The MON token registered an immediate rebound following the launch of Monad’s mainnet, an appreciation that broke the market’s negative dynamic. The move —with an intraday rise of over 35% and a reported peak of up to 46%— occurred despite a widespread downturn that included Bitcoin and a market capitalization contraction close to $1,000,000,000,000 since October.
The token’s commercial debut took place after a public sale on Coinbase’s token sale platform at an initial price of $0.025, and in the first 24 hours the price climbed more than 35%, with a peak that reached $0.0286 —an approximately 14% increase compared to the ICO price mentioned in the breakdown—. The effective supply for day one included 10.8 billion of MON, representing 49.4% of the total supply set at 100 billion, a circulating figure that came from airdrop claims and the public sale. The airdrop was targeted at 225,000 users who passed anti-Sybil verifications and selected active NFT holders on Ethereum and Solana, aiming to favor retention over speculation.
Concurrent listings on exchanges such as Coinbase, Kraken, Bybit, KuCoin, Bitget, Gate.io and Upbit provided immediate liquidity to absorb the initial supply and mitigate abrupt sell-offs. In a market characterized by a failure rate near 90% for airdrops that collapse after listing, that distribution and liquidity design appears to have been determinant in the price dynamics.
Launch rally and MON token metrics
Monad presents itself as an EVM-compatible Layer 1 designed for high throughput and low latency. EVM-compatible: it means the chain runs bytecode compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, facilitating the migration of existing contracts and tools. Among the highlighted technical specifications are a target of 10,000 TPS, block finalities of 0.8 seconds and block times of 400 ms; the testnet, launched in February 2025, reported having processed 2.44 billion transactions before the mainnet.
The architecture incorporates optimistic parallel execution —a model that allows transactions to be processed simultaneously across multiple cores to increase throughput—, along with JIT compilation for recurring contracts and a state management system called MonadDb. The identified cofounders are Keone Hon and James Hunsaker, who positioned the project as a response to scalability bottlenecks in traditional EVM chains.
Operational impact and compliance considerations point to how the combination of engineering, tokenomics focused on early users and broad listings created an operational environment with greater market depth, and for compliance and product teams the priority now is to monitor the actual distribution of holdings, outflows from airdrop recipients and the evolution of liquidity on listed markets, as well as the KYC/AML requirements associated with the initial distribution.
The behavior of the MON token after the launch presents a case to rethink airdrop and launch practices in bear cycles: the union of scalable architecture, targeted selection of beneficiaries and exchange liquidity can temper mass sell-offs.
