Question 1

What is Monad (MON)?

Accepted Answer

Monad (MON) is the native token of the Monad blockchain, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible layer-1 network that uses a custom Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus protocol called MonadBFT. The chain is designed for high throughput, short block times and fast finality while keeping full EVM and Ethereum RPC compatibility so existing Solidity applications can be deployed with minimal changes.

MON is the gas, staking and governance asset of the network. At public mainnet launch, the initial MON supply is set at 100 billion tokens, with a mix of unlocked tokens for circulation and ecosystem funding and locked allocations for the team, investors and the Category Labs treasury.

Monad (MON) is separate from MON Protocol (also ticker MON), which is a gaming and IP-focused ERC-20 project on other chains.

Question 2

What is Monad (MON) used for?

Accepted Answer

**1. Gas and transaction fees**

MON is the gas token for the Monad network. Users pay MON to:

* Submit transactions
 
* Execute smart contracts
 
* Interact with decentralized applications (dapps)

The base component of transaction fees is burned while optional priority fees are paid to validators. This creates inflation from block rewards and a deflationary effect from fee burns.

**2. Staking and network security**

Monad uses PoS where validators stake MON to participate in consensus and produce blocks. Delegators can stake MON to validators and share in rewards. Consensus is handled by MonadBFT, a HotStuff-style Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocol that targets single-slot finality.

At launch:

Block rewards start at 25 MON per block, which corresponds to roughly 2 billion MON per year, or about 2% of the initial supply

Locked allocations for the team, investors and the Category Labs treasury cannot be staked at first, so early staking power comes from unlocked circulating MON and the ecosystem development pool

The Monad Foundation plans to delegate a significant portion of the Ecosystem Development allocation to independent validators during the first year to help bootstrap decentralization.

**3. Governance and protocol participation**

MON functions as a governance token for the Monad ecosystem. Staked MON is expected to be used to:

* Vote on protocol and parameter changes
 
* Signal preferences for ecosystem funding and upgrades
 
* Participate through delegated governance structures supported by the Monad Foundation and ecosystem applications

These governance processes are intended to expand as the network and community grow.

**4. Ecosystem incentives and development**

A large share of MON is set aside for ecosystem growth:

* A sizable Ecosystem Development allocation is controlled by the Monad Foundation for grants, liquidity programs, infrastructure support and validator delegation
 
* Public sale and airdrop allocations place MON in the hands of community members and early users so they can transact, stake and participate in governance from launch

Projects built on Monad can also use MON as:

* Collateral or a base asset in DeFi protocols

* A fee or reward token in on-chain games and NFT markets
 
* An incentive for liquidity providers and early adopters

These uses depend on third-party applications rather than the base protocol.

Question 3

Key features of Monad and MON

Accepted Answer

**EVM and tooling compatibility**

Monad is designed to be fully EVM compatible at the bytecode level and to support Ethereum-style RPC interfaces. Developers can deploy Solidity contracts and use tools such as Foundry, Hardhat and MetaMask with only endpoint changes and minor configuration updates.

**Parallel execution and performance focus**

* Monad’s technical design centers on:
 
* Parallel execution with conflict detection
 
* Pipelining of transaction lifecycle stages
 
* Asynchronous execution decoupled from consensus
 
* MonadDb, a storage layer tuned for high-throughput state access

This architecture is built to support high transactions per second, short block times and fast finality while presenting a simple linear chain to applications.

Question 4

Tokenomics and supply mechanics

Accepted Answer

From public tokenomics disclosures:

* Initial supply: 100 billion MON at public mainnet launch
 
* Unlocked at launch (approximate):
    *   A public portion via token sale and airdrop
    *    An Ecosystem Development allocation managed by the Monad Foundation

* Locked at launch:
    * Investors 
    * Team
    * Category Labs treasury

All under multi-year lockups with at least a one-year cliff and not eligible for staking while locked

Supply changes over time through:

* Inflation from fixed per-block staking rewards (starting around 2% of the initial supply per year at launch)
* Deflation from burning the base component of gas fees

Total circulating supply depends on vesting schedules, rewards and network usage.

