MON

Monad

Layer 1

A fast parallel-EVM Layer 1 whose DeFi grew to $1B in its first year, with a large unlock due on 24 Nov.

Growing, unlock overhang v1.1 · as of 2026-10-21 · framework v1.13 Coinsight · all analyses
Bottom line

Monad launched on 24 Nov 2025 and built a real DeFi base quickly: DeFi TVL passed $1.02B and stablecoins $767M by the end of August 2026, with Aave, Euler, Ethena and Maple live. The token has not followed: at $0.0226 it trades below the $0.025 public sale price and −54% from the $0.0488 ATH, and chain fees of a few hundred thousand dollars a quarter are tiny next to issuance. Only ~11.7% of supply circulates, and the first team and investor cliff (~16.6B MON by one tracker, more than the whole current float) unlocks on 24 Nov 2026.

Scorecard (1–5)
Project
Token performance
Tokenomics
Price
$0.0226
+5.0% 24h · −11% 30d · CoinGecko 21 Oct
Market cap
$267.7M
rank #156 · FDV $2.28B, no max supply
24h volume
$19.6M
7.3% of market cap
From ATH
−54%
ATH $0.0488, Nov 2025
2026 YTD
−1%
$0.0228 → $0.0226
DeFi TVL
$1.02B+
31 Aug 2026, Monad Foundation

The last 12 months

$0.02$0.04$0.06Oct 25NovDecJan 26FebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec2025-11-27: $0.047$0.047 peak2025-12-19: $0.0169$0.017 low2026-04-14: $0.0359$0.0362026-10-04: $0.0339$0.0342026-10-21: $0.0226$0.0231Coinbase public sale2Mainnet and MON launch3ATH at $0.04884TVL passes $350M5Aave V3 goes live6$60M exit offer declined7DeFi TVL tops $1B8Open Summit, Singapore9First cliff unlock10Post-quantum account auth MIP
TokenomicsProductMarketAdoptionUpcoming

Daily closes from CoinGecko, 24 Nov 2025 (first trading day) to 21 Oct 2026.

Key events
  1. 1
    17 Nov 25 Coinbase public sale. First sale on Coinbase's new token platform: 7.5% of supply at $0.025, 17 to 22 Nov.
  2. 2
    24 Nov 25 Mainnet and MON launch. Public mainnet goes live with an airdrop; 50.6% of supply locked.
  3. 3
    26 Nov 25 ATH at $0.0488. Two days after launch; by 19 Dec price closes at $0.0169.
  4. 4
    06 Apr 26 TVL passes $350M. The Block notes ~$355M TVL but under $3,000 a day in chain fees.
  5. 5
    02 Jul 26 Aave V3 goes live. $83.5M deposited on day one; Ethena and Maple also launch in July.
  6. 6
    18 Aug 26 $60M exit offer declined. Foundation offered to buy locked investor MON; almost all declined, price +50% in a week.
  7. 7
    31 Aug 26 DeFi TVL tops $1B. TVL $1.02B+ and stablecoins $767M+; Euler's largest market is on Monad.
  8. 8
    06 Oct 26 Open Summit, Singapore. First flagship conference before Token2049; MON peaked at $0.0339 two days earlier, then fell a third.
  9. 9
    24 Nov 26 First cliff unlock. Team, investor and treasury cliff, ~16.6B MON by one tracker, then monthly vesting to 2029.
  10. 10
    Soon Post-quantum account auth MIP. Draft proposal for upgradeable account authentication; no activation date yet.

How a token swap flows through Monad

User
Signs a swap in MetaMask

Any Ethereum wallet works; gas is paid in MON.

Leader validator
Proposes a block

Picks transactions from the mempool, ordered by fee.

MonadBFT
Validators agree on order

Consensus fixes the order before anything is executed.

Execution
Runs in parallel

Transactions execute optimistically side by side; conflicts are re-run.

MonadDb
State is updated

Custom database writes the new balances; the DEX pool settles.

User
Swap confirmed

The block is final in about a second.

