After a flying start on Monday, the buzz surrounding Monad’s (MON) ICO on Coinbase has died down. A look back at this presale, whose success could be jeopardized by criticized tokenomics.
Monad’s MON sale slows down after a strong start
Last week, we covered the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) of Monad’s MON token on the Coinbase platform. At that time, we also highlighted 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 strong start, however, as in just 23 minutes, $43.2 million had already been raised out of the $187.5 million target, as noted by Scott Shapiro, Coinbase’s product director.
Nevertheless, enthusiasm slowed somewhat thereafter, with 45% of the tokens sold after 6 hours, then 63% by 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 attributed to the auction model chosen by the project, which reportedly encourages investors to adopt a wait-and-see approach, potentially positioning themselves at the last moment depending on the level of enthusiasm. Furthermore, he 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 earlier, and indeed, Louis Thomazeau, an investment partner at the Swiss fund L1D, also chimed in:
Technically, excluding the entire European continent does not optimize “the widest distribution.”
In response, Keone Hon explained the difficulties of getting everything up and running with a new initiative like Coinbase’s ICO platform, and when Louis Thomazeau asked whether Coinbase had communicated about potentially accepting European investors, Azi Hussain, Head of Listings at Coinbase, indicated that the exchange was “working on it”:
Exchange between Keone Hon and Louis Thomazeau
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 might be the case: the ICO page’s URL automatically redirected to the exchange’s homepage.
As the MON sale ends on November 22, we will be able to draw conclusions about the success or failure of this operation by then.
