MON (MON) Price

MON is the native asset of the Monad blockchain. It is used to pay fees for onchain transactions and smart contract operations, and it can also be staked to participate in network consensus. Monad is a Layer 1 compatible with EVM bytecode, making it an execution environment for Ethereum-style smart contracts and applications. MON's two core onchain roles correspond to different stages: transaction senders use it to pay execution fees; validators and delegators use it to establish staking weight, which affects voting power and block-production arrangements in consensus. Holding MON by itself does not mean that one has become a validator or earned staking rewards.

When transferring funds, deploying contracts, or calling contracts on Monad, users pay fees in MON. The basic fee calculation is: fee due = the transaction's gas limit × the actual price per unit of gas; gas abstracts the resources required by the network to process a transaction into a uniform unit. A key Monad rule is that fees are charged based on gas limit rather than gas actually used after execution. This is related to its asynchronous execution design: block leaders and validators must reserve block space for a transaction before execution. Charging only for lower actual usage could result in transactions occupying substantial space while paying very little in fees. Therefore, setting an excessively high gas limit directly affects the final cost paid in MON.

The price per unit of gas is compatible with EIP-1559: price_per_gas = min(base fee + user-specified priority fee, user-set maximum price per unit). The base fee is adjusted by the system on a per-block basis; the priority fee is the amount users specify additionally to increase ordering priority; and the maximum price per unit limits the price per unit of gas that users are willing to pay at most. Therefore, the total transaction fee is affected by both the gas limit and the price. If the maximum price per unit is set too low, the transaction may not be included in a block; when network load remains high, the base fee may exceed its minimum value. The USD valuation users see also changes with MON's market price, while the onchain fee denominated in MON is determined by the parameters above.

Monad uses staking to determine validator voting weight in MonadBFT consensus and, based on that, arrange block leaders for each epoch. Holders who cannot run nodes themselves can delegate MON to validators, causing their delegated amount to count toward the validator's total stake. To enter the active validator set, a validator must simultaneously meet three current thresholds: its authAddress must self-delegate at least 100,000 MON, total delegation must be at least 10,000,000 MON, and it must rank among the top 200 by staking weight. Validators that do not meet these conditions are removed from the active set at the next epoch boundary; therefore, delegation increases a validator's weight but does not guarantee that it will always remain eligible to be active.

Block-leader rewards have two parts: an inflation reward of a fixed 18 MON currently minted by the protocol per block, and the priority fees generated by transactions in that block. The validator first takes its self-set commission from the inflation reward, and the remainder is distributed according to each delegator's weight in that validator's total stake. A delegator's share of the inflation reward can be understood as: block inflation reward × (1 − validator commission rate) × (delegated amount / that validator's total stake). Priority fees currently go first to the validator; the validator may choose to share them through the staking precompile's externalReward mechanism, but such external rewards do not have the above commission deducted. Delegators can withdraw accumulated rewards or compound rewards to increase staking weight.

MON's initial total supply is 100 billion tokens, but the total is not fixed: the protocol mints new MON through block rewards while burning the base-fee portion of transaction fees. Therefore, supply changes depend on the combined result of reward issuance and base-fee burning. Priority fees and base fees have different destinations: priority fees currently go to block validators, while base fees are subject to the burn mechanism. One cannot infer that total supply must decline merely because there is burning, nor infer that total supply must rise merely because there are block rewards; the actual amounts issued and actually burned during the same period must be compared.

After unstaking, MON cannot be withdrawn immediately: unstaked tokens must wait 1 epoch before they can be withdrawn. Most staking operations also do not affect consensus immediately after the transaction is submitted; they are submitted at a boundary block and take effect at the start of a subsequent epoch. A boundary block occurs every 50,000 blocks, estimated in the documentation to be approximately once every 4 hours and 12 minutes; the boundary block snapshots the staking state to be used, followed by a delay of 5,000 rounds before the new epoch begins. If an operation enters after a boundary block, it may not enter the immediately following epoch and may instead be deferred to the one after it. The withdrawal wait and activation boundaries exist so that execution state, snapshot state, and the state used by consensus connect in fixed stages.