Monad Rises After Airdrop While Bitcoin and Ethereum Droop

The price of Monad’s native cryptocurrency rose on Tuesday, following a long-anticipated airdrop that initially underwhelmed a number of speculators.

The token, which can be used to pay for transaction fees or secure the layer-1 network through staking, recently traded hands at $0.042, up 19% from a day before, according to crypto data provider CoinGecko.

MON’s recent price marked a 68% increase from its initial price of $0.025 on Monday, which was the token’s going rate during a recently conducted public sale. MON’s price had risen as high as $0.045 earlier on Tuesday.

MON’s rise came as crypto prices continued cooling, falling back into a weekslong pattern, despite green shoots on Monday. Bitcoin erased gains as it fell 1.8% to $87,199. Ethereum also edged down to $2,939, while showing an 0.6% decrease over the previous day.

On Monday, some onlookers expressed surprise that MON’s price had mirrored the public sale, which took place on a platform that Coinbase introduced for fledgling tokens. Others argued that the price action was evidence of a system working as intended.

Monad bills itself as a high-performance blockchain, which solves limitations that other networks face by processing transactions in parallel, such as Solana or Sei.

Despite taking issue with the asset’s low circulating supply—only around 10% of all MON tokens that exist are currently in circulation—BitMEX co-founder and former CEO Arthur Hayes posited that the token could climb to $10, as animal spirits return to the crypto market.

“Just what this bull market needs, another low float, high FDV, useless L1,” he said on X. “But [obviously], I aped. It’s a bull market.”

Airdrops are typically used as a way to reward a crypto project’s early adopters, doling out tokens for free to community members and developers. Oftentimes, a number of recipients sell their airdrop to lock in gains, including an individual who goes NikkiSixx7 on X.

The individual told Decrypt that they “don’t regret” dumping their MON tokens on Monday at $0.031 apiece, arguing that the network’s team “gave almost nothing to their own communities.”

For NikkiSix7, the airdrop resulted in a $238 payday. The 10,600 MON tokens that the individual received would be worth around $445 today, based on current prices.

Over the past day, Monad had generated $400 million in trading volume on Upbit, the south korean crypto exchange. Meanwhile, $233 million worth of MON had been traded on Coinbase, followed by $160 million on Dubai-based Bybit.