total network locked position value (TVL) climbed, from approximately US$868 million in early August to nearly US$1 billion. Tom Wan, data director at Entropy Advisors, publicly highlighted the 300-millisecond milestone at the time of MIP-12 activation, comparing it to Solana's own progress towards the 200-millisecond block goal. The next scheduled event for MON holders is the token unlocking program on November 24, 2026-an event that is independent of this technology upgrade but may affect the trading environment at that time.

Conclusion

MIP-12 reduced the Monad block time to 300 milliseconds, shortened the deterministic finality to approximately 600 milliseconds, and adjusted the block reward and Gas caps accordingly. This upgrade is based on Monad's existing architecture that separates transaction sequencing and execution through MonadBFT, maintaining a stable throughput of 500 megabytes per second on a distributed set of consumer hardware verifiers.