The company is looking to offer an Ethereum-compatible environment that's faster than the original. Monad Labs, which is looking to develop a faster version of the Ethereum blockchain, said it raised $225 million in a funding round led by Paradigm that will allow it to add staff and spend on bringing the test version of its blockchain into production. The layer-1 blockchain is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) that executes the rules of Ethereum and makes sure submitted transactions and smart contracts follow the rules. More than 96% of the capital invested in decentralized finance (DeFi) is processed by the EVM, Monad said in a post on Substack.