Where MON comes in: every transaction pays gas in MON; the base fee is burned and the priority fee goes to the validator. Each block also mints new MON for validators and their stakers. Stablecoin swaps and DeFi use other tokens; MON is only the fee and staking asset.

Usage and adoption

USD at today's price ($0.0226): yearly flows and the 24 Nov unlock
Base fees burned (Q2 2026 × 4)
~$1.25M / yr
Foundation buyback offer (max)
$60M
Validator issuance (~2B MON)
~$45M / yr
24 Nov 2026 cliff (~16.6B MON)
~$376M

Base fees: DefiLlama shows ~$312K in Q2 2026 (~$169K in Q1, ~$252K partial Q3), so burn is under 3% of issuance in dollar terms. Issuance assumes 25 MON per block (~2B a year). The cliff figure is one tracker's estimate of everything unlocking on 24 Nov; Monad's own page puts the team part at ~10.7% of initial supply. The $60M offer was a ceiling; the amount spent was not disclosed.

  • weak signal
    Chain fees
    ~$312K / quarter

    Q2 2026 base fees, DefiLlama. Users paying for blockspace; very small next to a $2.3B FDV.

  • strong signal
    Stablecoins
    $767M+

    31 Aug 2026, Monad Foundation; up from $640M+ in July. Includes USDe and syrupUSDC.

  • strong signal
    DeFi TVL
    $1.02B+

    31 Aug 2026; ~$355M in April. Some of it is incentive-driven.

  • medium signal
    DEX volume
    >$1B / week

    Late Sep 2026 (Tapbit). Real trading, but can be inflated by incentives.

  • medium signal
    Validators
    ~200 nodes

    30+ countries (Monad, Aug 2026). Decentralization, not demand.

Monad's adoption is real at the DeFi layer: TVL, stablecoins and blue-chip protocols arrived within a year. Paid usage is not: base fees burn well under 3% of the MON minted each year, and the 24 Nov cliff dwarfs both. Watch fees and stablecoins, not TPS.

Project

What it is
An EVM-compatible Layer 1 built for speed: Ethereum apps and wallets work unchanged, but transactions execute in parallel and consensus runs ahead of execution. Mainnet and the MON token launched on 24 Nov 2025.
Team
Founded by Keone Hon, James Hunsaker and Eunice Giarta, who came from Jump Trading's high-frequency trading side. Category Labs writes the client; the Monad Foundation runs ecosystem and governance. Backers include Paradigm, Coinbase Ventures and Galaxy.
Technology
MonadBFT consensus, asynchronous execution, optimistic parallel execution and a custom state database (MonadDb). The full client is open source under GPL-3.0 since Sep 2025. Around 200 validator nodes in 30+ countries.
Traction
DeFi TVL $1.02B+ and stablecoins $767M+ (31 Aug 2026), up from ~$355M TVL in April. Aave V3 drew $83.5M on its first day (2 Jul); Euler's Monad market passed $230M, its largest on any chain. Weekly DEX volume above $1B (late Sep).
Competitors
Solana, Sui and Aptos for high-throughput apps; MegaETH, Sei and Base for fast EVM execution; Ethereum L2s generally.
Key risks
Fees are tiny next to valuation and issuance; ~88% of supply is still locked; large unlocks start 24 Nov 2026; TVL partly incentive-driven and could move to the next new chain.
Roadmap
First team, investor and treasury cliff on 24 Nov 2026, then monthly vesting to 2029. Category Labs drafted a MIP for flexible, upgradeable account authentication (Aug 2026), the first step of a post-quantum roadmap; no activation date yet.

Token performance

1-year return (24 Nov 2025 → 21 Oct 2026, CoinGecko)
MON
-13%
BTC
-22%
ETH
-35%

MON has only traded since 24 Nov 2025, so there is no 3-year return; for reference BTC is ~+179% (from ~$29.7k) and ETH ~+53% (from ~$1.6k) over 3 years. Since its first day MON (−13%) did better than BTC and ETH over their last 12 months, but it sits below the $0.025 public sale price. BTC and ETH figures are 1-year changes from CoinGecko; the 3-year figures are manual.

