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Monad launched 11 months ago: $889 million on-chain, but the token has fallen below its $0.025 sale price

From November 17 to 22 last year, Monad sold 7.5 billion MON on Coinbase for $0.025 per token, raising about $269 million in total, with 85,800 participants. Two days later, the mainnet and token launched together, and the price briefly climbed to around $0.048—roughly 90% above the sale price. The excitement at the time was easy to understand: a new chain claiming to make Ethereum run faster, combined with the first project on Coinbase’s new token sale platform, was bound to attract plenty of attention.

So what exactly is Monad? It’s an Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible Layer 1, meaning applications and tools on Ethereum can be moved over without changing their code. The difference is in how transactions are processed. Ethereum executes transactions one by one, while Monad assumes that most transactions won’t interfere with each other and runs them in parallel. It then checks for conflicts; any transaction that clashes is rerun with the correct data. The final result is the same as if transactions had been executed sequentially. Block times are about 0.4 seconds, and around 10,000 transactions per second is a design target, not a measured result. The aim is to support high-frequency trading and high-traffic applications. Its consensus mechanism is called MonadBFT, which advances in a pipelined fashion. The state layer has its own system, MonadDB, designed specifically to address data read and write bottlenecks under heavy concurrency.

Eleven months after launch, here’s what the on-chain ledger looks like. According to DefiLlama data from October 31, Monad had $889.04 million in DeFi TVL, $632.74 million in on-chain stablecoin market capitalization, $28.45 million in decentralized exchange volume over the past 24 hours, $12.71 million in perpetuals volume, 5.85 million transactions in 24 hours, and 10,710 active addresses. TVL and transaction counts show that the chain isn’t just spinning its wheels—people are genuinely putting money and transactions on it. Compare that with Nansen’s figures from the first day after launch: more than 3 million transactions, 140,000 addresses, and over 18,000 contracts. But be careful about the metrics: the 140,000 figure from the early days was cumulative addresses, while the 10,710 figure for October 31 is daily active addresses. The two numbers can’t be directly compared to measure growth or decline. Spread across just over 10,000 active addresses, 5.85 million transactions in a day works out to more than 500 per address on average. Activity is heavily concentrated among a small number of high-frequency addresses; ordinary users aren’t making anywhere near that many transactions.

But there’s a striking contrast in the same table. Over the past 24 hours, the chain itself collected just $11,224 in fees, while applications on the chain collected $254,725—more than 20 times as much. The chain gets plenty of use but collects little. That’s where Monad stands right now. Low fees are good for users, but token holders need to look at the other side of the equation: fees are not yet a major source of value for MON. At a little over $10,000 a day, that comes to just over $4 million a year. Compared with $889 million in TVL, that’s a very thin margin.

Now let’s look at the token ledger. MON has a total supply of 100 billion tokens, with about 10.8 billion in circulation at launch, including 7.5 billion sold publicly and 3.3 billion airdropped. Circulating supply is now about 11.8 billion, which also checks out when calculated from DefiLlama’s October 31 market cap of $226.64 million and the current price of $0.019. The team holds 27%, investors 19.7%, and the treasury and other allocations about 4%; roughly half the supply is still locked up, with all of it scheduled to be released by the fourth quarter of 2029. At $0.019, the current price is about 24% below the $0.025 sale price. The gains made by those who bought at the launch spike have long since evaporated, and anyone still holding tokens bought at the sale price is sitting on a paper loss.

For retail investors, there are really three takeaways here. First, TVL and transaction counts are worth watching, but don’t focus only on those two figures. How much a chain collects in fees each day is a better indicator of whether the token has a source of value. Second, applications making money doesn’t mean the token is making money. Application fees and chain fees are two separate ledgers, so be clear about where the money is going. Third, circulating supply is still gradually increasing, with new supply coming until 2029. Whenever the price rises, there may be newly unlocked tokens waiting to be sold.

My view is that Monad’s technical story makes sense, and its on-chain ledger doesn’t look bad, but the token’s ledger still doesn’t add up. At $0.019, three things are true at once: the price is below the sale price, unlocks are still ongoing, and fees remain very thin. It’s too early to rush to a conclusion, whether bullish or bearish.

When you look at a new chain, do you check its TVL first, or how much it collects in fees each day?

#Monad #并行EVM #Layer1 #项目拆解 $MON

—— web3 Leek Xiao Kai
The views expressed above are personal opinions only and do not constitute investment advice.

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