After a flying start on Monday, the hype surrounding Monad’s (MON) ICO on Coinbase has died down. We take a look back at this presale, whose success could be compromised by criticized tokenomics.
Monad’s MON sale slows down after a strong start
Last week, we reported on the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) of Monad’s MON token on the Coinbase platform. At the time, we also highlighted some particularly questionable tokenomics, with only 7.5% of the total MON supply reserved for this sale.
Launched on Monday on Coinbase, the sale got off to a good start, with $43.2 million of the $187.5 million target raised in just 23 minutes, as highlighted by Scott Shapiro, Coinbase’s product manager.
Nevertheless, enthusiasm slowed somewhat thereafter, with 45% of tokens sold after 6 hours, then 63% at the end of the second day yesterday, as noted by our colleagues at The Block.
For Keone Hon, co-founder of Monad, this slowdown can be explained by the auction model chosen by the project, which encourages investors to wait and see before potentially positioning themselves at the last minute depending on the level of interest. In addition, Hon emphasizes a desire to reach as many people as possible:
The goal of the MON token sale is to ensure the widest possible distribution. We chose Coinbase (and its democratic and transparent allocation algorithm) because of its unique ability to reach an audience that we believe is important to engage and reactivate. The world is vast, and it is crucial to break out of the speculative bubble.
Such a remark may be surprising, given the tokenomics flaws mentioned above, and indeed, Louis Thomazeau, investment partner for the Swiss fund L1D, also added:
Technically, excluding the entire European continent does not optimize “the widest possible distribution.”
In response, Keone Hon explained the difficulties of setting everything up for a new venture such as Coinbase’s ICO platform. When Louis Thomazeau asked whether Coinbase had communicated about the possible acceptance of European investors, Azi Hussain, head of listings at Coinbase, said that the exchange was “working on it”:
In fact, it is true that neither Monad nor Coinbase clearly and explicitly stated in their prior communications that European investors would not be able to participate in this sale. However, there was a clear indication that this would be the case, namely the fact that the URL of the ICO page automatically redirected to the exchange’s home page.
With the MON sale ending on November 22, we will be able to draw conclusions about the success or failure of this operation by then.
