Monad founder Keone does not deny Andre Cronje's Avalanche Fork Accusations, Fails to change Devnet gas fees from $AVAX to $MON.

In early January 2025, Andre Cronje, a core contributor to Fantom and a prominent DeFi architect, publicly alleged that the Monad blockchain is effectively a fork of Avalanche, posting code comparisons and stating that Monad is “just Avalanche with some changes.” Cronje’s thread targeted Monad’s claims of building a high‑performance, parallel EVM chain from first principles, arguing instead that much of the code base and key design elements, including consensus, derive from Avalanche’s implementation. These allegations quickly spread across crypto social media, raising questions about Monad’s originality, its disclosures to investors, and its positioning relative to other L1s. Following Cronje’s thread, Monad founder Keone Hon responded on X in a series of posts that did not directly deny the reuse or forking of Avalanche code, instead emphasizing Monad’s engineering work, performance goals, and improvements over existing designs. Around the same time, users examining Monad’s public devnet noted that transaction fee metadata still referenced AVAX as the gas token rather than MON, suggesting that parts of the codebase and configuration had been carried over from Avalanche with limited renaming. Critics used this as informal corroboration of Cronje’s fork claims, arguing that a genuinely independent implementation would not expose such Avalanche‑specific remnants at the devnet level. The dispute matters because Monad is a heavily funded L1 project promoted as a novel, high‑throughput EVM chain, and the crypto ecosystem is highly sensitive to questions of originality, licensing, and transparent attribution of open‑source work. Supporters note that forking and extending prior code is common in open‑source crypto development, and that innovation often happens incrementally on top of existing stacks. Detractors counter that projects raising large venture rounds on the premise of ground‑up technical breakthroughs have a heightened responsibility to disclose when they are building on existing chains’ code and architectures, particularly when visible artifacts such as devnet gas fee labels still reference the upstream network’s token.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

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