In a space where “ecosystem building” usually means reheated hackathons and limp grant programs, Monad moves like it’s running an HFT algo: no wasted cycles, no throwaway gestures. Every program, every founder touchpoint, every community ritual lands with intention. At the center is Tina, compass locked on a brutal north star: tell founders the truths no one else will.
Her Twitter bio distills it to a blade: “Sharing learnings from my mistakes.” That ethic was forged in places as far apart as a Westpac boardroom and a busy café floor, managing consumer products for millions of Australians one year, memorizing fifteen drink orders the next. The work taught her to read people fast, manage chaos with calm hands, and revere the smallest details. She’s been a founder, too, launching a Wormhole-based startup in 2022–23 that felt, in her words, like “banging my head against a wall.” It left her convinced of one thing: sugarcoating kills startups.
The moment that pulled her deeper into crypto came in 2022, at Wormhole and Jump’s “XHack” in Chicago. It was her first big event outside Australia, and the first time she felt she had found her people. Among them were Eunice, Keone, and Ashish, part of the founding team of Monad. At the time, launching a new EVM Layer 1 was borderline heretical. But these were people who had quit high-frequency trading jobs to do something absurdly hard: rebuild Ethereum from scratch.
“I realized they weren’t just cloning tech,” she says. “They were building something net-new.” Monad’s technical core solves the blockchain trilemma without the usual sacrifice, keeping decentralization, performance, and EVM compatibility intact. This is not marketing fluff: MonadBFT fixes a long-standing vulnerability in pipelined BFT consensus called tail-forking, and Raptorcast chunks massive blocks so they move across the network at speed, even at scale. Both are brand-new innovations, now open sourced as part of Monad’s consensus client.
If the tech is the foundation, Tina’s ecosystem design is the scaffolding. Her role, she says, is “building an economy where founders have the best chance to succeed.” That means finding “founders who relentlessly ship” and holding them accountable to weekly public progress updates. Feedback is candid, sometimes uncomfortable, always direct, because iteration is the only path to survival.
The programs started small: Mach, an online accelerator; Jumpstart, an invite-only three-day sprint; and the first Foundry, which tested how global the Monad pull could be. Each experiment refined what founders needed most and what investors wanted to see. That iterative loop eventually produced the headline numbers: Founder Residency bringing in 150+ investors, and Foundry scaling to 44 teams across 12 countries.
It also created something rarer: a founder community that is both supportive and gritty. “One of my favorite things is seeing founders give each other tough feedback and then celebrate wins together,” Tina says. Ten percent of the Monad Foundation team are ex-founders, creating a level of empathy most ecosystems lack. Two dedicated Echo Groups, Cambria and Plums, keep early-stage founders in close orbit with angels, VCs, and active community members.
The culture is anchored in places like The Studio in NYC, a co-building hub where Narrative, the first perpetual information market, recently launched its beta. “Co-building is important, it takes me back to that Chicago event where it all started,” Tina says.
The payoff is visible: early-stage teams in the Monad ecosystem have raised over $70 million for projects that cannot function on slower, higher-latency chains, such as onchain central limit orderbooks like Crystal, Drake, Kuru, and Perpl, where low fees and zero front-running are not luxuries but survival traits.
Looking ahead, Tina has her eyes on what she calls, "dopamine markets," where social interaction, content and financial markets collide. Attention spans have gotten shorter. Zoomers want social and financial experiences that are fun, fast and make them money. “This will be the next meta in crypto,” she predicts, pointing to apps like Kizzy (betting on influencers) and LEVR.Bet (leveraged sports betting, fresh off funding from BCAP and Maven11). Performance here is not a nice-to-have, it is the difference between viable and dead-on-arrival.
From memorizing fifteen drink orders to making data-driven product calls for millions of banking customers, Tina’s career has been a masterclass in the one thing founders actually need: execution in the details. “I realized I knew absolutely nothing,” she tweeted about becoming a founder. The humility stuck. So did the work ethic.
Her measure of success is not TVL or transaction throughput. It is the number of builders who found their tribe in Monad’s orbit and learned to ship faster, fail smarter, and build bigger. And with Monad set to go live on mainnet before the end of the year, that tribe is about to have an entirely new frontier to build on.
If you are a founder who ships and want to join the Monad ecosystem, apply and join DeltaV or follow @DeltaV_xyz for upcoming initiatives.
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Cheryl Douglass
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