Question 5

Who created Monad (MON)?

Accepted Answer

Monad and MON are developed and stewarded by:

* Category Labs, Inc. (formerly Monad Labs), a systems engineering and research company that designs and implements the Monad protocol
 
* Monad Foundation, a separate organization focused on ecosystem growth, token distribution, delegation and governance infrastructure
 
The three co-founders commonly associated with Monad are:

* **Keone Hon** – co-founder and CEO, with prior experience leading a trading team at Jump Trading and later work in its crypto division 
* **James Hunsake**r – co-founder with a background as a technical lead on low-latency trading systems at Jump Trading
* **Eunice Giarta** – co-founder with experience in strategy and operations, helping guide the transition from Monad Labs to Category Labs and broader ecosystem work

Public funding records show a seed round led by Dragonfly in 2023 and later rounds that brought total funding for Monad Labs / Category Labs into the hundreds of millions of dollars at a multibillion-dollar valuation. These entities and founders are the main contributors behind MonadBFT, the parallel EVM execution engine and the MON tokenomics model.

#	Instrument	Exchange	Benchmark Score	Price	24h Change	24h Volume	24h Trades	24h Open	24h High
1	MON-USDT MONUSDT	bybit	A	0.02151USDT	-1.33%	120,975,411.20MON	20,448	0.02180USDT	0.02226USDT
2	MON-USD MON-USD	coinbase	AA	0.02149USD	-1.31%	53,029,979.00MON	7,035	0.02177USD	0.02223USD
3	MON-USD MONUSD	kraken	AA	0.02147USD	-1.38%	10,684,000.82MON	2,144	0.02177USD	0.02221USD
4	MON-USDT MON_USDT	gateio	A	0.02154USDT	-1.24%	6,211,875.00MON	3,063	0.02181USDT	0.02225USDT
5	MON-USDT MONNEWUSDT_SPBL	bitget	BB	0.02155USDT	-1.46%	4,395,572.90MON	569	0.02187USDT	0.02224USDT
6	MON-EUR MONEUR	kraken	AA	0.01924EUR	-1.03%	3,867,011.01MON	1,168	0.01944EUR	0.01986EUR
7	MON-USDC MON-USDC	okex	A	0.02151USDC	-1.47%	1,904,699.50MON	1,156	0.02183USDC	0.02222USDC
8	MON-EUR MON-EUR	okex	A	0.01939EUR	-0.21%	651,146.50MON	157	0.01943EUR	0.01978EUR
9	MON-USD MON_USD	cryptodotcom	AA	0.02151USD	-1.34%	462,530.00MON	63	0.02180USD	0.02216USD
10	MON-USD monusd	gemini	A	0.02143USD	-1.55%	190,080.00MON	456	0.02177USD	0.02281USD
11	MON-USD monusd	bitstamp	AA	0.02149USD	-1.39%	164,333.90MON	271	0.02180USD	0.02215USD
12	MON-TRY MON-TRY	okex	A	1.08TRY	-0.37%	155,646.07MON	35	1.08TRY	1.10TRY
13	MON-EUR moneur	bitstamp	AA	0.01947EUR	1.44%	25,935.90MON	3	0.01919EUR	0.01947EUR
