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Key Takeaways
- The Monad Foundation offered early investors up to $60 million to sell locked MON early, but nearly all declined.
- Repurchased tokens remain locked on their original vesting schedule, so the buyback doesn’t add new supply to the market.
- MON trades around $0.021, about 16% below its public sale price, even as Monad’s DeFi activity has grown sharply.
The Monad Foundation gave some of its earliest investors a chance to cash out locked MON tokens months before they would normally become tradeable. Nearly all of those approached declined.
The foundation said Tuesday it had completed a program offering to buy locked MON from select early investors at a discount, with as much as $60 million set aside for the purchases.
What the Foundation Disclosed, and What It Didn’t
The foundation did not disclose the price it offered, how much of the $60 million was ultimately spent, or how many investors participated. Any tokens the foundation did acquire through the program remain locked on their original vesting schedule, meaning the buyback does not bring additional MON onto the market ahead of schedule.
The program functioned as an early exit option rather than a token unlock. Investors willing to accept a lower price could receive cash immediately instead of waiting for their allocation to become tradeable under the network’s normal vesting terms.
Because repurchased tokens stay locked, the foundation’s stated goal was to give liquidity to individual investors whose circumstances had changed without increasing the total supply available to the broader market.
Monad’s Vesting Schedule and the November Unlock
Monad is a newer blockchain built to run applications compatible with Ethereum, positioning itself as a faster alternative for developers already building in Ethereum’s ecosystem. Its MON token pays transaction fees and helps secure the network.
Investors were allocated about 19.7 billion MON, close to 20% of the token’s original supply, when Monad’s public network launched last November. Those tokens are locked for one year from launch, after which they begin releasing on a monthly schedule that continues over the remainder of a four-year vesting period.
As a result, November marks the first point at which early investors can begin selling MON through normal vesting releases, roughly three months after the foundation’s buyback offer concluded. The program concluded roughly three months before investors could begin selling MON through normal vesting releases.
MON’s Price Against Its Fully Diluted Supply
MON traded around $0.021 on Tuesday, about 16% below the $0.025 price set in last year’s public token sale.
Roughly 11.8 billion MON are in circulation, giving the token a market value of about $250 million against a fully diluted valuation near $2.1 billion once all locked tokens are counted. That gap between circulating and fully diluted value reflects how much of the token’s eventual supply remains outside the market.
Network Activity Has Grown Even as the Token Lagged
The token’s price weakness stands in contrast to activity building on the network itself. Total value deposited in Monad-based decentralized finance applications climbed to about $895 million from roughly $360 million on July 2, according to DeFiLlama, an increase of nearly 150% in about six weeks.
Stablecoins on Monad are worth approximately $707 million, and decentralized exchanges on the network processed roughly $79 million in trading volume over a recent 24-hour period.
That growth in on-chain activity does not explain why nearly all approached investors turned down the buyback offer. Without knowing the size of the discount the foundation proposed, the low participation rate cannot be read on its own as a bullish signal for MON’s price. Investors may have simply judged the offered discount too steep relative to the token’s prospects.
What Comes Next for Investors
The foundation said the program was designed to provide liquidity to early investors whose investment plans had shifted since Monad’s launch, while keeping the remaining holder base aligned with the network’s longer-term development. The foundation has not said whether it plans to run a similar program before or after the November unlock.
