I’ve been waiting for this day longer than I care to admit. When a Layer-1 that promises 10,000 transactions per second actually ships mainnet on schedule, you sit up and pay attention. Today, November 24 2025, Monad finally flipped the switch. The MON token is live, the airdrop is hitting wallets, and the price is doing exactly what new L1 tokens do – absolutely everything at once.
So let’s cut through the noise and talk about what actually happens next.
Why Monad Actually Feels Different This Time
Look, we’ve all lived through the Solana summer, the Sui hype cycle, the Aptos launch – the list goes on. Most high-TPS chains arrive with big promises and then spend months figuring out stability. Monad’s team took the opposite approach: stay quiet, build like maniacs, and ship when it’s ready rather than when the marketing calendar says so.
That alone makes today worth watching closely.
The tech itself is legitimately impressive. Parallel execution that actually maintains full Ethereum compatibility? That’s not marketing speak – it’s a genuine engineering breakthrough. When you combine that with single-slot finality and fees that make Polygon look expensive, you start understanding why some pretty sharp builders have been positioning for this launch for months.
The Tokenomics Reality Check
Let’s address the elephant in the room first: yes, Monad has a 100 billion token supply. Yes, that sounds terrifying when you first hear it. But context matters more than the raw number ever could.
Here’s what actually unlocked today:
- 7.5% from the public sale (mostly through Coinbase)
- 3.3% airdrop to roughly 225,000 wallets
- Gradual unlocking starting for the 38.5% ecosystem fund
That’s roughly 10.8 billion tokens hitting circulation immediately, with more trickling in over time. The crucial detail everyone misses? Team and investor tokens are locked and cannot stake at launch. That single decision changes everything about early reward distribution.
Most launches get absolutely wrecked because insiders can stake their massive bags day one and compound while retail gets diluted. Monad explicitly prevented that.
What The Coinbase Sale Actually Told Us
The numbers from the Coinbase token sale were wild – $269 million raised against a $187 million target. More importantly, they used a “fill from bottom” allocation that favored smaller buyers. When retail manages to out-demand institutions in a structured sale, that’s usually a pretty bullish signal.
I’ve watched enough of these sales to know the pattern. When institutions dominate, the token often dumps hard at listing because they’re flipping allocations. When retail fights tooth and nail to get in, the floor tends to hold better. Simple as that.
Early Price Action Scenarios (As They Actually Play Out)
Right now, pre-market platforms show MON trading around that $0.029–$0.032 range. That’s giving us an initial FDV roughly in the $2.9–$3.2 billion neighborhood. Not cheap, but not completely insane given the tech and the current market environment.
Here’s how I’m thinking about the first 72 hours:
- Bear case ($0.018–$0.025): Heavy airdrop selling combines with thin initial liquidity. We’ve seen this movie before – recipients who farmed for months take profits immediately. If volume stays under $300M in the first day, this becomes probable.
- Base case ($0.035–$0.055): Airdrop selling gets absorbed by genuine demand from developers and users actually wanting to use the chain. Volume pushes $500M+, major perp venues add deep liquidity, and we settle into a reasonable discovery range.
- Bull case ($0.065+): Everything goes perfectly – mainnet stays up without issues, first major dApps announce migrations, staking demand explodes as people realize yields will be substantial with only circulating supply able to stake initially.
Honestly? I’m leaning toward the base case, maybe shading toward bull if the first few hours of chain stability look clean.
The Network Effect Flywheel Nobody’s Talking About
Here’s what actually excites me more than price speculation: the flywheel potential.
Developers have been waiting for a chain that delivers Solana-like performance without Solana’s reliability issues, but keeps full EVM compatibility. That’s Monad’s entire pitch. When those builders start deploying real TVL – not just meme coins, but actual DeFi protocols with users – the token accrual mechanics kick in.
Every transaction pays fees in MON. Every major protocol that migrates brings their users who need MON for gas. The 38.5% ecosystem fund can be used aggressively to bootstrap liquidity and incentives without dumping on retail.
I’ve seen this play out before, but rarely with this combination of technical readiness and fair launch mechanics.
What Could Actually Derail This
Nothing’s guaranteed, obviously. The biggest risks right now:
- Technical issues at launch – even brief downtime would kill momentum
- Coordinated dumping from large airdrop recipients
- Broader market turning risk-off (though BTC at $86k suggests we’re still in risk-on territory)
- Major exchanges being slow to list (though this seems unlikely given the Coinbase relationship)
Any single one of these could push us toward that bear case temporarily. But the beautiful thing about genuine technological advantage? It tends to win out eventually.
Where Price Could Realistically Go By EOY 2025
Everyone wants the million-dollar question. Fine, here’s my actual thinking:
If Monad simply executes – keeps the chain up, attracts real dApps, uses that ecosystem fund intelligently – a $10–15 billion FDV by end of 2025 feels completely reasonable. That would put MON in the $0.10–$0.15 range with the current supply schedule.
If they absolutely crush it and become the default high-performance EVM chain? $25 billion+ FDV isn’t crazy. That’s $0.25+ per token.
These aren’t the kind of numbers you throw around lightly. But when you have genuine technical differentiation in a market that’s starving for it, strange things become possible.
The chains that win the next cycle won’t be the ones with the best marketing. They’ll be the ones that simply work better than everything else. Monad might actually be that chain.
The launch is just beginning. The real story starts now – when we see whether this technology actually delivers on its promises in production, with real users and real money at stake.
One thing I know for sure: the next few weeks are going to be fascinating to watch.
Disclosure: This is not financial advice. Cryptocurrency investments carry significant risk. The author may hold positions in assets discussed.
