Monad Mainnet Launch: Ecosystem Overview and Emerging Projects

Monad Mainnet Launch: Ecosystem Overview and Emerging Projects

After much anticipation, the Monad mainnet, a high-performance blockchain, has finally launched. The Monad mainnet and MON token officially went live on November 24th, following its debut as Coinbase’s first Launchpad project, attracting 85,820 participants who invested $269 million. Even in a bear market, the oversubscribed Monad token sale demonstrated its ability to attract capital and generate buzz. As a leader in the parallel EVM space, Monad has promised a throughput of up to 10,000 TPS (transactions per second) and a 1-second finality time, now facing real-world market testing. As another bet by Paradigm in the public blockchain arena, Monad serves as a test of Paradigm's investment acumen in the crypto market. A high-performance blockchain's capacity to support its ecosystem will determine its value. Unlike simply relying on a 'copy-paste' strategy for existing EVM applications, Monad's unique technical architecture has attracted a new wave of projects seeking to leverage its high-frequency trading capabilities.

The Monad ecosystem comprises 304 protocols, including 77 unique to it, with DeFi protocols accounting for over 60%. PANews has compiled a list of the most representative emerging projects in the Monad ecosystem, considering factors like Monad exclusivity, investment institutions, project activity, and other dimensions, covering DeFi, Launchpad, prediction markets, DeAI, and DePin. However, Monad is still in the early stages of ecosystem building, with many projects still in testing or early interaction phases. Users should be aware of potential risks when participating.

Mynt (USDm)

Mynt (USDm) is a zero-knowledge proof stablecoin protocol powered by Succinct’s SP1 zkVM (zero-knowledge virtual machine) architecture, combined with a collateralized minting model. Users can use MON tokens as collateral to mint USDm while earning yields from reserve assets. Mynt emphasizes verifiable privacy, collaborating with Fairblock to use additive homomorphic encryption (PHE) and multi-party computation (MPC) to encrypt transaction amounts, mitigating the risk of front-running. Mynt also introduces the concept of 'state liquidity.' Thanks to ZK technology, USDm can seamlessly integrate rents across different protocols, meaning users don’t need to frequently transfer tokens between DeFi protocols, instead enabling liquidity reuse and verification through state proofs. In the testnet phase, Myn processed over 1 million transactions and generated $250,000 in revenue.

Kintsu

Kintsu is positioned as a liquidity staking protocol focused on maximizing capital efficiency. Users receive sMON after staking MON, a circulating token that accrues staking rewards over time. The sMON token model is designed for deep DeFi integration. By allowing sMON to circulate and trade in various DeFi applications, Kintsu not only maintains the liquidity of staked assets but also allows users to deploy assets into yield markets without sacrificing basic staking rewards. After its mainnet launch, Kintsu demonstrated a strong early lead, with a TVL of 17.50 million MON (approximately $540,000) and 605 sMON holders. The protocol has secured $4 million in seed funding led by Castle Island Ventures.

Magma

Magma is a liquidity staking platform that allows users to earn circulating staking vouchers gMON by staking MON tokens. gMON not only represents staking rewards but also has composability and can be used as collateral in various dApps (decentralized applications) within the Monad ecosystem for lending, trading, and other activities. After the mainnet launch, Magma's TVL (Total Value Locked) exceeded 7.13 million MON (approximately $200,000), with over 800 gMON holders, 800 independent addresses, and over 1,000 transactions. The protocol has secured $3.9 million in seed funding with participation from Animoca Ventures, among others.

Kuru

Kuru is a completely on-chain executed CLOB DEX (Central Limit Order Book Decentralized Exchange). The protocol's uniqueness lies in its leveraging Monad's parallel execution and low latency to provide a CEX-like user experience while maintaining self-custody. Kuru's design allows market makers to provide and revoke limit orders at low, constant gas costs, addressing the core pain points of traditional DEXs in efficiency and price discovery. Monad Labs co-founder and CEO Keone Hon stated that Kuru could help DEXs narrow the execution gap with CEXs. After the mainnet launch, Kuru's TVL quickly exceeded $1.4 million, with a 24-hour trading volume exceeding $11 million, generating approximately $9,000 in protocol revenue.

Kuru secured $2 million in seed funding led by Electric Capital and an $11.5 million Series A funding led by Paradigm.

Perpl

Perpl is a Perp DEX (Decentralized Perpetual Contract Trading Platform) built on Monad, also adopting a CLOB model. Derivative trading pairs have extremely high real-time requirements for feed prices, liquidation, and margin, and any delay may lead to high slippage or liquidation risks. The protocol leverages Monad's high throughput and sub-second finality to ensure that the entire process of order matching and transaction execution can be completed on-chain, thereby eliminating reliance on centralized components such as off-chain sequencers to further improve transaction transparency and efficiency. Perpl secured $9.25 million in funding led by Dragonfly.

