Anyone else notice how much faster blockchains have gotten lately?

I have been in DeFi long enough to remember when transactions felt painfully slow and expensive. Recently, I have been reading about Monad, and it caught my eye because it’s aiming to make Ethereum level compatibility actually fast and scalable.

Monad is a high-performance, EVM-compatible Layer-1 that supports easy migration for Ethereum-based dApps. It reportedly achieves 10,000 TPS, with 400ms block times and 800ms finality, far faster than many current chains.

The $MON token is used for transaction fees, staking, and governance. While waiting for the mainnet launch and official airdrop, there is already pre-market activity on Bitget, which has been interesting to watch for early momentum signals.

Of course, there are risks, Monad is still new, and $MON’s utility is untested until the network goes live.

Curious what others think, can high throughput Layer-1s like Monad genuinely improve DeFi, or is it just another performance race?