Lawsuit against Monad: Aptos Says There is Plagiarism and Technology Theft

Bittime - After the horrendous launch of HyperEVM, Monad which was on the L1 path did not remain silent. Just a day after HyperEVM launched, the project, which managed to raise $225 million in funding in April 2024, led by Paradigm, finally released their testnet.

However, amidst cheers from the community and various airdrop tutorials, another L1 competitor, Aptos, immediately posted on the X social media platform, accusing Monad of plagiarizing the technology developed by Aptos. This sparked a war of words between the two.

The Beginning of the Controversy: Plagiarism Accusations from Aptos

The controversy over the originality of the technology was first started by Aptos' research director, Alexander Spiegelman, who stated: "I don't understand why Monad spent so much time copying Aptos' technology. It's all open source, and there are already plenty of peer-reviewed papers. Rather than keeping it secret, they might as well copy it openly."

On a very important day for Monad, co-founder James Hunsaker couldn't hold back and immediately responded in the comments: "Optimistic Concurrency Control (OCC) was invented in 1979, when your parents hadn't even met. I was researching Software Transactional Memory (STM) in the Haskell environment long before you were out of diapers. BlockSTM is a simple extension of those concepts. I've never seen Aptos code; in fact, if you hadn't published this crap, I wouldn't have even thought about it about Aptos. We properly cite anything related to consensus in our documentation and papers."

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Rising Tensions: Backlash and Mutual Innuendo

Seeing that Hunsaker didn't concede, Spiegelman again stated the facts: "There's no need to attack the person, it's better to attack the problem. We all know how and why Monad was created. BlockSTM is one (if not the only) STM that has been implemented in production. Before BlockSTM, no one could really achieve efficiency. Given your background, you should know this."

As tensions rose, Hunsaker bypassed the technicalities and replied: "Were you on the field before?" At this point, Spiegelman was already speechless and exasperatedly shot back: "Do you know the difference between read-write locks and mutexes?" This time, Hunsaker did not reply.

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Happens Often: Plagiarism in the New World of Public Chains

Plagiarism controversies involving new public chains are not uncommon in the cryptocurrency world. Sonic's high-performance design was questioned because it imitated Solana's PoH and pipelined architecture; Sui and Aptos, who hail from Diem, sparked a "sibling feud" over Move's shared language and parallel execution; zk-SNARKs Aleo accused of imitating zkSync's ZKP framework; Berachain's modular architecture and IBC functionality is considered a "fancy fork" by the Cosmos community; and Mantra's RWA tokenization model is seen as replicating Ondo Finance's successful experience.

Time of Controversy: Competition or Strategic Moment?

The timing of this controversy coincides perfectly with the launch of the Monad testnet. The testnet was a key moment for Monad to attract developers, validate the technology, and strengthen community trust, while the allegations from Aptos shifted the focus from Monad's technology showcase to the confrontation between the two.

As a new L1 that has yet to launch mainnet, Monad has garnered significant community expectations, thanks to $225 million in funding raised last year led by Paradigm and the narrative as a “high-performance evolution of Ethereum.” For this testnet, the Monad team has prepared well, triggering a series of steps to maintain community attention and goodwill after launch.

APT Growth: Controversial Price Increases

On platform This momentum is the right narrative capital for the Monad to protect and magnify. Meanwhile, Aptos research director Spiegelman chose to launch the charge on the same day as the testnet launch, perhaps keeping market competition in mind.

Aptos' move may not only win price increases. In the crypto market, attention is a scarce resource. During the community's observation of the event, Aptos' native token (APT) experienced a significant price increase.

FAQ

What is Aptos accusing Monad of? 

Aptos accused Monad of copying their technology, specifically technology related to Software Transactional Memory (STM) and BlockSTM.

Does Monad admit to the plagiarism accusation? 

No, Monad co-founder James Hunsaker denies the allegations and insists that their technology is based on earlier research and is not related to the Aptos code.

What impact will this controversy have on the market? 

This controversy caused great concern in the crypto community, with the price of the Aptos token (APT) rising after the allegations were made.

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Reference

Chaincatcher, Aptos accuses Monad of plagiarism, stealing technology or riding on traffic?, accessed 23 February 2025.

Author: MF