Author: Jae, PANews
Monad, the high-performance public blockchain that the community has been eagerly anticipating this year, has finally launched. On the evening of November 24th, the Monad mainnet and MON token officially launched. Previously, as Coinbase's first Launchpad project, it attracted 85,820 participants who invested $269 million. Even in a sluggish market environment, the oversubscription of the Monad token sale demonstrates its ability to attract funds and its popularity.
As a leader in the parallel EVM track, Monad has been touting a throughput promise of up to 10,000 TPS (transactions per second) and a final confirmation time of 1 second. Now, it's time for the market to put its claims to the test. For Paradigm, another major investment in the public blockchain sector, Monad serves as a litmus test for its investment capabilities in the crypto market. Whether it can redeem itself from Blast's previous failure will depend on this battle.
The value of a high-performance public blockchain will depend on the carrying capacity of its ecosystem. Unlike strategies that simply rely on "copying and pasting" existing EVM applications, Monad has attracted a number of emerging projects seeking to leverage its high-frequency trading capabilities thanks to its unique technical architecture.
The Monad ecosystem comprises 304 protocols, 77 of which are proprietary, with DeFi protocols accounting for over 60%. PANews has compiled a list of representative emerging projects within the Monad ecosystem, considering factors such as Monad exclusivity, investment institutions, and project activity. These projects cover DeFi, Launchpad, prediction markets, DeAI, and DePin, among others. However, Monad is still in the early stages of ecosystem development, with many projects still in testing or early interaction phases. Users should be aware of potential risks before participating.
Mynt (USDm)
Mynt (USDm) is a zero-knowledge proof stablecoin protocol powered by Succinct's SP1 zkVM (Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machine) and incorporating a collateralized minting model. Users can mint USDm using MON tokens as collateral while earning yield from reserve assets. Mynt prioritizes verifiable privacy, collaborating with Fairblock to use additive homomorphic encryption (PHE) and multi-party computation (MPC) to encrypt transaction amounts, avoiding the risk of front-running.
Mynt also introduced the concept of "state liquidity." Thanks to ZK technology, USDm can achieve seamless combination of rents across different protocols, meaning that users do not need to frequently transfer tokens between different DeFi protocols; liquidity can be reused and verified simply through state proofs.
During the testnet phase, Myn processed over 1 million transactions, generating $250,000 in revenue.
Kintsu
Kintsu is positioned as a liquidity staking protocol focused on maximizing capital efficiency. Users who stake MON receive sMON, a circulating token that accumulates staking rewards over time. The sMON token model is designed for deep DeFi integration. By allowing sMON to circulate and trade across various DeFi applications, Kintsu not only maintains the liquidity of staked assets but also allows users to deploy assets to yield markets without sacrificing the base staking rewards.
Since its mainnet launch, Kintsu has demonstrated a strong early lead, with a TVL of 17.5 million MON (approximately $540,000) and 605 sMON holders. The protocol previously secured $4 million in seed funding led by Castle Island Ventures.
Magma
Magma is a liquidity staking platform that allows users to earn circulating staking tokens (gMON) by staking MON tokens. gMON not only represents staking rewards but is also composable, serving as collateral across various dApps (decentralized applications) within the Monad ecosystem for activities such as lending and trading. Since its mainnet launch, Magma's TVL (Total Value Locked) has exceeded 7.13 million MON (approximately $200,000), with over 800 gMON holders across 800 unique addresses and over 1,000 transactions. The protocol previously secured $3.9 million in seed funding from investors including Animoca Ventures.
Kuru
Kuru is a CLOB DEX (Centralized Order Book Decentralized Exchange) that executes entirely on-chain. Its unique feature lies in leveraging Monad's parallel execution and low latency to provide a CEX-like user experience while maintaining self-custody. Kuru's design allows market makers to place and cancel limit orders at high frequency with low, constant gas costs, addressing the core pain points of traditional DEXs in efficiency and price discovery. Keone Hon, co-founder and CEO of Monad Labs, has stated that Kuru can help DEXs narrow the execution gap with CEXs.
After its mainnet launch, Kuru's TVL quickly surpassed $1.4 million, with 24-hour trading volume exceeding $11 million, generating approximately $9,000 in protocol revenue. Kuru previously secured $2 million in seed funding led by Electric Capital and $11.5 million in Series A funding led by Paradigm.
Perpl
Perpl is a full-chain Perp DEX (decentralized perpetual contract trading platform) built on Monad, and it also adopts the CLOB model. Derivatives trading has extremely high requirements for real-time price feeds, settlement, and margin; any delay can lead to high slippage or liquidation risks. The protocol leverages Monad's high throughput and sub-second finality to ensure that the entire process of order matching and trade execution can be completed on-chain, thereby eliminating reliance on centralized components such as off-chain sorters and further improving the transparency and efficiency of trading.
