Improbable's chief executive spent two years dismissing rival high-performance chains as slower and less decentralized. DefiLlama's latest figures show Monad with about 33 times Somnia's active addresses and MegaETH with nearly seven times its fees.
Herman Narula, the founder and chief executive of Improbable, has spent nearly two years telling rival high-performance chains that Somnia, the network his company built, beats them. On the figures DefiLlama published on October 8, the two chains he aimed at most often, Monad and MegaETH, now have more users, more fee revenue and more deposits than Somnia.
Narula does not formally run Somnia. "I run Improbable, somnia is run by Peter Lipka but we are a big contributor," he wrote in August, and in September: "Somnia is independent, we are investors." His own posts describe a closer involvement than that. In March he wrote that "it’s all somnia for improbable atm" and that "Both somnia and improbable are hiring execs." In September he said "the founders and improbable have agreed to support the project," and told a critic: "We’ve been working on improbable and later somnia for longer than the entire Trojan war." Improbable built the chain under contract for the Somnia Foundation, as this site reported this week, and Lipka, who now runs Somnia, worked alongside Narula at Improbable for 15 years. Narula's posts are the most prominent public case for Somnia against its competitors, and they are on the record.
What he said about Monad
On January 31, 2025, replying to Monad's account, Narula wrote that a Monad claim was "Literally total horseshit," adding: "@Somnia_Network does this now in dev net, presumably you saw that number and felt the need to pretend you can hit it."
In September 2025 he asked his followers: "If you would rather build on @monad than @Somnia_Network , what are some of the reasons? Cos I don’t see any tech wise." Seventeen days later he struck a gentler note, "trolling aside..I hope both monad and somnia win," before adding of Monad's name: "Still think the name is like an STD."
What he said about MegaETH
When MegaETH's mainnet drew attention in January 2026, Narula posted: "Yes, Somnia which is 10x faster and decentralised. Megaeth would have been so useful in 2019."
In replies in the same thread he wrote that "A database running on one machine is not a blockchain," and contrasted "a working chain that does 1m tps" with "the jokers looking to scam you out of another TGE," without naming whom he meant. Four days later he posted: "It’s incredible that a centralised l2 is this much slower than @Somnia_Network." When a MegaETH supporter claimed the chain had processed more transactions in seven days than other chains had in their lifetimes, Narula replied: "It did fewer than @Somnia_Network in the same test, you should ask why that is."
What the numbers show now
DefiLlama's readings for October 8 put the three chains side by side. Somnia had 357 active addresses, 1.95 million transactions, $358 in fees, $179 in revenue, $2.93 million in value locked and $203,445 in DEX volume. MegaETH had 1,840 active addresses, 2.17 million transactions, $2,436 in fees, $2,392 in revenue, $14.02 million in value locked and $713,405 in DEX volume. Monad had 11,656 active addresses, 5.71 million transactions, $13,102 in fees, $11,089 in revenue, $1.005 billion in value locked and $37.85 million in DEX volume.
Against Somnia, MegaETH has about five times the active addresses, nearly seven times the fees, about 13 times the revenue and close to five times the value locked. On transactions, the measure Narula used against MegaETH in January, MegaETH is now slightly ahead: 2.17 million against 1.95 million.
Monad's lead is of a different order. It has about 33 times Somnia's active addresses, about 37 times its fees, about 62 times its revenue and about 186 times its DEX volume. Its value locked, $1.005 billion, is roughly 340 times Somnia's $2.93 million. The market values the tokens the same way: MON was worth $307.24 million, MEGA $49.34 million and SOMI $31.59 million.
What the numbers do not show
Neither rival is thriving by any absolute standard. MegaETH's value locked fell 24% in the 24 hours before the reading, and Monad's DEX volume fell 67% on the week. Monad raised $248 million at a $3 billion valuation, and its daily fees remain small beside that.
Usage also does not settle Narula's technical argument. Part of his objection to MegaETH was architectural, that it is a centralized layer 2, and a count of users says nothing either way about how decentralized a chain is. What the figures do show is that throughput was not what any of these chains lacked. Somnia's 1.95 million daily transactions average about 23 a second, against a capacity Narula has put at a million a second. MegaETH's average is about 25.
On September 17 Narula asked: "What happened to all those people who said @Somnia_Network was dead, are they now brave enough to say they were wrong?" Three weeks later, DefiLlama counted 357 active addresses on Somnia in a day.
