Monad Airdrop "Turn the Table", Testnet has died.

Author: Hu Tao, ChainCatcher

Yesterday, the Layer1 public chain Monad token MON, which attracted market attention, officially launched and once fell below the public offering user cost price. Currently, the FDV still hovers in the range of 3-3.5 billion USD, which is not only lower than the mainstream predicted market value of 8 billion USD on Polymarket, but also far below the early Pre-TGE market valuation of 15 billion USD.

This is not only a heavy blow to the Layer 1 narrative but also a milestone “tragedy” for the profit-seeking crowd.

Previously, Monad became the highest-valued unlaunched Layer 1 in the market with a valuation of $3 billion, with high expectations from the community. Its testnet has accumulated over 300 million unique addresses, and many studios are registering Monad addresses using millions of addresses. At the end of October, Monad officially opened airdrop queries but unexpectedly excluded all testnet interaction addresses from the airdrop.

The logic of the “毛党” (token farmers) is that “sunshine everywhere” is a common practice among many project teams. As long as they maintain frequent interactions, they may receive token rewards ranging from a few dollars to several tens of dollars. The accumulated token value from multiple addresses can still be considerable. However, Monad officials did not respond to the wishes of the large token farming community by excluding all testnet addresses from the airdrop scope.

“All addresses interacting with the testnet have been exploited, and participating in various NFTs is basically useless. The only ones who received the Monad airdrop were some old addresses that had never interacted with Monad but had traded on Hyperliquid,” said A-Du (a pseudonym), head of a毛 extraction studio in Hangzhou, to ChainCatcher.

For a time, Monad became the target of intense criticism from many users looking to exploit it, but the Monad team remained unfazed. According to the well-known KOL Feng Mi, the idea behind this airdrop is to bundle individuals who have made contributions, have identity, and have potential into Monad, focusing on identity + contribution, such as Monad ecosystem developers, heavy DeFi users, and quality NFT holders.

The well-known alpha blogger Spark received a reward of 3 million MON in this airdrop, currently valued at about 110,000 USD. This is not due to his interaction records, but because he has served as a Mod in the Monad community for 3 years and established the Monad Chinese community. This is considered by Monad officials as a substantial contribution, which is also a key target for most project airdrops.

For project parties, the significance of airdrops lies in rewarding long-term supporters of the project, reflecting their emphasis on community users, while also rewarding active participants and influencers in the surrounding ecosystem, using airdrop rewards to attract them into their own ecosystem. From the earliest Uniswap to the thousands of projects that followed, such as Gitcoin, Arbitrum, Scroll, Berachain, and Aster, airdrops have been viewed as an essential path for project parties to attract users.

During this period, the standards for airdrops have been constantly forked and evolved. Some projects focus on equality and general happiness, being quite generous to the participants who engage in interactions, while others establish strict rules for interactions on testnets/mainnets, conducting a rigorous witch hunt based on a points system. This time, Monad completely abandoned users who interact on the testnet, or rather, retail investors.

“If a network ignores retail investors for a long time, it will become overly elitist in its early stages and lose a broad community base. In the early days of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and Bsc, it was supported by a group of seemingly insignificant small retail investors who brought network effects and community vitality.” Feng Mi said this on X. He believes that Monad should provide grassroots retail investors with a space to grow gradually; even a small amount can enable more people to truly become part of the MON network community.

Chasing Wind believes that the毛人 (毛人 refers to those who profit off of projects) not only contribute fees, data, and traffic to the project parties but also play a significant role in promotion. Personally, I believe these individuals should be given some incentives. The operation of Monad is really too poorly considered, shaking the foundation of trust in the entire industry. "Ice Frog also stated on Twitter.

“However, from the perspective of the project team, they need to formulate the airdrop strategy based on the long-term development needs of the project. 'Arbitrageurs have no loyalty; they will sell off as soon as they receive the airdrop and then run to the next project team to arbitrage. For the project, this only creates selling pressure and no long-term benefits. Is it necessary to distribute tokens to them?” An anonymous KOL described arbitrageurs as 'parasites' in the crypto ecosystem.

The Australian Master Brother also believes that the logic of airdrops in the industry is changing. “In the past, when CEX examined the fundamentals of a project, they paid great attention to the activity level of on-chain data and active user metrics. During the cold start phase, project teams needed popularity. For a long time, project teams tacitly accepted or even reached an agreement with the airdrop army: if you come here to help me get listed, I will airdrop to you, and we will share the profits together. But now, CEX Listing no longer looks at on-chain data and users, because everyone knows that these data are heavily inflated,” the Australian Master Brother said in a post on Twitter.

The logic of business is ruthless. As the data bubble on the chain becomes increasingly severe and the selling pressure from pump-and-dump groups negatively impacts the price trends of many projects, Monad's choice is reasonable. However, this is destined not to be the choice for most projects, as Monad, as a public chain project with significant capital backing, still has many cards to play. Its technical strength and the potential explosive power of ecological applications could bring it a large community of users. However, for most projects, they essentially belong to the marketing category and must rely on airdrops to attract attention and market heat.

In the long run, airdrops remain one of the important sources of value in the cryptocurrency industry, but the logic and targets of airdrops are undergoing profound changes. “The results of the Monad airdrop basically announce the collapse of the logic of the testnet interaction and farming track, and in the future, it is highly probable that no one will be brushing the testnet anymore,” said the Australian master.

In fact, Monad's “table-flipping” this time has been anticipated by many KOLs, such as Master Brother from Australia, Ice Frog, and Chasing Wind, who have openly stated that they did not participate in the interaction with Monad. It is understood that the top KOLs will focus more on diverse markets such as “mouth stroking” and arbitrage, while also concentrating on high-quality projects like Polymarket to focus on creating premium accounts.

In addition, several interviewed studios indicated that their earnings are lower than last year and also below expectations. “The key is still to find areas where you have advantages, whether it's low labor costs, advanced technology, keen investment research that can discover early projects, or influential KOLs to leverage. It's quite difficult to achieve significant profits just by following the crowd and doing the same as everyone else,” said Adu.

As the market capitalization of leading projects such as Monad has significantly fallen below market expectations, and many projects have locked user airdrop shares for a long time after their TGE, the position of the profit-seeking individuals in the project's benefit distribution ecosystem has been declining repeatedly, resulting in a continuous decrease in the value of the tokens they hold. The logic of profit-seeking through volume has become increasingly unsustainable.

“Therefore, the era when retail investors could enter the primary market to take advantage of cheap dividends by providing labor is indeed over. The door has actually been closing for a while, and Monad's airdrop was merely the final closure of the last small gap,” sighed the Australian Master.