Magma staking goes live on Monad mainnet following MON token sale

Magma staking went live on Monad’s mainnet on Monday, giving early users a way to stake MON and receive a liquid staking token, gMON, that continues earning rewards across the network's DeFi protocols.

The protocol is the first MEV-optimized liquid staking product on Monad, an Ethereum-compatible Layer 1 network that pitched faster confirmations and low fees.

Magma's design captures the extra value produced when validators reorder or bundle transactions, known as MEV, and returns that revenue to stakers instead of letting it accrue to validators alone.

Magma CEO David Mass told The Block he is less focused on early TVL spikes and more on what people are actually doing on-chain during Monad’s first weeks. If users quickly move beyond airdrop activity and start putting “real size into Monad-native strategies,” he said, it would signal that the network is already functioning as a real economic environment.

Mass added that gMON should become “the first stop for users entering the Monad DeFi ecosystem,” ultimately serving as default collateral across money markets, perps, and structured products.

He also touched on the current market downturn, saying he hasn’t shifted his broader expectations for early activity on the chain. “A choppy market is actually a great test of a product’s usefulness,” he said, noting that market cycles affect the pace of growth, but “the quality of the infrastructure decides the direction of growth.”

Monad token sale

The launch follows the close of Monad’s first public token sale on Coinbase’s new fundraising platform — the exchange’s first offering with U.S. retail access since the 2018 ICO crackdown.

The MON sale ran Nov. 17–22 and reached its full $187.5 million USDC target, according to the official token sale dashboard. Coinbase data shows that the sale ended more than 1.4x oversubscribed.

Monad's initial supply totals 100 billion MON, with roughly half unlocked at mainnet for ecosystem programs and a recent airdrop. Team and investor allocations remain locked for at least a year and cannot be staked during that period.

Magma, built by Hydrogen Labs, has raised $4.2 million from investors including Bloccelerate, CMS Holdings, Animoca Ventures, and Arthur Hayes' Maelstrom. It is working with validator partners, including Blockdaemon and Figment, with additional integrations planned across borrow-lend platforms such as Euler.