The毛党 suffers a defeat Monad: "The logic of testing network毛 race has collapsed"

Author: Hu Tao, ChainCatcher

Yesterday, the highly anticipated Layer 1 public chain Monad token MON was officially listed, and it briefly fell below the cost basis for public-sale users. At present, FDV still hovers in the $3–$3.5 billion range. This not only falls below the $8 billion mainstream projected market cap on Polymarket, but also is far lower than the $15 billion valuation of the earliest Pre-TGE market.

This is not only a heavy blow to the Layer 1 narrative, but also a “tragic” milestone for the “farmers” community.

Previously, Monad was valued at $3 billion, the highest valuation among unissued Layer 1 tokens in the market. It was placed high hopes by the farmers community. Its testnet had accumulated more than 300 million interaction addresses in total. Many studios were registering Monad addresses using millions of addresses. In late October, Monad officially opened up the airdrop eligibility query, but unexpectedly excluded all testnet interaction addresses from the airdrop scope.

The farmers’ logic is that “sunshine everywhere” is a common practice for many project teams. As long as they maintain frequent interactions, they may receive token rewards ranging from a few dollars to dozens of dollars. Even though those tokens come from multiple addresses, the total value can still be substantial. However, Monad’s official team did not follow through with what the large farmers wanted, excluding all testnet addresses from the airdrop.

“Every address that interacted with the testnet is anti-farmer, and participating in all kinds of NFTs basically has no use. Ironically, the only ones who got the Monad airdrop are some old addresses that never interacted with Monad, but traded on Hyperliquid,” said A Du (a pseudonym), head of a farmers studio in Hangzhou, to ChainCatcher.

For a time, Monad became the target of intense attacks by a large number of farmers, but Modad’s official stance remained unchanged. In the view of well-known KOL Fengmi, the thinking behind Monad’s airdrop this time is to bundle people who have contributions, identities, and potential into Monad—building around identity + contribution, such as Monad ecosystem developers, heavy DeFi users, and holders of quality NFTs.

Well-known alpha blogger spark received a reward of 3 million MON in this airdrop, worth about $110,000. This was not because of his interaction record, but because he served as Mod of the Monad community for 3 years and built the Monad Chinese community. This is regarded by Modad as an act with real contributions—an important target for airdrops by most project teams.

For project teams, the significance of airdrops is twofold. On the one hand, they reward long-term supporters and show their importance to community users. On the other hand, they reward active participants and influential figures in surrounding ecosystems; by using airdrop incentives, they attract those people into their own ecosystem. From the earliest Uniswap to later projects such as Gitcoin, Arbitrum, Scroll, Berachain, Aster, and thousands of other initiatives, airdrops have been considered the necessary path for project teams to attract users.

During this period, airdrop standards have continued to split and evolve. Some projects emphasize “everyone gets a share,” and are quite generous toward farmers who participate in interactions. Others set strict rules for interactions on the testnet/mainnet: based on a points system, they conduct rigorous “witch” screening. But this time, Monad completely abandoned testnet-interaction users—more precisely, retail users.

“If a network keeps ignoring retail users for a long time, it will make the network overly elite from the early stage, losing a broad base of community people. In the early days of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and Bsc, it relied on a group of seemingly insignificant small retail users. They brought network effects and community vitality.” Fengmi said this 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 a community together on the MON network.

Zhuifeng believes that farmers contribute not only trading fees, data, and traffic to project teams, but also play a good role in publicity. “In my view, these people need to be given some incentives. Monad’s actions are really too inconsiderate—what it shakes is the foundation of trust across the entire industry.” Bingwa also posted on Twitter.

But from the perspective of project teams, they need to formulate airdrop strategies based on the project’s long-term development needs. “Farmers have no loyalty. Once they receive the airdrop, they will sell and then go to the next project to farm. For the project, this only creates selling pressure and no long-term benefits. Is it necessary to give tokens to them?” An anonymous KOL described farmers as “parasites” in the crypto ecosystem.

Tu’Ao master brother also believes the industry’s airdrop logic is changing. “In the past, when CEXs examined a project’s fundamentals, they placed great emphasis on how lively the on-chain data was and on active user metrics. When projects were in their cold-start phase, they needed popularity. So for a long time, project teams tacitly permitted, or even reached an agreement with farmers: you come to my place to farm and help me get listed on major exchanges, and I’ll airdrop to you in return—everyone divides the tally together. But now, CEX listings no longer look at on-chain data and user metrics, because everyone knows these numbers are heavily inflated.” Tu’Ao master brother wrote on Twitter.

Business logic is ruthless. As on-chain data bubbles grow increasingly serious and the selling pressure from farmers has brought negative effects to many projects’ token price trends, Monad’s choice has its rationality. But it is destined not to be the choice of most projects. As Monad is a capital-backed public chain project, it still has many cards to play. Its technical strength and the potential for explosive ecosystem applications could bring it a large number of community users. However, for most project teams, which are essentially marketing-oriented, they must use airdrops to gain attention and market hype.

From a long-term perspective, airdrops remain one of the important sources of value in the crypto industry, but their logic and their target audiences are undergoing profound changes. “Monad’s airdrop results basically declare the collapse of the testnet ‘black slave’ interaction-and-farming pathway. In the future, most likely no one will刷 the testnet anymore,” Tu’Ao master brother said.

In fact, many KOLs had already anticipated Monad’s “flipping the table.” Like Tu’Ao master brother, Bingwa, Zhuifeng, and many other KOLs, they had long made it clear early on that they would not participate in Monad interactions. According to what’s understood, top KOLs will put more effort into “mouth-farming” and arbitrage markets, while also focusing on curated high-quality projects such as Polymarket to build premium accounts.

In addition, multiple interviewed studios said that their earnings are lower than last year and below expectations. “The key is still to find areas where we have advantages—either low labor costs, advanced technology, or strong investment research that can spot early projects, or influential KOLs who can mouth-farm. Following the crowd to farm is now quite hard to achieve relatively rich returns,” A Du said.

As the market cap of leading projects such as Monad falls far below market expectations, and even many projects lock airdrop shares for users for a long time after TGE, farmers’ position in the project teams’ profit distribution ecosystems keeps dropping further and further, and the value of the tokens they receive continues to shrink. The volume-driven farming logic, in which they win by volume, is no longer sustainable.

“So, the time when new retail users entered the primary market to grab cheap windfall by providing labor is truly over. The door has been closing for a long time, and Monad’s airdrop simply shut the last tiny crack,” Tu’Ao master brother sighed.