What is Monad (MON)? Analyzing the potential and challenges of a new public chain capable of thousands of TPS

Monad mainnet officially launched on November 24, 2025, marking a new phase for this high-performance Layer-1 blockchain, which claims to process tens of thousands of transactions per second. Within just a few days, its total network locked value rapidly surpassed $150 million, with leading DeFi applications deploying on it one after another. However, amidst anticipation, the native token MON has been under continuous pressure since its launch.

Project Overview: Funding Stars and Technological Breakthroughs

Monad is a high-performance Layer-1 blockchain designed to fundamentally solve the blockchain “Impossible Triangle” (scalability, security, and decentralization). Its core feature is being a “fully compatible high-performance public chain with Ethereum Virtual Machine compatibility.” This means developers can migrate existing Ethereum smart contracts and ecosystem tools to Monad with almost zero cost, without major modifications, and immediately enjoy exponential performance improvements. The project is developed by the Monad Labs team, whose core members come from traditional financial giant Jump Trading, with extensive experience in high-frequency trading system development.

Monad’s rise is supported by strong capital backing. In November 2025, it completed a public fundraising via Coinbase’s token sale platform, raising $269 million with over 85,000 participants. Prior to this, the project had completed multiple funding rounds, totaling over $244 million, led by top institutions such as Paradigm and Coinbase Ventures.

Core Innovations: How to Achieve “Ten Thousand TPS”?

Monad’s technical architecture revolves around breaking the bottleneck of sequential execution in traditional blockchains. Its claimed 10,000 TPS, sub-second block times, and finality are based on the following underlying innovations:

Parallel and Optimistic Execution: Unlike traditional blockchains that process transactions one by one, Monad can handle a large number of non-conflicting transactions simultaneously, significantly increasing throughput. Its “Optimistic Parallel Execution” mechanism predicts transaction dependencies and allows processing on multiple virtual machines concurrently. If conflicts occur later, re-execution ensures correctness.

Custom Consensus and Database: Monad adopts a consensus mechanism called MonadBFT, an optimized version of HotStuff protocol, supporting rapid transaction finality within about 1 second. Its core database, MonadDB, is designed for high-performance state management, optimized storage to lower node operation barriers, and promote network decentralization.

Asynchronous Execution and Pipelining: Monad decouples transaction execution from consensus, allowing transactions to be executed asynchronously and independently after consensus is reached. This design improves overall efficiency, reduces latency, and, combined with the above technologies, forms the foundation of its high performance.

Ecosystem Status: Early Results After Mainnet Launch

The mainnet launch is the starting gun for ecosystem development. The Monad ecosystem has shown strong momentum early on, with a strategy to quickly introduce mature “blue-chip” projects to guide liquidity, while incubating native innovations.

Infrastructure and DeFi: From the outset, Monad received robust infrastructure support. Leading oracles like Chainlink, cross-chain bridges such as Wormhole and LayerZero have been integrated. In DeFi, top protocols like Uniswap, Curve, and Morpho have rapidly deployed, with Uniswap locking nearly $60 million in TVL in the short term, becoming the largest liquidity hub in the ecosystem.

Emerging Sectors and Applications: Besides traditional DeFi, the Monad ecosystem has also seen distinctive applications. For example, the blockchain game Lumiterra has become one of the most active applications, with over 100,000 daily active wallets, leveraging Monad’s low latency for real-time on-chain gaming. NFT marketplaces like Magic Eden have integrated into the ecosystem, providing NFT and gaming asset trading channels.

Token Economics: Unlock Schedule and Market Impact

The total supply of MON tokens is 100 billion. Its distribution structure is key to understanding current and future price trends.

According to public information, MON’s allocation is roughly:

• 38.5% for ecosystem development (developer grants, community incentives, etc.)
• 27.0% to the team
• 19.7% to early investors
• 7.5% for public sale
• 4.0% reserved treasury
• 3.3% for community airdrops

At mainnet launch, a crucial detail is that over 50% of the token supply (including team, investors, and treasury shares) was initially locked, with gradual unlocking starting in the second half of 2026 on a quarterly basis. The initial circulating supply was only about 10.8% of the total.

Price Performance and Market Forecast

As of January 7, 2026, based on the latest data you provided, MON’s price is $0.02812, with a 24-hour trading volume of $9.08M and a total market cap of approximately $305.4 million. The price has increased by 21.34% over the past 7 days, indicating some volatility and market attention.

Market outlooks vary. On one hand, some believe that after airdrops and initial token listings, due to profit-taking by insiders and concerns over oversupply, prices may face downward pressure. On the other hand, technical analysis and ecosystem growth expectations lead to long-term forecasts.

Below is a comparison of user-provided data and market analyst predictions:

Future Challenges and Key Focus Points

Despite an impressive start, Monad faces many challenges ahead. The public chain sector has entered a fierce competition stage, with Solana and others establishing mature ecosystems and user habits. The narrative of “high performance” alone is no longer sufficient; the real test is whether it can attract developers to build continuously and retain genuine users.

In the coming year, two key points will determine Monad’s trajectory:

1. Genuine ecosystem growth: Whether it can surpass initial “blue-chip protocol migration,” incubate influential native killer applications, and form stable user retention and capital cycles.
2. Token unlock absorption: The large-scale token unlock starting in the second half of 2026 will be a major test of market supply and demand. Whether the actual demand generated by the ecosystem can effectively absorb this additional supply will be a core price determinant.

As the market focuses on MON’s price chart, a more important curve is quietly forming—the growth trajectory of daily active addresses and smart contract interactions on Monad. By the end of 2025, its total locked value exceeded $150 million, but despite claiming ten thousand TPS, the actual daily transaction volume still has a huge gap from its theoretical maximum.