The MON Airdrop

Introduction

As Monad Public Mainnet approaches, the Monad Foundation is excited to announce the MON Airdrop. This airdrop allocates tokens to 5,500 members of the Monad community as well as to nearly 225,000 members of the wider crypto community. The MON Airdrop is designed to make people who eat, sleep, and breathe crypto the initial stakeholders in the Monad network.

MON tokens have been allocated to recipients across five tracks, each with a number of subtracks which are detailed below. Individuals who qualify through multiple subtracks are eligible to receive the combined total of their subtrack allocations.

Claim Portal

The claim portal is live at https://claim.monad.xyz.

This is the only valid claim portal. Beware of imposter websites; assume those are scams attempting to phish your credentials.
The portal uses Privy for authentication. You can sign a message with your EVM or Solana wallets to establish ownership of your wallets. You can also link your Twitter, Discord, Telegram, Farcaster, or email accounts. All authentication is via Privy.
The portal will be open until November 3, 2025, and there is no benefit to claiming early, so take your time and be cautious.

Anti-sybil efforts

The primary objective for the airdrop is to make Monad Community members and blockchain power users the initial stakeholders in the Monad network. Assembling this set of initial stakeholders was challenging given the strong financial incentive for sybil attackers and bot farm operators to attack new networks.

In determining criteria that could identify crypto power users, we considered what actions sybil actors could easily repetitively take and instead focused on criteria that would be difficult to fake. Actions that were easily bottable, such as transacting repeatedly with low economic value, are not actions that we could feasibly utilize as standalone criteria, because any portion given to real users would be dwarfed by a much larger portion given to bots.

Ultimately, we selected a set of criteria that identify folks who are highly active both on and offchain. Onchain, we focused on usage of major DeFi protocols, especially usage that would require contributing capital for sustained periods of time, as well as high-volume DEX traders and holders of some notable NFT collections. Offchain, an emphasis was placed on metrics tied to verified social identifiers, participation in social and educational web3 communities, and contributions to public goods and security research. We conducted significant manual labeling, and built two apps – Monad Community Recognizer and Monad Cards – to give Monad and crypto community members input into the process.

For onchain data analysis, the Monad Foundation enlisted the help of a third party, Trusta AI, to identify and remove sybil addresses. Third party expertise in anti-sybil distribution has been helpful, and we're grateful to the Trusta team for their assistance.

Monad Community

The Monad Community component is by far the largest component of the airdrop. Why? Because Community is Everything.

We have frequently commented that the moral support of a single smart, observant person can completely change the trajectory of a startup. For Monad, this effect was a thousandfold.

Community members have led by example, stepping out of their comfort zone to start new companies, lead initiatives, build audiences, hone creative talents, organize others, and generally challenge themselves to grow. They convinced us to dream bigger – to believe that significant change in how the world transacts was not only possible, but actually probable, through consistency, fearlessness, and a bit of luck.

Crypto has always been about community. Early believers in Bitcoin bonded over shared values – decentralization, censorship-resistance, self-sovereignty, and open source code – and the seemingly irrational belief that Bitcoin could change the way that the world thinks about money. Early Ethereum enthusiasts geeked out over programmable money on a world computer, imagining a fairer system of governance and capital formation enforced by immutable code. Early Solana community members bonded over a vision of DeFi at NASDAQ speed and brutal, hardware-driven efficiency.

In each case, technology and community went hand in hand. What made a technology ultimately so impactful was the collective belief and intensive effort of a community who dared to be fearlessly optimistic.

Over the past few years, early Monad Community members have bonded over a shared vision of a decentralized, open, and permissionless future, where true decentralization and real performance go hand in hand. They have championed the belief that decentralized systems will eat the world - if we do it right. Shared values of optimism, resilience, transparency, and long-term effort have been the backbone of our culture. "No shortcuts" has been our motto.

Today, many of the early believers in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana are lauded as leaders in the space. But only a few years ago, they were just smart, curious people who believed in something and took initiative with consistency and intentionality. The Monad Community is at that point right now.

We want members of the Monad Community to be significant stakeholders in the network because we believe in their future influence and potential to shape the course of both Monad and crypto in general. We believe that we are surrounded by giants who have already shaped Monad substantially and who will go on to transform all of crypto.

