Monaco: The Wall Street-Grade Trading Layer

Sei

18 Aug 2025 • 4 min read

Written by Cody Garrison, Monaco Core Contributor

The financial world is undergoing its largest transformation in decades. Trillions of dollars in traditional assets are moving onchain, institutional players like BlackRock and Goldman Sachs are embracing tokenization, and traders increasingly demand 24/7 access to global markets without arbitrary settlement delays.

Meet Monaco: The Wall Street-Grade Trading Layer

Monaco is a Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) that delivers institutional performance with decentralized principles. Built as a shared liquidity layer, Monaco enables any application to access deep institutional liquidity without the traditional barriers of building and bootstrapping their own trading infrastructure.

Monaco is a breakthrough in decentralized execution, with <1ms execution and 400ms settlement on Sei, designed to become the default trading layer for the expanding onchain economy spanning crypto, real-world assets (RWAs), prediction markets, and gaming economies.

Built by Monaco Research and incubated by Sei Labs, Monaco realizes Sei's founding vision of dedicated infrastructure for high-performance decentralized trading.

Everything Will Be Onchain

The world is becoming tokenized right before our eyes. Capital markets are moving onchain and traders expect liquidity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Tokenization of capital markets isn't a niche concept, it's being adopted at an exponential rate.

Estimates put the tokenized market at $30T by 2034, growing more than 45% a year, and traditional finance infrastructure cannot serve the tokenized world:

Market closures prevent price discovery during global news events. Multi-day settlement ties up capital unnecessarily. Payment for order flow prioritizes broker profits over trader execution. Slow execution creates arbitrage opportunities that benefit institutions over retail.

It’s no surprise that all markets seem to have an eye toward moving onchain.

Industry Leaders Are All In

Scott Bessent - US Secretary Of The Treasury: “Recent reporting projects that stablecoins could grow into a $3.7 trillion market by the end of the decade”

Larry Fink - CEO BlackRock: “Every stock, every bond, every fund — every asset — can be tokenized. If they are, it will revolutionize investing. Markets wouldn't need to close. Transactions that currently take days would clear in seconds. And billions of dollars currently immobilized by settlement delays could be reinvested immediately back into the economy, generating more growth."

Kai Fehr - Global Head of Trade Standard Charter: “With the current market trends, we expect demand for overall tokenised real-world assets to reach up to USD 30.1 trillion by 2034.”

Everything is coming onchain, Wall Street included, and decentralized infrastructure will need to mature by 50x to meet the demands that this capital drives.

Monaco: A Foundational Pillar of Decentralized Wall Street

For the first time, Monaco is bringing Wall Street’s speed and scale to a decentralized execution engine. Monaco's infrastructure can execute trades in <1ms, on par with the Nasdaq & NYSE, and settle onto Sei in just 400ms – a 200,000x improvement compared to T+1 settlement.

Monaco is lightning fast, open-source, and as explained later, rewards the app builders that use it.

<1ms execution coupled with Sei’s 400ms settlement
Revenue sharing for trader order flow to apps built on Monaco’s CLOB
Deep liquidity across a wide range of assets
Permissionless and censorship resistant so anyone can launch and trade tokens

How Monaco Achieves This Vision:

While Monaco's technical excellence provides the engine—<1ms execution and ultra-fast settlement—it's the protocol design elements like shared liquidity and PitPass that turbocharge its greater vision.

Technical Aspects

Monaco achieves its breakthrough performance through:

Optimized order matching algorithms running on dedicated infrastructure
Direct integration with Sei's 400ms finality for near-instant settlement
Support for complex order types including portfolio margin across spot and derivatives

Shared Liquidity: Tap Deep Institutional Liquidity in Minutes

Shared liquidity means multiple applications tap into one unified liquidity pool, eliminating the need to bootstrap individual order books.

No longer do DEX builders need to start off with empty order books and bootstrap their own liquidity, they can simply tap into deep tier-1 LPs and focus on building a world class product and UX for traders.

Shared liquidity means tighter spreads and better pricing for institutional traders who demand a Wall Street-grade experience.

Unlike traditional payment for order flow (PFOF) arrangements that cost retail traders billions annually, Monaco's PitPass transparently shares revenue based on actual volume while maintaining best execution.

Exchanges, wallets, games, and other applications can integrate Monaco's liquidity in minutes and automatically earn fees from the trades they facilitate, without negotiating commercial agreements or sacrificing best execution for their users.

Builders can utilize Monaco’s PitPass codes to build a Wall Street-grade trading experience without worrying about sourcing liquidity or clearing or settlement infrastructure, drastically reducing the cost of bootstrapping.

When applications route trades through Monaco, they automatically earn revenue from that order flow. No negotiations, no complex agreements. This democratizes access to order flow revenue that traditionally only benefits large institutions.

Network Effects

Monaco's architecture creates powerful network effects where increased adoption leads to deeper liquidity, tighter spreads, and better pricing—attracting more builders and traders in a virtuous cycle.

As more apps build on Monaco, more market makers enter to satisfy the trading demand. This deepens Monaco liquidity, making it even more useful to new builders and their traders. This leads to more trading volume, leading to more fees and more liquidity from market makers.

This flywheel effect, powered by <1ms execution speeds, positions Monaco as the default trading infrastructure for institutional onchain activity, and the quintessential infrastructure for launching your high-performance trading dApp.

The Wall Street of the Future

The financial system is undergoing its most significant transformation in decades, with trillions of dollars in assets moving onchain and demanding 24/7 liquidity. Monaco is more than just a DEX to support trading these assets, it’s the credibly neutral infrastructure that will power this new financial system.

Monaco doesn't just level the playing field, it rebuilds it entirely, in favor of traders and builders.

Decentralized Wall Street is the vision.

Monaco is the Wall Street-Grade Trading Layer powering it. ⭕️