Monad kicks off MON airdrop claims as mainnet launch edges closer

The Monad Foundation has opened the airdrop claims portal for Monad's long-awaited native MON token, live for the next three weeks.

The airdrop allocates MON to more than 230,000 members of the crypto community across five categories, the Monad Foundation confirmed in a blog post . These include 5,500 Monad community members, onchain power users, broader crypto participants, contributors, and builders.

More specifically, this includes users of major DeFi protocols — including Aave, Morpho, Pendle, Curve, Uniswap, PancakeSwap, Hyperliquid, and Pump.fun — as well as governance participation in leading DAOs and ownership of NFTs such as CryptoPunks, Pudgy Penguins, Mad Lads, and Milady Maker.

The project cautioned participants to be aware of scams ahead of the portal's launch, reiterating that users should only follow its official communication channels and that there is no highly time-sensitive component to the process, with plenty of time to stake their claim.

The portal marks the eligibility phase only, allowing users to connect wallets and reserve tokens. MON won't be transferable yet — distribution will follow the token generation event, coinciding with the mainnet launch, expected to be announced after the claim window closes on Nov. 3.

"The portal uses Privy for authentication," Monad co-founder Keone Hon confirmed on X. "You can sign a message with your EVM or Solana wallets to prove ownership. You can also link your Twitter, Discord, and other social accounts. Everything uses Privy. Only sign messages that you've reviewed carefully."

"Once your information is in, that's all you have to do! You can forget about this, open your wallet on Monad mainnet launch day and you will have your MON there," Monad Foundation Head of Growth Kevin McCordic said . "There will be an optional early reveal event for those interested in seeing their airdrop amounts — tune in October 28th!"

Based on mark prices of Hyperliquid's MON-USD hyperp of nearly $0.069 ahead of the portal's opening, MON's fully diluted valuation stands at roughly $6.9 billion, with $7.7 million in open interest and $4.7 million in 24-hour trading volume. Hyperps, or Hyperliquid-only perps, function like perpetual contracts but do not require an underlying spot or index oracle price.

En route to mainnet

Layer 1 blockchain Monad rolled out its testnet earlier this year and is designed to be fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, making it easier for developers to transition their applications. The project has previously indicated its mainnet is expected to launch by the end of 2025. "We invite you to join us on Monad Public Mainnet soon," the team said on Tuesday.

Monad claims to have optimized the way Ethereum works to provide greater throughput — designed to offer up to 10,000 TPS with a one-second block time. However, this may be more challenging for node operators, with hardware requirements roughly twice those of the Ethereum blockchain.

Rather than simply cloning the Ethereum codebase, Monad says it's building a new EVM from the ground up, using a pipelined architecture. This staggered approach, rather than carrying out each process one after the other, enables more efficient processing and instant block finality. 

At launch, Monad will integrate with apps like Uniswap, Magic Eden, and OpenSea, and support the Phantom, MetaMask, Rabby, and other wallets. The network's token will be used to pay for transactions to be included within blocks, known as a carriage cost, and for transactions to be executed, according to Monad's technical documents .

Monad Labs, the developer behind the blockchain, was co-founded by former Jump Trading developers and raised $225 million in a 2024 funding round led by Paradigm. Monad Labs previously raised $19 million in funding led by Dragonfly Capital, following a $9 million pre-seed round in May 2022 and a $10 million seed round in December 2022.

Monad ecosystem projects, including decentralized exchange Kuru, staking protocol Kintsu, and liquid staking platform aPriori, have also collectively raised over $100 million.