Range 2026
$0.0173 low (6 Feb) to $0.0359 high (14 Apr), daily closes; now $0.0226
12-month drawdown
−64%, from $0.047 (27 Nov 2025) to $0.0169 (19 Dec 2025); now −54% from the $0.0488 ATH
Liquidity
$19.6M traded in 24h, 7.3% of market cap; rank #156; FDV $2.28B is 8.5x market cap
Relative strength
−13% since launch vs BTC −22% and ETH −35% over 12 months, but −33% since 4 Oct ($0.0339) as the unlock nears
ATH check ATH check passed. The $0.0488 ATH (26 Nov 2025) came two days after launch, but price came back within 50% of it, closing at $0.0359 on 14 Apr 2026 (74% of the ATH), so the ATH is used as the reference.

Tokenomics

Supply
100B MON at genesis, ~100.68B now with issuance; no max supply. ~11.8B circulating (~11.7%).
Inflation
25 MON per block to validators and stakers, about 2B MON a year (~2% of initial supply). Monad's staking reference reportedly says 18 MON, so the exact rate is uncertain.
Unlocks/vesting
50.6% was locked at launch: team ~27%, investors ~19.7%, treasury ~3.9%. One-year cliff on 24 Nov 2026 (~16.6B MON by one tracker, ~$376M at today's price), then monthly vesting to Q4 2029.
Utility
Gas on Monad, staking to secure MonadBFT (validators need 10M MON total stake), governance. Locked tokens cannot be staked.
Concentration
Team, investors and treasury hold about half of supply; Foundation and ecosystem allocations hold much of the rest. Public sale on Coinbase was 7.5% of supply at $0.025.
Sinks
Base fees are burned, but at ~$0.3M a quarter that is far below issuance. The Foundation offered up to $60M to buy locked investor MON (Aug 2026); almost all declined. No ETFs.

Bull case

Monad keeps compounding DeFi (Aave, Euler, Ethena, stablecoins above $767M) and the 24 Nov cliff is absorbed with little selling, as the buyback refusals hint. Price reclaims the $0.025 sale price and retests the $0.034 to $0.036 highs of April and October.

Bear case

The cliff roughly doubles the float, recipients sell into thin fee revenue, and MON loses the $0.017 lows of Dec 2025 and Feb 2026. TVL drifts to newer chains once incentives fade, leaving a $2.3B FDV against under $2M a year of fees.

Watch before the next re-run

  • Exchange inflows and price around the 24 Nov 2026 cliff unlock
  • Chain fees and MON burned vs ~2B MON yearly issuance
  • DeFi TVL and stablecoin supply on Monad (DefiLlama)
  • $0.025 sale price above, $0.017 lows below

Where to trade

Krakenlisted

MON against EUR · USD

24h $453.5k · ±2% depth $202.3k

OKXlisted

MON against EUR · USDT · USDC · TRY

24h $2.24M · ±2% depth $415.5k

Largest exchanges

Exchange24h vol±2% depth
BybitMON/USDT$3.60M$417.9k
OKXMON/USDT$2.08M$415.5k
CoinbaseMON/USD$1.14M$1.04M
UpbitMON/KRW$884.9k$149.9k
KrakenMON/USD$322.7k$236.2k

Deepest DEX pools

Pool24h vol±2% depth
Uniswap V4CLMON/WETH · Monad$1.49M$49.5k
Uniswap V3CLMON/USDC · Monad$490.5k$49.0k
Uniswap V4CLMON/USDC · Monad$1.54M$38.3k

Pool size (TVL), fee tier and fee APR are not in yet: they need DefiLlama, which this setup cannot reach so far. CL = concentrated liquidity (higher fees, more impermanent-loss risk).

On-chain share of all MON volume: 22.3%.

As of 21 Oct 2026 · CoinGecko tickers (24h volume, ±2% depth). ±2% depth is the money it takes to move the price 2% either way: the real size of a market. Exchanges ranked by volume among well-known venues; pools by depth. Not investment advice.

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