"Research Director Accuses Monad of Stealing Aptos' Blockchain Tech"

Aptos Research Director Calls Out Monad for Alleged Copying of Key Innovations

Alexander Spiegelman, Director of Research at Aptos, has accused Monad of copying key technologies from Aptos without proper acknowledgment. The allegations surfaced following Monad's testnet launch, with Spiegelman taking to X (formerly Twitter) to express his concerns.

Spiegelman called out Monad for allegedly replicating several key elements of Aptos' execution models and consensus mechanisms. While acknowledging that open-source frameworks allow for shared innovation, he criticized Monad's failure to attribute Aptos' engineering and research efforts properly.

“I really don’t understand why it takes so much time for Monad to copy Aptos tech,” Spiegelman posted.

The core of the dispute revolves around the technical underpinnings of Monad’s blockchain infrastructure. Spiegelman alleged that Monad’s MonadBFT seems to have copied AptosBFT, an upgrade of the Jolteon consensus mechanism.

According to him, Monad supposedly copied the pipelined design from Diem, which later became Aptos.

Spiegelman also compared Solana’s (SOL) static parallel execution with Aptos’ dynamic parallelism via BlockSTM. While Monad altered BlockSTM’s execution, he stressed that the core ideas came from Aptos.

“One day, in 2029, when they finally release their code we will all see,” he stated.

In response, James Hunsaker, co-founder of Monad, refuted the claim and denied any copying.

“I’ve never looked at any Aptos code, in fact I never think about Aptos except when you post nonsense like this,” he said.

He argued that optimistic concurrency control was discovered in 1979. Hunsaker further explained that he worked on software transactional memory (STM) in the Haskell context, which predates Aptos. Furthermore, he noted that BlockSTM is simply a straightforward extension of these earlier concepts.

Lastly, he clarified that Monad properly cites any consensus-related work in its documentation and papers. Nonetheless, Spiegelman doubled down on his claims.

He emphasized that BlockSTM stands as one of the rare software transactional