An Ethereum Killer's Muted Kickoff

Just three months ago, Monad jumped into the deep end as one of the first big projects to pursue an initial coin offering this cycle.

It hasn't been the easiest road since then for the EVM-based Alt-L1.

Monad's native token MON entered a brutal crypto market, and while it trades 20% below its $0.025 ICO debut price, it's performing better than plenty of other crypto assets during the same time.

But Monad's post-ICO journey has been exacerbated by other struggles, including a consistent wave of high-profile departures (accompanied by plenty of "vesting cliff reached" memes on CT) and some fairly tepid adoption metrics that are contributing to a fair amount of bearishness on the project across Crypto Twitter.

Today, we’re revisiting Monad three months post-ICO, unpacking the tough vibes that have followed, what they've been working on, and the challenges facing the much-hyped chain.

The Monad Pitch

Provocatively pitched as an Ethereum killer, Monad boldly promised to advance the efficient frontier of blockchain design, constrained by tradeoffs between decentralization and throughput.

For Monad, this involved fundamentally rearchitecting Ethereum with parallelism, low-latency consensus mechanisms, and high-efficiency data handling structures. The end result is the Monad we know today, an EVM-compatible L1 capable of processing 10k transactions per second from within one single, user-friendly unified execution environment.

Performance Without Demand

Three months ago, Monad was the archetype for a modern mega-ICO: its technical ambition unmatched, its retail accessibility incomparable, and its community following exceptional.

But it had plenty of hype to live up to following its successful oversubscribed ICO, which received $269M in total bids against $187.5M worth of available tokens.

Three months later, the verdict feels complicated. The chain shipped, the token is here, throughput is high, and fees are low. While the original vision of Monad seems to have been achieved, sustained demand never really materialized.

Monad is doing all of the things that you'd expect from a newly launched chain that has hundreds of millions of dollars sitting in the bank and billions worth of tokens waiting to unlock. The nascent blockchain has already spent millions on developer hackathons, builder residency programs, and venture accelerators. Its social team is frequently getting busy on socials, shouting out the popular community applications.

But despite all capital committed and promotional efforts made, the bad vibes on Crypto Twitter incurred by Monad's relentless string of high-profile resignations from early team members has been hard to avoid.

Adoption metrics have been mixed as well. For one of the last year's most anticipated L1 launches, ranking 20th by TVL on DeFiLlama was certainly not the expected outcome. Meanwhile, Monad currently sits far below its peak of 150k daily active users, with onchain usage activity now hovering just below 20k DAUs. 

As Ethereum pushed forward faster than expected on its scaling promises via zkEVM advances, users don't appear to be showing a lot of hunger for another EVM-based L1.

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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin echoed a similar sentiment earlier this month, framing the creation of EVM-based alt-L1s as unnecessary:

“We don't friggin need more copypasta EVM chains, and we definitely don't need even more L1s.”

Challenges Ahead

Monad successfully merged Solana's scale with the EVM, producing a cohesive user experience that Ethereum is still years from replicating itself. That is definitely a success in itself, but after years of buildup and hype, it's clear that Monad still has plenty left to prove to the broader community.

The MON token is holding fast, currently on the rise and trading just below 20% below the IPO price. Its onchain metrics have stabilized, with DAUs flattening out and TVL no longer bleeding as it did throughout January.

On paper, Monad checks every technical box of a successful blockchain. In practice, however, user migration has been more muted than many expected, with limited urgency to migrate for an experience that already exists elsewhere.