Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk’s weekly wrap of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I’m Margaux Nijkerk, a reporter at CoinDesk.
In this issue:
* Monad Blockchain Goes Live With 100B Token Supply and Airdrop
* Celestia’s TIA Token Rises as ‘Matcha’ Upgrade Preps Network for Cross-Chain Future
* Ethereum’s Fusaka Upgrade Signals New Era for Value Accrual: Fidelity Digital Assets
* World App Starts Virtual Bank Accounts Pilot for USDC Payroll Deposits
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Network News
MONAD CHAIN AND AIRDROP GO LIVE: The layer-1 Monad blockchain went live, accompanied by an airdrop of its MON token. The Monad team described the blockchain as a “high-performance network capable of supporting a broad range of growing industry verticals, including DeFi, payments/stablecoins, and emerging institutional use cases for high frequency finance.” Previously, the team said that the blockchain is also “EVM-compatible,” and that the chain is designed to help scale Ethereum’s virtual machine into its next stage of growth. As for the airdrop, according to project documentation, the total supply of MON is 100 billion tokens, with 10.8% currently unlocked and in circulation. That circulating portion is divided between two buckets: 7.5% was made available over the past week through a public sale on Coinbase’s Token Platform at $0.025 per token, and the remaining 3.3% unlocks as part of the airdrop. The remaining supply is allocated as follows: 27% to the Monad team, 19.7% to investors, 4% to the Labs Treasury, and 38.5% toward ecosystem development. Some community members on X expressed frustration with the distribution, arguing that the team’s share is unusually high compared with industry norms.”Monad mainnet’s public launch marks a major step toward making high-performance blockchain infrastructure accessible to everyone. Developers shouldn’t have to choose between speed, security, and usability,” said Keone Hon, the co-founder of Monad, in a press release shared with CoinDesk. “With Monad, we’ve worked to deliver all three, without asking builders to abandon the tools and languages they already know. We’re excited to empower a new wave of applications and bring blockchain technology closer to mainstream and institutional adoption.” — Margaux Nijkerk Read more.
CELESTIA ROLLS OUT MATCHA UPGRADE: The project behind the data availability blockchain Celestia rolled out what it calls its biggest software upgrade yet, dubbed Matcha. At its core, this update is designed to boost the network’s capacity and improve token economics. Among the technical changes, it increases the maximum block size to 128 MB (up from 8 MB) and changes how data propagation works, enabling much higher throughput. Simply put, Celestia is preparing itself to handle much more data, which is important if many applications start using it as their underlying “routing” or “data-availability” layer. Beyond throughput, Matcha upgrade also claims to make significant economic and interoperability improvements. The upgrade cuts annual token inflation from ~5% down to ~2.5%. It also removes a “token filter” for cross-chain bridges, meaning non-TIA assets can more easily be moved through or routed by the Celestia layer. This is meant to signal that Celestia wants to become a go-to layer for cross-chain data availability and asset routing. The project’s native token, TIA, is roughly up about 6% over the last 24 hours, trading around $0.65. However, the token is still down 97% from its peak of around $19.70 in December 2024. — Margaux Nijkerk Read more.
