Aptos research director Alexander Spiegelman took to social media to question Monad's plagiarism of its technology, saying he did not understand why Monad spent a lot of time copying Aptos' technology, and that it was open-source and had peer-reviewed papers. In response, Monad co-founder James Hunsaker countered, saying that he had been working on software transactional memory (STM) in the Haskell environment for a long time, and that BlockSTM was just a simple extension of these technologies, emphasizing that he had never looked at any of the Aptos code.