Monad rises following airdrop, Bitcoin and Ethereum down

The token recently traded hands at $0.042, up 19% from a day before, according to crypto data provider CoinGecko

The price of Monad’s native cryptocurrency rose on Tuesday, following a long-anticipated airdrop that initially underwhelmed a number of speculators.

The token, which can be used to pay for transaction fees or secure the layer-1 network through staking, recently traded hands at $0.042, up 19% from a day before, according to crypto data provider CoinGecko.

MON’s recent price marked a 68% rise from its initial price of $0.025 on Monday, which was the token’s going rate during a recently conducted public sale. MON’s price had risen as high as $0.045 earlier on Tuesday.

MON’s rise came as crypto prices continued cooling, dropping back into a weekslong pattern, despite rising on Monday. Bitcoin erased gains as it dropped 1.8% to $87,199. Ethereum also dropped to $2,939, while showing an 0.6% decline over the previous day.

Monad bills itself as a high-performance blockchain, which solves limitations that other networks face by processing transactions in parallel, such as Solana or Sei.

Despite taking issue with the asset’s low circulating supply—only nearly 10% of all MON tokens that exist are currently in circulation—BitMEX co-founder and former CEO Arthur Hayes posited that the token could jump to $10.

Just what this bull market needs, another low float, high FDV, useless L1, he said on X. But (obviously), I aped. It’s a bull market.

Airdrops are typically used as a way to reward a crypto project’s early adopters, doling out tokens for free to community members and developers.

Over the past day, Monad had generated $400 million in trading volume on Upbit, the south Korean crypto exchange. Meanwhile, $233 million worth of MON had been traded on Coinbase, followed by $160 million on Dubai-based Bybit.