Monad mainnet launches with 50.6% of total MON token supply initially locked

Following a multi-year development cycle, the Monad mainnet is launching on Monday. The high-throughput blockchain’s public debut follows several weeks of MON token distribution efforts designed to foster ecosystem participation and co-ownership. 

On Sunday, Monad wrapped up its MON token sale, seeing a surge in interest as the offering was set to close. The public sale, the first conducted using Coinbase’s new ICO platform, raised approximately $269 million from 85,820 participants, according to the Monad team. 

In addition to the 7.5% of the total MON token supply offered via Coinbase, Monad also set aside over 3.3 billion MON tokens — about 3.3% of the total 100 billion token cap — for community airdrops. 

According to the project’s tokenomics, 50.6% of the total MON supply will initially be locked, including the nearly 26.9 billion tokens allocated to the team, 19.6 billion tokens for investors, and 3.9 billion for the Monad treasury. Unlocks will begin in the second half of 2026 and gradually increase quarterly until the end of 2029 per a public vesting schedule. 

About 38.5 billion tokens will be immediately circulated for ecosystem development. “While a minority (less than 2% of total supply) of the MON set aside for Ecosystem Development is already committed to various projects and infrastructure providers, the Monad Foundation expects the majority balance to be spent over many years post-Public Mainnet launch,” the foundation wrote. 

'Speed, security, and usability'

At launch, several well-established crypto projects will be live on the Monad mainnet, including MetaMask and Phantom wallets, Curve and Uniswap decentralized exchanges, and USDC, USDT0, and AUSD stablecoins, among other protocols. The network is “EVM bytecode-compatible,” meaning developers can easily redeploy Ethereum-compatible applications.

“Developers shouldn’t have to choose between speed, security, and usability. With Monad, we’ve worked to deliver all three, without asking builders to abandon the tools and languages they already know,” Monad co-founder Keone Hon said in a statement on Monday. “We’re excited to empower a new wave of applications and bring blockchain technology closer to mainstream and institutional adoption.”

Monad development kicked off in 2022 in an attempt to solve the blockchain trilemma tradeoffs between security, scalability, and decentralization. The chain uses “optimistic parallel execution,” a specialized RaptorCast validator communication protocol, and a custom database called MonadDb to achieve transaction finality in about 400 milliseconds. Monad open-sourced its client under a GPL-3.0 license in September. 

A Monad testnet reportedly achieved a peak processing speed of over 10,000 transactions per second. 

Category Labs (formerly Monad Labs) has raised at least $225 million from venture backers, including Coinbase Ventures, Dragonfly Capital, Electric Capital, Greenoaks, and Paradigm.