James Hunsaker is the CTO and co-founder of Monad, a parallel EVM blockchain providing portability and performance. ^[1]

Education

Hunsaker graduated from the University of Iowa with a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics. ^[1]

Career

Husnaker worked as an associate at Goldman Sachs until 2012, when he became VP at J.P. Morgan. He later held the same position at Goldman Sachs until 2014. He then joined Jump Trading, a data and research-driven trading business, as a senior software engineer for the trading team, where he met Keone Hon. Together, alongside Eunice Giarta, they co-founded Monad Labs. ^[1]

Monad Labs

In an interview with The Pipeline Podcast, Hunsaker shared how the co-founders came up with the idea of Monad: ^[2]

“You can actually build something that maybe other people can't build and our experience, you know, being from HFT at Jump and other things is just we have that experience building those really low latency systems and we just, yeah, we looked at the existing software that's out there, all the different L1s, L2s weren't really around back then, but all the existing L1s and, you know, look at their consensus mechanism, look at their execution, their VMs, some had different VMs in Ethereum, you know, like Solana, looked into all these sorts of aspects and just felt like, yeah, you know, different people had made different trade-offs that maybe we didn't agree with, different people just copied software from different components into their own and I think ultimately, like, building it from the ground up, building it from scratch, you have a lot of control and if you have expertise in that, then you can build something that's faster than what other people can build so that's, yeah, that's why we started it.”

He also shared some of the challenges Monad has faced since development: ^[2]

“I think I've mentioned before, HFT doesn't use a database. The strategies will start up, in the case of trading futures, it's like 23 hours a day. Strategies start up, and for 23 hours they don't touch the disk; they just run in memory. Obviously, given the state size of Ethereum and other chains, with tens of gigabytes, hundreds of gigabytes of data, you have to put that on disk. Technically, understanding new technology that we weren't personally familiar with was a big lift and that takes time. You have to learn it. I never worked for Samsung, I never built SSDs, so I didn't really know or pay much attention to how they worked, their internal architecture, or what the state-of-the-art is with that stuff. So, we had to learn all that and that involved a lot of experimentation.”

“In terms of the company, it's always hard to find and hire good people. The employment market's very competitive. You've got big tech companies like Google and Apple, and you have the finance market in New York with a lot of trading firms, HFT, and investment banks. So, you're competing in that market, and that's kind of a new thing for us. It's definitely challenging on many fronts.”

Interviews

Monad and Personal Journey

In a 2023 interview with Munjal Shah of the Unfiltered Podcast, Hunsaker discussed Monad Labs and shared his personal journey into crypto, starting with his technical background: ^[3]

“I started "programming" in third grade. My mom was a teacher, so she always had Apple IIs and Macs to play on at her school. In my school, we had mostly Apple IIs. Back then, there were magazines you could buy—or in my case, borrow from the library—that had code written in them. You would type the code from the magazine into your Apple II, and then you could play a game or something…But to answer your question, yeah, I was somewhat technical. I didn't know very much compared to what I know now. I was technical enough to recognize innovation. I could tell that something was innovative compared to everything else. I think a lot of people still struggle with that; it's hard to tell if something is truly unique or if there is something innovative here.”

He then shared his motivations for becoming an entrepreneur: ^[3]

“It's just like intuition. Some guy started, and it's sort of like that: if somebody else can do it, why can't I start? I don't know if Steve Jobs is from the Midwest or the West Coast or something, but people did it, so certainly it's possible. It's probably just an underestimation and somewhat naive presentation of the work that's actually involved. They're just optimists, thinking, "Oh, it's not that hard; I can pull this off," without really knowing everything that's involved. This is big business stuff—lots of lawyers, investment bankers, and all this involved. You have no idea about that, so ignorance helps to a certain extent. Not knowing the challenges you’re about to face helps you face those challenges because if you actually understood the daunting tasks in front of you, you'd probably turn and run away, go home, and watch TV or something.”

Towards the end of the interview, he discussed why he left Jump Trading and shared his view on the future of the industry: ^[3]

“HFT is just a long grind; it's constant grinding. There's no secure position, with the exception of some teams and firms. Some people dominate certain trades or markets, but that's rare. Even then, people are all kind of under pressure, so it's a never-ending grind. From 2014 to 2022, so eight years—literally a couple of weeks short of eight years—we had some success, but it was time to do something new. Riding the same prop for such a long time, it wasn't a high barrier to leaving. I wasn't super apprehensive about it. I've done that, and I may go back to trading someday or do some trading on the blockchain. Building an actual order book exchange or at least helping to build that or seeing it manifest itself—there are some products out there.”

“I think as an industry we need to get serious about real apps that real people want to use, where decentralization and all its benefits actually provide a competitive advantage over a centralized version. It's going to be blockchain competing with services like PayPal and Venmo. Arguing whether it's going to be Solana or Fantom or some other blockchain seems almost like a waste of time.”