Mu Digital

Mu Digital is an RWA (Real World Asset) platform that aims to bring the Asian credit market on-chain, targeting the tokenization of Asia's $20 trillion credit market. The protocol provides two main risk-graded products: 1) AZND (Asian Dollar): a senior risk-graded product backed by high-quality Asian credit instruments, which will offer a native yield of 6% to 7% upon launch; 2) muBOND: a junior risk-graded product designed to provide users seeking higher returns with enhanced yields of up to 15%. The protocol has secured $1.5 million in Pre-Seed funding, with the investor lineup also including traditional financial institution UOB Venture Management. Mu Digital is online simultaneously with the mainnet, with muBond TVL (Total Value Locked) reaching $20 million and AZND TVL reaching $80 million.

Castora

Castora is a decentralized P2P (peer-to-peer) prediction market, similar to platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, allowing users to bet on real-world events, such as elections or sports games, and settle them on-chain. The protocol leverages Monad's low latency to achieve real-time odds updates. Unlike the traditional order book model, Castora adopts a pool-based betting model. Users pay an 'Entry Fee' to enter a specific prediction pool, and the system will determine at the snapshot time that users whose prediction results are closest to the real situation will win the prize pool. Compared to the order book model of prediction markets, Castora's mechanism is more similar to a 'full split evenly' or 'sweepstakes pool' model, which also lowers the threshold for market makers and makes it easier for ordinary retail users to participate in liquidity provision and betting. Currently, Castora has launched early pools such as ETH price prediction, which is one of the dApps with higher interaction within the Monad community.

Nad.fun

Nad.fun is a social Meme coin issuance platform that allows users to deploy tokens at extremely low cost within minutes, supporting the entire process of creating, issuing, and trading tokens, similar to pump.fun. The protocol adopts classic bonding curve pricing to ensure early fair launch. After the mainnet launch, Nad.fun has generated 30 new Meme coins. Currently, the Meme coin with the highest market value is NADS, at $730,000, and the ATH (all-time high) market value once approached $2 million.

FortyTwo

Fortytwo is a DeAI inference network that utilizes 'swarm intelligence' technology to achieve scalable, low-hallucination AI through node contributions. The protocol supports the training and deployment of distributed models, where AI Agents can directly exchange data on-chain. Operations at Fortytwo are highly latency-sensitive. Through Monad's high-performance parallel execution environment, it ensures that data exchange and inference tasks between AI Agents can be completed with extremely low latency. High transaction speed is also a prerequisite for achieving scaled intelligence. The protocol relies on a dynamic load balancing system to optimize resource utilization and ensure that nodes remain highly active when performing lightweight tasks such as video calls or web browsing, but inference will be automatically reduced or suspended temporarily when users perform heavy operations such as 4K video editing. This type of fine-grained resource management is only feasible when the underlying blockchain can handle fast and cheap transactions. As of now, Fortytwo has 450 active nodes and has completed over 4,500 inference tasks within the day. The protocol has secured $2.3 million in Pre-Seed funding led by Big Brain Holdings.

Rumi

Rumi aims to build an AI-driven media and advertising company. The protocol adopts a unique 'watch-to-earn' model that rewards users for their content consumption behavior through visual language models. Rumi strives to transform passive media content into interactive experiences, and the protocol supports intelligent analysis of media content, having established collaborations with TVision, Story Protocol, and others. Rumi's live broadcast time in Q3 reached 8.5 billion hours, equivalent to 970,000 years of attention. The protocol has secured $4.7 million in Pre-Seed funding led by a16z crypto CSX and EV3.

Multisynq

Multisynq aims to build a real-time application layer for the Internet, committed to bringing Google Docs-level real-time collaboration experience to all online applications, including DeFi, games, and ambient programming, without relying on centralized cloud service giants. The protocol has secured $2.2 million in seed funding led by Manifold.

Poply

Poply is an NFT marketplace and issuance platform. The protocol emphasizes respect for creator royalties and specifically optimizes the NFT minting and listing experience based on Monad's high-frequency trading characteristics. Poply also provides AI tools (e.g., prompt-based generative artwork that can be minted into NFT collections) and user-friendly real-time bidding and trading features. Poply will launch a 6,000-piece Poply Otters NFT series on November 24th, which will grant holders lower fee benefits, higher token allocation quotas, and exclusive airdrops, among other user benefits.