Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. Subscribe to the Morning Minute on Substack.
Monad officially launched its public mainnet on Monday, kicking off one of the most anticipated Layer 1 debuts of the year.
For those unfamiliar, the Monad chain is built around a simple pitch: Ethereum-style development with much higher performance.
The team aims for massive throughput, low-latency block times, and parallel execution, all wrapped inside a fully EVM-compatible environment so developers don’t need to learn anything new.
The ecosystem was ready at launch.
Early apps included gaming, wagering, Telegram-native tools, and DeFi-adjacent consumer products, giving users something to actually do on day one. And there was a virtual beer pong game allowing real wagering (shout out to Bro.fun).
From a trading perspective, day 1 was volatile.
MON dropped to $0.025 ($2.5B FDV) quickly on open, going as low as $0.023 as people raced to sell their airdrops (ranging from $1k+ to $6k+ for most who were eligible). Then it rebounded over 50% to $0.038 before falling back towards the $0.03 range, before rallying back to $0.039 overnight.
“Monad’s founding thesis is that decentralized systems have superpowers of resilience, trustlessness, and and resistance to central control. But they need to further scale.
The result is a unique network that’s starting to accomplish this!” – Keone, Monad co-founder
“Excited for Monad to go live because it’s one of the few tech-first chain launches. The EVM has the best tooling and developer ecosystem, but has been hamstrung by poorly-performing node and consensus implementations. Very cool to see a grounds-up rewrite” – 0xFoobar on X
Monad enters an L1 market that is more competitive than ever.
Performance alone isn’t enough anymore.
Users (and investors) care about what they can do on the chain. What apps are there?
And Monad did launch with a decent list of curated apps for day one (easily discoverable in their portal landing page, similar to how Abstract launched).
The billion-dollar question, though, will users remain past day one?
Well, the team has $1B+ to incentivize teams to build apps to attract those users.
The Monad ecosystem development budget is 38.5% of the 100B token supply. That’s $1.15B at the time of writing. And the team will dangle those tokens as carrots for teams to come and build on Monad over the coming months and years.
That token allotment is a bit part of the longer-term Monad bull case. But it’s also a big part of the near-term bull case.
Very few of those tokens have been given out. So what tokens are out there in the wild?
Only the 3.3% from the airdrop and 7.5% from the ICO sale are substantially a part of the “float.” And every other token bucket has at least a 1-year lock on it. So MON will be a very low float (~12%) token for the foreseeable future.
But for the bull case to be realized, users still have to come and transact on Monad.
We will find out soon enough if they are able to pull that off…
Here’s a rundown of major token, protocol and airdrop news from the day:
Here is the list of other notable headlines from the day in NFTs:
