The primary reason Monad decided to be EVM compatible was because EVM already has a ton of developer tools and resources. There's nothing particularly exceptional about EVM itself nor is there anything that's particularly deficient. It's a standard (but bit weird with 32 byte words) stack-based VM, with a small well-defined runtime. It's implementation is not much different than what you would find in any undergraduate compiler/interpreter class. So it doesn't make sense to start anew. You'd have to build all the resources/tools/community/etc from scratch. Some obviously feel differently as they decided to build new VMs, but I'm not convinced. This is not to say Monad won't innovate in this area - it absolutely will. @category_xyz has an awesome "compiler" team with top-notch devs and researchers. You'll see the output of that team in the future. One thing I discussed with @zen_llama when he was hired was focusing on dev support. Monad and/or Category can definitely do a better job of that, and we started ramping that up more recently. Focus for now is on the most performance-sensitive apps. A lot of apps won't ever need any guidance because of the EVM compatibility, some apps will need a little, and a small number of apps will need a lot of help. Our team also learns and improves from these collaborations - they are mutually beneficial. re community, I welcome any sort of disagreement and feedback that's genuine. I feel like I've made this point many times before.