Monad token sale defies ‘fizzle’ fears, will end oversubscribed on Coinbase

The public offering for Monad's MON tokens will conclude oversubscribed, as a late surge in buying activity assuages initial fears that the token sale would fizzle out. 

The sale, which sought to raise $187 million in USDC, has raised nearly $216 million as of publication time, over 115% of the target. The pace of buys increased on Saturday ahead of the sale's planned 9 p.m. ET conclusion, according to a dashboard from X user Swishi, with over $43 million in buys over the past 24 hours. 

The pace of MON buys began to increase Saturday morning, via Swishi.

The MON token sale, which started hot with $43 million in buys within the first half hour of its launch on Nov. 17, seemed to fizzle that day, reaching only 45% of its target roughly six hours after it began. In comparison, a token sale for rival network MegaETH on Oct. 27 saw $1.39 billion in commitments for just $50 million worth of tokens, with the sale oversubscribed by 27.8x. 

Monad is seeking to develop an EVM-compatible hyper-performant Layer 1 network. (MegaETH, also EVM-compatible, is a Layer 2 rollup.) About 7.5% of the total MON supply was offered via Coinbase, in the latter firm's first major test of its new public token sales platform, a significant shift in strategy for the leading U.S. crypto company. 

Of the max 100 billion MON token supply, 38.5% will be reserved for ecosystem development, 27% for the team, and 19.7% for investors. A smaller 4% allocation is reserved for the Category Labs Treasury. 

Monad co-founder Keone Hon had defended the firm's token sale earlier in the week, when it looked like the sale might end undersubscribed. "The purpose of the MON token sale is to achieve the broadest distribution," Hon wrote in a post to X. "We chose Coinbase (and their allocation algorithm, which is democratic and transparent) because of their unique ability to reach an audience that we think is important to engage and re-activate. The world is a big place and it's so important to break out of the bubble."

Hon had predicted that the sale's mechanisms might lead to a last-minute surge in commitments. "In the MON token sale on Coinbase, users get 5 1/2 days to decide whether to commit, and once they commit, they're locked in," Hon also said on Tuesday. "That actually incentivizes people to wait until the last minute to evaluate, which is an interesting dynamic that might be revisited for future sales."