Morning Minute: Monad's $4B Debut – Decrypt

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.

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors rallied hard on Monday along with stocks; BTC at $87,400
• White House launched Genesis Project as Manhattan Project for AI
• Monad debuted its MON token + mainnet; MON at $3.9B fdv
• Saylor’s Strategy did not announce any buys; BMNR passed 3% of ETH supply
• MetaMask introduced equity perps trading on mobile

🚀 Monad Launches Its Mainnet

A new high-performance layer-1 just went live.

Is the market ready for it?

📌 What Happened

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.

🗣️ What Are They Saying

“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

🧠 Why It Matters

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…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Memes

A few Crypto and Web3 headlines that caught my eye:

• Crypto majors are very green tailing stocks on a very green day for markets; BTC +2% at $87,400; ETH +4% at $2,920, BNB +1% at $850, SOL +5% at $136
• KAS (+22%), ENA (+13%), and SUI (+11%) led top movers
• The NASDAQ jumped 2.7% yesterday as stocks like GOOG (+6%) and TSLA (+7%) soared
• The White House launched the “Genesis Mission” as a Manhattan Project for AI
• Binance and CZ are accused of enabling crypto transactions for Hamas in a new lawsuit
• Kraken teased a debit card launch coming today
• Tether bought another 1M Rumble shares, sending the YouTube rival’s stock sharply higher
• The European Central Bank repeated warnings that rapidly growing stablecoins could pose “stability risks” to the broader financial system

In Corporate Treasuries / ETFs

In Memes / Onchain Movers

• Memecoin leaders are green led by Fartcoin again; DOGE +3%, Shiba +3%, PEPE +6%, PENGU +10%, BONK +9%, TRUMP +1%, SPX +8%, and FARTCOIN +23%
• SPSC jumped 98% leading onchain movers; arc (+65%), 67 (+30%) and chillguy (+23%) were other notable movers

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

Here’s a rundown of major token, protocol and airdrop news from the day:

• Monad debuted its mainnet and MON token, opening at $3.6B fdv after nearly a day of trading
• MetaMask introduced new equity perps on mobile, allowing users to go long or short stocks like NVDA or TSLA
• MegaUSD deposits go live today at 9 am ET, meant to seed USDm supply in the ecosystem (capped at $250M)
• The Virtuals team promised refunds after a bad actor from the Basis OS team stole user funds in a security breach

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

Here is the list of other notable headlines from the day in NFTs:

• NFT leaders were very green on Monday; Punks +3% at 31 ETH, Pudgy +7% at 5.7, BAYC +1% at 5.94 ETH; Hypurr’s +10% at 700 HYPE
• Autoglyphs (+20%) were notable movers
• Art Blocks announced its final 3 projects for AB 500, featuring the original 3 artists Snowfro, Daniel Calderon and Jeff Davis
• Jack Butcher teased ‘Self Checkout’ as an IRL mint experience at Art Basel