Perpl previously secured $9.25 million in funding led by Dragonfly.
Mu Digital
Mu Digital is an RWA (Real-World Asset) platform designed to bring the Asian credit market on-chain, aiming to tokenize Asia's $20 trillion credit market. The protocol offers two main risk-tiered products: 1) AZND (Asian Dollar): a premium risk-tiered product backed by high-quality Asian credit instruments, offering a native yield of 6% to 7% upon launch; 2) muBOND: a basic risk-tiered product designed to provide enhanced yields of up to 15% for users seeking higher returns.
The protocol had secured $1.5 million in pre-seed funding, with investors including traditional financial institution UOB Venture Management. Mu Digital launched its mainnet simultaneously, with muBond TVL (total value locked) reaching $20 million and AZND TVL reaching a staggering $80 million.
Castora
Castora is a decentralized P2P (peer-to-peer) prediction market, similar to platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi. It allows users to place P2P bets on real-world events, such as elections or sporting events, and settles the bets on-chain. The protocol leverages Monad's low latency to achieve real-time odds updates.
Unlike traditional order book-based prediction markets, Castora employs a pool-based betting model. Users pay an "entry fee" to enter a specific prediction pool, and the system determines the winner at snapshot time. The user whose prediction is closest to the actual outcome wins the prize pool. Compared to order book-based prediction markets, Castora's mechanism is more similar to a "full share" or "pool" model, which lowers the barrier to entry for market makers, making it easier for ordinary retail investors to participate in liquidity provision and betting.
Currently, Castora has launched early pools such as ETH price prediction and is one of the most frequently interacted dApps within the Monad community.
Nad.fun
Nad.fun is a social meme token issuance platform that allows users to deploy tokens in minutes at extremely low cost, supporting the entire process of creation, issuance, and trading, similar to pump.fun. The protocol uses classic bonding curve pricing to ensure fair early launches.
Since its mainnet launch, Nad.fun has generated 30 new Meme tokens. Currently, the Meme token with the highest market capitalization is NADS, at $730,000, while ATH (its all-time high) once had a market capitalization approaching $2 million.
FortyTwo
Fortytwo is a DeAI inference network that utilizes "swarm inference" technology to achieve scalable, low-illusion AI through node contributions. The protocol supports distributed model training and inference, where AI agents can directly exchange data on-chain. Fortytwo operates with extremely high latency requirements. It leverages Monad's high-performance parallel execution environment to ensure that data exchange and inference tasks between AI agents are completed with very low latency. High transaction speed is also a prerequisite for achieving scalable intelligence.
The protocol relies on a dynamic load balancing system to optimize resource utilization, ensuring nodes maintain high activity during light tasks such as video calls or web browsing, but automatically reducing or pausing inference when users perform heavy operations such as 4K video editing. This fine-grained resource management is only feasible if the underlying public blockchain can handle fast and inexpensive transactions.
To date, Fortytwo has 450 active nodes, with over 4,500 inference tasks completed daily. The protocol previously secured $2.3 million in Pre-Seed funding led by Big Brain Holdings.
Rumi
Rumi aims to build an AI-driven media and advertising company. Its protocol employs a unique "watch-to-earn" model, rewarding users' content consumption behavior through a visual language model. Rumi is committed to transforming passive media content into interactive experiences, and its protocol supports intelligent media content parsing. It has already partnered with companies such as TVision and Story Protocol.
Rumi's live streaming duration reached 8.5 billion hours in Q3, equivalent to 970,000 years of attention. The protocol previously secured $4.7 million in Pre-Seed funding led by a16z crypto, CSX, and EV3.
Multisynq
Multisynq aims to build a real-time application layer for the internet, bringing the instant collaboration experience of Google Docs to all online applications, including DeFi, gaming, and ambient coding, without relying on centralized cloud service giants.
The agreement had previously secured $2.2 million in seed funding led by Manifold.
Poply
Poply is an NFT marketplace and distribution platform whose protocol emphasizes respect for creators' royalties and optimizes the NFT minting and listing experience based on Monad's high-frequency trading characteristics. Poply also provides AI tools (such as generative artwork based on prompts, which can be minted into series of NFTs) and user-friendly real-time bidding and trading functions.
The protocol will launch 6,000 Poply Otters series NFTs on November 24, and will give holders user benefits such as lower transaction fees, higher token allocation, and exclusive airdrops.
