Monad Launches Mainnet, MON Trades Near ICO Price

Layer 1 blockchain Monad launched its mainnet and native asset today, Nov. 24, just a few days after its its initial coin offering (ICO) on Coinbase ended. MON debuted for spot trading on Coinbase and several other major centralized exchanges today, and is currently trading around $0.0254. The token briefly rallied as high as $0.0286 earlier today, per data from CoinGecko — about 14% higher than its ICO price.

Based on the current price, MON’s fully diluted valuation (FDV) is sitting near $2.5 billion. However, Polymarket odds show about 90% of bettors expect Monad’s FDV to come in below $2 billion by tomorrow, one day after launch.

MON’s market capitalization is about $270 million, which places it in the lower 200s among tokens by market capitalization, according to CoinGecko.

Oversubscribed Despite Slow Start

Initially, Monad’s ICO on Coinbase started off slowly, especially when compared with recent token sales, like MegaETH’s and Stable’s. That in part could be due to the fact that Coinbase’s know-your-customer requirements and regional blocks limited some buyers.

The Monad public token sale offered roughly 7.5% of the 100 billion total token supply at $0.025, an allocation that implied about $187.5 million in available public funding. Some in the community earlier expressed concern that only 3.3% of the total MON supply is set aside to be airdropped, meaning, when combined with the ICO allocation, only around 11% of the total supply will be available to the average retail investor.

Despite the slow start, Monad’s ICO ended up raising roughly $269 million in total commitments from about 85,800 participants in the debut token sale on Coinbase’s new platform, after the CEX acquired crypto fundraising platform Echo in October. Demand exceeded the available allocation by roughly $82 million, making the sale about 1.43x oversubscribed on commitments.

Notably, the number of participants is far more than recent ICOs, and more than double the participants in MegaETH’s recent token sale.

Founded in 2022 by Keone Hon, James Hunsaker and Eunice Giarta, Monad was pitched as an EVM compatible Layer 1 that prioritizes parallel execution and a purpose built state database to deliver high throughput and low latency.

The project raised over $220 million last year from backers including Paradigm, Dragonfly, Electric Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and others.