Kushal Babel and Babak Gilkalaye of Category Labs chat with Patrick O'Grady about their research into scaling blockchain broadcast.

They discuss the techniques existing blockchains (like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana) use to disseminate data across p2p networks. The, they dive into the "broadcast stack" (Data Transmission, Encoding, System and Broadcast Strategy) and explore how Monad is employing Raptor Codes to balance low latency with high throughput. Last, we discuss the tradeoffs (and open questions) of deploying pre-consensus broadcast instead of "in the hot path" broadcast.