14	MON-USD MONUSD	cexio	BB	0.02185USD	4.00%	1,260.90MON	1	0.02100USD	0.02185USD
15	MON-USDC MONUSDC	cexio	BB	0.02198USDC	5.75%	1,190.85MON	1	0.02078USDC	0.02198USDC
16	MON-USDT MONUSDT	cexio	BB	0.02187USDT	3.82%	996.43MON	2	0.02106USDT	0.02187USDT
17	MON-KRW KRW-MON	upbit	B	28.90KRW	-1.03%	62,106,686.82MON	1,610	29.20KRW	29.80KRW
18	MON-USDT MONUSDT	bitrue	D	0.02153USDT	-1.19%	10,419,912.67MON	6,499	0.02179USDT	0.02227USDT
19	MON-USDT monadusdt	huobipro	C	0.02153USDT	-1.22%	8,391,503.71MON	3,095	0.02179USDT	0.02223USDT
20	MON-USDT MONUSDT	mexc	C	0.02150USDT	-1.38%	6,456,641.58MON	3,418	0.02180USDT	0.02226USDT
21	MON-USDT MON_USDT	bitunix	C	0.02150USDT	-1.42%	4,914,637.00MON	8,298	0.02181USDT	0.02226USDT
22	MON-USDT MON_USDT	bydfi	-	0.02154USDT	-1.19%	4,366,838.83MON	3,071	0.02180USDT	0.02226USDT
23	MON-USDT MON-USDT	bigone	-	0.02144USDT	-1.43%	4,193,915.00MON	4,184	0.02175USDT	0.02229USDT
24	MON-EUR MON-EUR	bitvavo	B	0.01916EUR	-1.38%	3,574,192.82MON	1,082	0.01943EUR	0.01985EUR
25	MON-USDT mon_usdt	digifinex	D	0.02154USDT	-1.28%	3,320,684.96MON	1,839	0.02182USDT	0.02224USDT
26	MON-USDC MONUSDC	mexc	C	0.02148USDC	-1.42%	2,603,058.71MON	3,033	0.02179USDC	0.02227USDC
27	MON-USDT MON_USDT	coinw	-	0.02151USDT	-1.48%	2,544,791.21MON	2,757	0.02183USDT	0.02224USDT
28	MON-USDT MONAD-USDT	bingx	D	0.02153USDT	-1.28%	2,518,047.39MON	6,371	0.02181USDT	0.02225USDT
29	MON-KRW MON_KRW	bithumbkorea	-	28.50KRW	-1.62%	1,969,619.85MON	530	28.97KRW	29.61KRW
30	MON-TRY MONTRY	btcturk	E	1.08TRY	-0.15%	1,107,379.60MON	89	1.08TRY	1.10TRY
31	MON-USDC UMONUSDC	hyperliquid	-	0.02174USDC	-0.36%	577,294.20MON	102	0.02182USDC	0.02220USDC
32	MON-USDT MONUSDT	btcturk	E	0.02168USDT	1.08%	336,804.00MON	16	0.02145USDT	0.02220USDT
33	MON-IDR monidr	indodax	E	390.22IDR	-2.45%	109,264.00MON	204	400.00IDR	450.00IDR
34	MON-INR MONINR	coindcx	-	2.20INR	-1.15%	57,068.07MON	42	2.22INR	2.26INR
35	MON-USD MONUSD	edxmarkets	C	0.02164USD	-0.88%	46,872.68MON	13	0.02184USD	0.02196USD
36	MON-THB THB_MON	bitkub	C	0.7295THB	-0.16%	41,587.47MON	19	0.7307THB	0.8657THB
37	MON-USDT USDT-MON	upbit	B	0.02588USDT	0.00%	0MON	0	0.02588USDT	0.02588USDT
38	MON-BRL MON-BRL	mercadobtc	C	0.1163BRL	-2.99%	733.22MON	5	0.1199BRL	0.1199BRL
39	MON-KRW mon_krw	korbit	C	28.79KRW	-3.68%	435.45MON	3	29.89KRW	39.39KRW
40	MON-BTC BTC-MON	upbit	B	0.0₆2600BTC	0.00%	0MON	0	0.0₆2600BTC	0.0₆2600BTC
41	MON-KRW MON_KRW	coinone	C	29.05KRW	11.56%	345.50MON	1	26.04KRW	29.05KRW
42	MON-USDT MONADUSDT	hitbtc	E	0.02717USDT	0.00%	0MON	0	0.02717USDT	0.02717USDT