Foundry NYC 2.2: Why Speed, Not Hype, Decides the Future of Monad's EVM Ecosystem

The Real Metric That Matters

I’ve spent five years building quantitative models for crypto markets. At Foundry NYC 2.2, I expected keynote fluff—what I got was something far more valuable: silence.

Not from VCs screaming about ‘the next paradigm,’ but from founders quietly iterating on Slack at 3 AM after closing keynote sessions.

One founder told me: ‘Don’t ask what your six-month plan is. Ask what you built this week.’ That’s the only metric that survives.

MVP Is Your First Principle

Think of building a car? Start with a skateboard.

The team behind LootGO didn’t ship NFT minting or AI-driven analytics—they shipped a CLI tool that let users verify one core action in under four hours.

No white papers. No investor decks. Just feedback loops → iteration → expansion. This is how you build infrastructure, not hype.

Speed > Vision

The most dangerous delusion in Web3? Believing vision drives adoption. It doesn’t. Speed does. Monad Testnet-2 now runs 161 nodes across 33 countries—not because we dreamed it, but because teams shipped patches before breakfast. Your roadmap is irrelevant if your MVP can’t evolve in days—not months.

Breaking Out Isn’t About Audience—It’s About Architecture

We don’t break out by chasing mainstream attention—we break out by making systems so usable they attract it passively. When your product becomes the substrate for other projects’ growth… you’re no longer selling to crypto circles—you’re enabling Web3 itself. This isn’t marketing—it’s plumbing. And plumbing doesn’t trend. It endures.

The Quiet Confidence of Builders

I speak to founders who don’t tweet about ‘disruptive innovation.’ They speak to me about failed iterations—about rejected features—about users who said ‘this doesn’t work.’ That’s not failure—that’s calibration. The best teams aren’t loud—they’re precise. Their confidence isn’t performative—it’s derived from data, done at dawn, after last night’s session, on an empty conference floor.