After a flying start on Monday, the buzz surrounding Monad’s (MON) ICO on Coinbase has died down. Here’s a look back at this presale, whose success could be jeopardized by its 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 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 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 afterward, 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 explained by the auction model chosen by the project, which actually encourages investors to adopt a wait-and-see approach so they can potentially jump in at the last minute depending on the level of excitement. 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 re-activate. The world is vast, and it’s crucial to step outside the speculative bubble.
Such a remark may come as a surprise, given the tokenomics flaws mentioned earlier; indeed, Louis Thomazeau, an investment partner at the Swiss fund L1D, also chimed in:
Technically, excluding the entire European continent does not optimize for “the widest distribution.”
In response, Keone Hon explained the challenges of implementing everything 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 be unable to participate in this sale. However, there was one glaring clue that suggested this might be the case: the fact that the ICO page’s URL automatically redirected to the exchange’s homepage.
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.
