The毛党 has fallen, Monad: "The logic of the testnet grabbing race has collapsed"

Author: Hu Tao, ChainCatcher

Yesterday, the highly anticipated Layer 1 public chain Monad’s token MON officially launched, once dropping below the cost basis for public sale users. Currently, the FDV remains in the $3-3.5 billion range, which is not only below the $8 billion mainstream market cap predicted on Polymarket but also far below the $15 billion valuation of the early Pre-TGE market.

And this is not only a heavy blow to the Layer 1 narrative but also a “tragic” milestone for the “grab and dump” community.

Previously, Monad was valued at $3 billion, making it the highest-valued unissued Layer 1 token in the market, and was highly anticipated by the grab-and-dump crowd. Its testnet has accumulated over 300 million interaction addresses, with many studios registering Monad addresses using millions of addresses. At the end of October, Monad officially opened an airdrop query, but unexpectedly excluded all testnet interaction addresses from the airdrop scope.

The logic of the grab-and-dump community is that “sunshine” is a common practice among many project teams; as long as there are frequent interactions, they can potentially earn token rewards ranging from a few dollars to dozens of dollars. The accumulated token value across multiple addresses can still be significant. However, Monad’s official stance did not follow the wishes of the large grab-and-dump crowd to include all testnet addresses in the airdrop.

“Testnet interaction addresses are all anti-grab, and participating in various NFTs basically has no use. The only addresses that received the Monad airdrop are some old addresses that never interacted with Monad but traded on Hyperliquid,” said A Du, head of a grab-and-dump studio in Hangzhou, to ChainCatcher.

For a time, Monad became the target of fierce criticism from many grab-and-dump users, but the Monad official team remained unmoved. According to well-known KOL Feng Mi, the idea behind this airdrop was to bind contributors, identity, and potential people 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 tokens in this airdrop, worth about $110k. 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 regarded this as a substantial contribution, which is also a common target for airdrops by most project teams.

For project teams, the significance of an airdrop is partly to reward long-term supporters, demonstrating their emphasis on community users, and partly to incentivize active participants and influencers in the surrounding ecosystem, attracting them into their own ecosystem through rewards. From Uniswap to Gitcoin, Arbitrum, Scroll, Berachain, Aster, and thousands of other projects, airdrops have become an essential method for attracting users.

During this period, the standards for airdrops have continued to diverge and evolve. Some projects emphasize fairness and generosity, being quite generous to grab-and-dump participants, while others set strict rules for testnet/mainnet interactions, implementing rigorous “whale” screening based on points. This time, Monad completely abandoned testnet interaction users, or retail investors.

“If a network neglects retail investors for a long time, it will make the network overly elite early on, losing a broad community base. In the early days of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and BSC, it was all about a group of seemingly insignificant retail investors—they brought network effects and community vitality,” Feng Mi said on X. He believes Monad should give grassroots retail investors a space to grow gradually, even if just a little, so more people can truly become part of the MON network community.

Zhuifeng believes that grab-and-dump participants contribute not only fees, data, and traffic but also serve as effective publicity. He personally thinks they should be given some incentives. “Monad’s approach is really thoughtless, shaking the trust foundation of the entire industry,” said Bingwa on Twitter.

However, from the project team’s perspective, they need to formulate airdrop strategies based on long-term project development needs. “Grab-and-dump participants lack loyalty; they sell immediately after receiving the airdrop and move on to the next project. For the project, this only causes selling pressure and no long-term benefit. Is it necessary to give them tokens?” said an anonymous KOL, describing grab-and-dumpers as “parasites” in the crypto ecosystem.

Australian master brother also believes that the industry’s airdrop logic is changing. “In the past, when CEXs evaluated a project’s fundamentals, they paid close attention to on-chain data activity and active user metrics. During cold starts, projects needed popularity. For a long time, project teams tacitly or explicitly reached an understanding with grab-and-dump armies: you come to grab-and-dump for me, help me get listed on major exchanges, and I’ll give you airdrops in return. But now, CEX listings no longer look at on-chain data or user metrics because everyone knows these data are heavily inflated,” he tweeted.

The business logic is cold and ruthless. As on-chain data bubbles grow more severe and the selling pressure from grab-and-dumpers negatively impacts many projects’ token prices, Monad’s choice is understandable. However, this will likely not be the path most projects take, because Monad, as a heavily capital-backed public chain project, still has many cards to play. Its technical strength and potential explosive power in ecosystem applications could bring it a large community of users. But for most projects, which are essentially marketing projects, they must rely on airdrops to attract attention and market hype.

In the long run, airdrops remain one of the important sources of value in the crypto industry, but the logic and targets of airdrops are undergoing profound changes. “The results of Monad’s airdrop basically mark the collapse of the testnet grab-and-dump track, and in the future, testnet activity will likely decline sharply,” said Australian master brother.

In fact, many KOLs predicted this “table-flip” by Monad. Like Australian master brother, Bingwa, Zhuifeng, and others, many early on stated they would not participate in Monad interactions. It is understood that top KOLs will focus more on “mouth-lobbying,” arbitrage, and other diverse markets, while also concentrating on high-quality projects like Polymarket to create premium content.

Additionally, several interviewed studios reported that their earnings are lower than last year and below expectations. “The key is to find areas where we have advantages—whether it’s low labor costs, advanced technology, keen research to discover early-stage projects, or influential KOLs to promote—it’s quite difficult to just follow the crowd and grab and dump for substantial gains,” said A Du.

As the market cap of top projects like Monad has fallen far below expectations, and many projects lock user airdrop shares for long periods after TGE, the grab-and-dump community’s position in the project ecosystem continues to decline, with token values shrinking. The “quantity over quality” grab-and-dump logic is no longer sustainable.

“So, the retail investors who entered the primary market by providing labor for cheap profits have indeed come to an end. The door has long been closing, and Monad’s airdrop was just the last crack shut,” sighed Australian master brother.