Monad Briefly Dips Below ICO Price

Monad, the parallelized EVM Layer 1 blockchain that launched its token last week, took investors on a wild ride, after the token nearly doubled from its ICO price, only to erase all its gains and dip below the $2.5 billion sale valuation this morning.

MON has recovered slightly this afternoon, trading back above its ICO price of $0.025 after falling as low as $0.0225.

MON Chart – CoinGecko

While investors and airdrop recipients enjoyed the token’s strong price action in its opening 72 hours, MON has fallen back in line with the rest of the crypto market, which continues to struggle.

Monad’s mainnet has only been live for seven days, and is currently the 36th-largest blockchain by DeFi total value locked (TVL) with just $151 million according to DeFiLlama.

It is worth noting that Monad has been left with big shoes to fill, as the last major Layer 1 launch, Plasma, achieved more than $2 billion in TVL on its opening day.

Most chains start off slower, with Hyperliquid’s HyperEVM perhaps being a fairer comparison. HyperEVM took more than two months to break above the $500 million TVL mark, and reached as high as $2.7 billion in September, roughly 10 months after its launch.

DeFi protocols deployed on Monad are still rolling out incentives for the chain’s bootstrapping period, with Euler Finance, currently the fifth largest protocol by TVL on Monad, announcing new borrow incentives today.

Even though its DeFi TVL is lagging, overall activity on Monad remains strong. Over the last seven days, Monad was the seventh busiest chain by total transactions, with more than 19 million unique transactions, surpassing Arbitrum and Avalanche, which each recorded roughly 16 million transactions.

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