Monaco: Wall Street-grade CLOB infra on Sei, TL;DR
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Monaco is a permissionless backend with 5-25 microsecond off-chain matching and sub-400ms settlement on Sei. It has no native frontend, offers shared liquidity from day one, and reinvents PFOF with PitPass.
Key claims
Off-chain matching designed for 5-25 microsecond execution
Settlement finality under 400ms via Sei Giga and Autobahn
PitPass lets frontends earn a share of trading fees
One of the most underrated CLOB players out there is @monacotrading.
Why?
Monaco is not just another perp DEX. It's a Wallstreet-grade onchain infra layer that aims to bridge the performance gap between TradFi and DeFi.
<1ms latency and a permissionless backend that can support anything from perps or spot to prediction markets and much more, is what makes Monaco a truly unique contender amid the CLOB wars.
Built on @SeiNetwork, it's also an anti-thesis to the increasing shift towards app-sepcific execution layers, acting as a crucial enabler within the Sei ecosystem, and finally making the original vision of a "trading chain" a reality.
Let me give a TL;DR on what I'm foreshadowing above ↓
➤ Monaco employs a hybrid architecture with an off-chain matching engine designed for 5-25 microsecond execution, a potential 1000x improvement over many other solutions and even outcompeting CEXes.
➤ It is purpose-built as a specialized piece of infra within the Sei eco, leveraging the upcoming "Giga" upgrade and its parallelized "Autobahn" consensus for ultra-fast, sub-400ms settlement finality.
➤ The architecture deliberately takes the matching process offchain in favor for speed, while keeping the non-negotiable elements, a.k.a. custody and settlement, fully decentralized and non-custodial on the Sei L1.
➤ By moving order placement, modification, and cancellation off-chain, it eliminates gas costs for liquidity providers, enabling tighter spreads and deeper markets.
➤ Monaco functions as a unified liquidity hub within Sei, providing a deep, shared order book from day one that any app can plug into, solving the "cold-start" problem.
➤ By deliberately not having its own native frontend, it acts as a "decentralized Nasdaq", a credibly neutral foundation that does not compete with the ecosystem of applications building on it.
➤ The innovative "PitPass" system reinvents PFOF for Web3, allowing any front-end builder to permissionlessly and programmatically earn a share of the trading fee revenue they generate.
➤ The platform is architected not just for crypto-native assets but as the foundational trading layer for the multi-trillion dollar tokenized RWA market, which demands institutional-grade performance.
If you want to learn more, stay tuned for the CLOB campaign that we're currently running with @a1research__, where we will dive deep into Monaco's architecture, its vision, and the competitive landscape.
Stay tuned and DYOR anon.
More details on the @a1research__ can be found here:
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What came next · since 30 Sep 2025
Since then
Zero has written 3 more pieces on Monaco since this one.