Why we settle on Monad

A settlement layer is judged on a single axis: how long the merchant has to stand there not knowing whether they have been paid. Everything else is secondary to closing that window.

Monad gives us sub-second finality with EVM equivalence, which means the tooling merchants already trust keeps working and the confirmation arrives inside the span of a normal counter interaction. The buyer has not put their phone back in their pocket before the invoice has moved to settled.

The second reason is cost. Settlement that eats a visible percentage of a small payment is not settlement, it is a tax on small baskets. Fees on Monad stay low enough that a coffee-sized payment is still worth accepting, which is the test most chains quietly fail.

The third is that neither side needs to hold the native token. Gas is abstracted end to end, so a merchant can receive their first payment without ever having acquired MON, and a buyer never learns the word.

The chain the buyer pays from is theirs to choose. The chain you are settled on should be boring, fast and cheap. That is the split, and it is why the two are different chains.