Monad unveils airdrop and public mainnet date

Monad is set to launch its upcoming Layer 1 blockchain and native token on Nov. 24, at 9 a.m. ET, a team member disclosed to The Block. The public network launch and community airdrop are among the most anticipated events in crypto this year.

The Monad Foundation opened a token claim portal in mid-October until Monday, Nov. 3, providing users a view into their MON allocations and to connect their wallets. Monad’s chosen wallet partner, Privy, experienced " degraded performance " the morning the claims portal opened, signalling the intense interest in the token launch.

"It's one of the most anticipated crypto launches in the past year," Director of Marketing at the Monad Foundation Nathan Cha told The Block.

The airdrop was designed to reward thousands of early members of the Monad ecosystem, as well as approximately 225,000 verifiable onchain users. This includes "significant" users of DEXs like Hyperliquid and Uniswap, lending protocols like Aave, Euler, and Morpho, and memecoin launchpads like Pump.fun and Virtuals, among many other protocols. Longtime holders of about a dozen NFT projects and DAO governance participants will also be rewarded, according to Monad.

"We want members of the Monad Community to be significant stakeholders in the network because we believe in their future influence and potential to shape the course of both Monad and crypto in general," the Monad Foundation wrote in October. "We believe that we are surrounded by giants who have already shaped Monad substantially and who will go on to transform all of crypto."

In addition to reserving tokens for crypto educational efforts like RareSkills and SheFi, as well as security researchers like SEAL 911 and Protocol Guild, Monad released a limited series of " Monad Cards " detailing high-profile social media commentators.

That said, the exact tokenomics breakdown has yet to be made public.

Monad was founded in 2022 and raised $225 million to build an EVM-compatible network that rivals Solana’s speed and Ethereum’s decentralization.

A testnet released earlier this year provided a view into the protocol’s custom parallel execution design capable of running thousands of transactions at once and a bespoke MonadDb database providing sub-second finality.

At launch, Monad plans to have integrations with decentralized apps, including Uniswap, Magic Eden, and OpenSea, and support wallets like OKX, Backpack, MetaMask, Rabby, among other options.