Monad: The Home For Builders

Choosing a new blockchain to build on top of is a very difficult decision for builders and involves more than choosing the right technology. It requires understanding what support exists, what programs are available, and the traits of the existing ecosystem.

Below is an overview of the programs and activations available to builders in the Monad ecosystem, whether you are new to the ecosystem or already deployed.

Nitro

Nitro is Monad Foundation's accelerator program, a resource for teams that are actively building and making progress on their applications. Each cohort runs for three months, with $500K deployed per selected team on day one across fifteen different teams.

Admission requires publishing four consecutive public weekly ship logs before an interview is granted. Teams that advance spend one month in-person in NYC, two months remote with weekly KPI check-ins, and close with a demo day in front of 300+ investors.

Backers include Paradigm, Electric Capital, Dragonfly, and Castle Island. Mentors include operators and founders from Nansen, OpenSea, Pendle, Sky Mavis, Virtuals, Delphi Digital, and others.

Nitro teams also receive a substantial stack of infrastructure credits: up to $100K from GCP, $10K from Alchemy with VIP support and co-marketing, $12K from QuickNode with priority support and office hours, $2,400 from Vercel, and onboarding support from Mercury including VC introductions. For early-stage teams, this materially reduces the operational cost of building, enabling builders to focus on the product features that really move the needle.

Nitro is open to founders building on any chain. Applications for the first cohort close on March 14, 2026. The first cohort then kicks off in early April in NYC.

Blitz

Blitz is a series of one-day IRL hackathons held in developer hubs around the world, designed for developers who want to get hands-on with Monad in a focused, high-energy environment.

The day begins with workshops on Monad's architecture and developer tools, followed by a build sprint where participants work solo or in small teams to build and deploy a working prototype of something (i.e. a consumer app) on testnet. The event closes with demos in front of the room, with cash prizes for top performers decided by live audience vote. The Monad Foundation team is present alongside other builders in the industry, giving participants direct access to real-time feedback and the opportunity to build relationships across the ecosystem.

Denver was the 30th Blitz hosted in the past nine months. Events have spanned Bangalore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Shenzhen, Seoul, Hangzhou, Beijing, Chengdu, Shanghai, San Francisco, and more. Across all of them, Blitz has brought approximately 1700 unique developers into the Monad ecosystem, with 688 attendees and 282 projects deployed across nine events in 2026 alone.

Hackathons

The Monad Foundation and other organizations also run focused hackathons tailored to specific business verticals, structured with fixed timelines, submission requirements, judging criteria, and backed by established names in the industry. The goal is to enable teams to ship working products and surface high-signal teams that go on to build within the ecosystem. Across all hackathons in 2026, over 742 projects have been deployed, 413 of which were agentic, and more than 2,550 participants have taken part, with $292K in total prizes awarded.

For example, Moltiverse was a two-week hackathon co-hosted by Nad.fun with $200K in prizes centered on AI agents and the infrastructure required to support them at scale. Builders were tasked with creating autonomous agents capable of executing transactions on Monad, with focuses spanning world model agents, agent-to-agent commerce, gaming and wagering, robotics and hardware, and open experimentation. Two tracks ran in parallel, one requiring a token launch on nad.fun and one focused purely on shipping agents on Monad, making the event accessible to both crypto-native developers and AI developers from outside the ecosystem. Over 400 projects entered, with 312 deployed on Monad. Supporters included Paradigm, Dragonfly, Circle, and the Ethereum Foundation.

Additionally, the Rebel in Paradise AI Hackathon was a six-week event combining an online competition with two IRL hacker camps in Beijing and Shenzhen, each hosting around 100 participants. There were four dedicated tracks: agent-native payments and infrastructure, consumer-facing agent applications, crypto-native AI products and markets, and agent-powered gaming platforms. Prize structures included non-cash awards such as GPUs, hardware, and lab visits alongside cash prizes. In total, 101 projects were deployed and the event drew 745 participants across its online and IRL components.

Foundry

Teams that are further along their product journey also require support and resources. For teams that already have a product in market, Foundry is designed to accelerate progress and momentum. It has been running since mid-2024, built around three core pillars: Access, Relationships, and Momentum.

The program is typically one to two weeks in person in New York with a cohort of builders at a similar stage. Past editions have brought together around 40 teams, with roughly 30 mentors, VCs, and subject matter experts providing consistent guidance throughout the week.

Sessions include technical deep-dives on security and AI tooling with direct access to the Category Labs team, GTM and brand-building with experts from outside crypto, and off-the-record founder conversations with experienced operators in New York. Cohorts of 6-8 founders meet regularly throughout the program to share progress and exchange direct feedback. Office hours with specialists in UI/UX, community building, and growth are also available. The Monad Foundation team co-works alongside founders for the duration of the program.

Every founder is expected to leave with a shipped feature, at least three VC introductions, and five or more substantive founder relationships. The next cohort, Foundry NYC 3.3, runs March 16-27, 2026 in NYC.

Monad Madness

Monad Madness is a pitch competition where a select number of venture-ready teams present in front of a panel of judges and investors. Teams go through pitch preparation workshops in the days prior, and a VC networking event runs alongside the competition so investor access extends beyond the demo itself.

Monad Madness has been held across NYC, Seoul, Bangkok, and Hong Kong, with prize pools equating to $260K. The Hong Kong edition held in April, 2025 featured 15 projects, a separate VC dinner, and Mandarin-language pitches.

The Bigger Picture

Nitro, Blitz, hackathons, Foundry, and Monad Madness are not isolated programs. Together they represent a curated support system that covers every stage of the builder journey, from a developer's first day in the ecosystem to a funded, scaling company. The range of the programs and support available to builders from every region of the world showcase why Monad is the home for builders.

About Monad

Monad is a high-performance, EVM-compatible Layer-1 blockchain designed for high-frequency finance. It delivers up to 10,000 transactions per second, sub-second finality, and low transaction fees. Its architecture enables more efficient payment flows and other transaction-intensive financial use cases by reducing latency and improving throughput while maintaining compatibility with established Ethereum standards. Monad is operated by a decentralized, globally distributed validator network and provides secure, scalable infrastructure for onchain financial activity at scale.