The Maoist faction has fallen: Monad says, "The logic behind the testnet grab race has collapsed."

Author: Hu Tao, ChainCatcher

Yesterday, the market’s highly anticipated Layer1 public chain Monad token MON officially launched, briefly falling below the cost basis for public offering users. Currently, FDV remains in the $3.0–$3.5 billion range. This not only falls short of Polymarket’s mainstream predicted market cap of $8 billion but is also far below the $15 billion valuation of the earliest Pre-TGE market.

And this is not only a heavy blow to the Layer1 narrative—it is also a milestone “disaster” for the airdrop-harvesting (carpet-bagging) community.

Previously, Monad was valued at $3 billion, making it the highest-valued unissued Layer1 token in the market. The airdrop hunters had high hopes for it. Its testnet accumulated over 300 million interaction addresses, and many studios registered Monad addresses using millions of addresses. In late October, Monad officially opened the airdrop query, but unexpectedly excluded all testnet interaction addresses from the airdrop scope.

The logic of the airdrop hunters is: “Sunshine everywhere” is a common approach for many project teams. As long as you maintain frequent interactions, you might still receive token rewards ranging from a few dollars to dozens of dollars. Even small amounts add up, and the total token value across many addresses can be significant. However, Monad’s official team did not respond as the large airdrop community hoped—they excluded all testnet addresses from the airdrop.

“The testnet interaction addresses all anti-airdrop, participating in various NFTs basically has no use. The only addresses that received Monad airdrops are some old addresses that never interacted with Monad but traded on Hyperliquid,” said A Du (pseudonym), head of a Hangzhou-based airdrop studio, to ChainCatcher.

For a time, Monad became the target of fierce criticism from many airdrop hunters, but the Monad team remained unmoved. According to well-known KOL Feng Mi, the strategy behind this airdrop was to bind contributors, those with identity and potential, into Monad—focusing on identity + contribution, such as Monad ecosystem developers, heavy DeFi users, and high-quality NFT holders.

Famous alpha blogger spark received a reward of 3 million MON in this airdrop, worth about $110,000. This was not due to his interaction record but because he served as a moderator in the Monad community for three years and established the Monad Chinese community. The Monad team considers this a substantial contribution, and such individuals are typically key targets for airdrops in most projects.

For project teams, the significance of airdrops is twofold: on one hand, to reward long-term supporters and demonstrate the project’s emphasis on community users; on the other, to incentivize active participants and influential figures in the surrounding ecosystem, attracting them into the project’s ecosystem through rewards. From Uniswap’s early days to thousands of subsequent projects like Gitcoin, Arbitrum, Scroll, Berachain, Aster, and others, airdrops have become an essential method for projects to attract users.

During this process, the standards for airdrops have continued to diverge and evolve. Some projects emphasize “everyone gets a share,” aiming for fairness and joy, and are quite generous to participating airdrop hunters. Others impose strict rules on testnet/mainnet interactions, implementing rigorous Sybil (witch) screening on top of a points system. This time, Monad completely abandoned testnet interaction users—or, in other words, retail investors.

“If a network is long-term ignored by retail users, it will become too elitist early on, losing a broad community base. In the early days of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and BSC, it was a small group of retail users who seemed insignificant but brought network effects and community vitality,” Feng Mi said on X. He believes Monad should give grassroots retail users room to grow gradually—even if only a little—so that more people can truly become part of the MON network community.

Chasing the Wind believes that airdrop hunters not only contribute fees, data, and traffic but also play a significant role in promotion. Personally, I think these people should be given some incentives. “Monad’s approach is too thoughtless, shaking the trust foundation of the entire industry,” said Ice Frog on Twitter.

From the project perspective, they need to formulate their airdrop strategies based on long-term development needs. “Airdrop hunters lack loyalty; once they receive tokens, they sell immediately and move on to the next project to carpet-bag. For projects, this only creates selling pressure and no long-term benefit. Is it necessary to allocate tokens to them?” said an anonymous KOL, describing carpet-baggers as “parasites” in the crypto ecosystem.

Touterland Master Brother also believes the industry’s airdrop logic is changing. “In the past, CEXs evaluated a project’s fundamentals by focusing heavily on on-chain data activity and active user metrics. During cold starts, projects needed hype. So, for a long time, project teams tacitly tolerated or even reached tacit agreements with the carpet-bagging army: ‘You come here to farm hype, and I’ll give you an airdrop; we split the gains.’ But now, CEX listings no longer consider on-chain data or user metrics because everyone knows these data are heavily inflated,” he wrote on Twitter.

Business logic is cold and ruthless. As on-chain data bubbles grow more severe and the selling pressure from carpet-baggers negatively impacts many projects’ token prices, Monad’s choice is reasonable. However, it is unlikely to be the choice of most projects, because as a capital-heavy public chain project, Monad still has many cards to play. Its technical strength and the potential explosive growth of its ecosystem applications could bring it a large community of users. But for most projects, they are fundamentally marketing projects that rely on airdrops to attract attention and market heat.

Long-term, airdrops remain an important source of value in the crypto industry, but their logic and targets are undergoing profound changes. “The results of Monad’s airdrop basically mark the collapse of the testnet enslaved interaction carpet-bagging track logic. In the future, most likely no one will farm on the testnet anymore,” said Touterland Master Brother.

In fact, many KOLs anticipated this “table-flipping” move by Monad early on. Leaders like Touterland Master Brother, Ice Frog, and Chasing the Wind have publicly stated they did not participate in Monad interactions. It is understood that top KOLs will focus more on “verbal carpet-bagging,” arbitrage, and other diverse market activities, while also concentrating on curated high-quality projects like Polymarket to build premium accounts.

Additionally, multiple studios interviewed reported that their earnings are lower than last year and below expectations. “The key is to find areas where you have advantages—whether low labor costs, advanced technology, early detection of promising projects through research, or influential KOLs who can help with verbal carpet-bagging. It’s quite difficult to achieve substantial returns just by following the crowd,” said A Du.

As the market caps of top-tier projects like Monad fall far below expectations, and many projects lock user airdrop shares for long periods after TGE, the position of carpet-baggers in the project’s benefit distribution ecosystem continues to decline, and the value of the tokens they receive keeps shrinking. The “volume wins” carpet-bagging logic is no longer sustainable.

“So, the small retail investors who entered the primary market by providing labor and enjoying cheap bonuses—yes, that era is over. The doors have been closing for a long time. Monad’s airdrop just closed the last tiny gap,” sighed Touterland Master Brother.