With this principle at the forefront, the Monad Community is the largest component of the MON airdrop. Impactful, long-term members of the Monad Community were identified through an exhaustive manual effort, as well as through community input via the Monad Community Recognizer and via social graph analysis.

Social distribution efforts are often haphazard and inefficient, casting a broad net to find the few contributors that matter. In the case of Monad, thousands of strong contributors with high recognizability and high overlap of social graphs meant targeting was a much more efficient and productive process.

The Monad Community has had a massive impact on the trajectory of Monad. The moral support, humor, creativity, kindness, initiative, and sincerity of many outstanding individuals in the community have been genuinely motivating and energizing to everyone working on Monad or building in the Monad ecosystem.

All in one.

Onchain Users

The MON airdrop includes power users of major mainnet blockchains, as identified by activity onchain, NFT ownership, and other such metrics. This category of the airdrop is allocated to EVM and Solana addresses that have historically generated significant value onchain, across several of the following prioritized value forms:

Significant DEX traders, including traders on Hyperliquid and Phantom Wallet (spot and perpetuals), and traders of tokens launched on Pump.fun, Virtuals, and other memecoins.
Significant depositors into major DeFi protocols including Aave, Euler, Morpho, Pendle, Lighter, Curve, PancakeSwap, and Uniswap.
Longtime owners of various NFTs, including Azuki, Chimpers, CryptoPunks, Doodles, Fluffle, Hypurr, Mad Lads, Meebits, Milady Maker, Moonbirds, Pudgy Penguins, Redacted Remilio Babies, Sappy Seals, Solana Monkey Business (Gen 2), and Wassies.
Recently active participants of governance in DAOs of major DeFi protocols on Ethereum.

Blockchain users across these criteria were determined as of a snapshot date of September 30, 2025 at 23:59 UTC. Certain criteria were computed over a multi-month lookback.

Crypto Community

The MON airdrop includes members of the broader crypto community, as identified through social graph exploration, as well as efforts like the Monad Cards initiative. The guiding principle was to select for real crypto users. While it is impossible to identify every such person, filter out all farmers/bots, and avoid double counting, this airdrop was an effort to identify individuals who care deeply about crypto and make them stakeholders in the Monad network.

One particularly significant component was Monad Cards. Monad Cards was an initiative to identify many active, thoughtful, and deeply-invested people on Twitter. Those selected were then encouraged to identify others who were missed but were nonetheless deserving of recognition. People who claimed cards in Wave 1, people who claimed cards in Wave 2, and people who forgot to claim their cards were all included in the airdrop.

We also included select members of the [ ] community, participants in the Legion fundraising platform, Backpack users, Fantasy Top heroes, MetaDAO token holders, ARC Community members, active participants in the LobsterDAO Telegram group, and notable Farcaster users, among others.

Crypto Contributors and Crypto Curious

The airdrop includes individuals who contributed to the betterment of crypto through security research, protocol development, and education. We included ZachXBT, members of SEAL 911, select Cantina auditors with a history of impactful findings, members of the Protocol Guild (as determined by inspecting the Splits contract), and others.

The airdrop also includes students and instructors from educational efforts including RareSkills and SheFi.

Monad Builders

The airdrop includes the builders who are growing the vibrant Monad ecosystem: members of teams that are building natively on Monad, developers who made qualified submissions in Monad Blitzes, Dev Missions, and other hackathons, and individuals who have made notable contributions as builders. Recipients were identified manually, with a focus on proof of work and attendance in IRL events.

For the avoidance of doubt, Monad Foundation and Category Labs team members are not considered Monad Builders for these purposes. We have actively excluded identifiers associated with project team members from the list of eligible recipients, and we have expressly prohibited Monad Foundation and Category Labs full-time team members from claiming tokens in the Monad airdrop.

Conclusion

This concludes a significant effort by the Quant and Engineering teams at the Monad Foundation to identify as many individuals as possible who are deserving stakeholders in the Monad Network. As part of this effort, we combed through tons of on and offchain data, and we also built new experiences like the Monad Community Recognizer and Monad Cards to democratize inputs.

It is likely that we still missed many deserving individuals. It was impossible to identify everyone, and we applaud your dedication and passion. To those whom we missed, we're sorry – but there are more exciting things in store. We invite you to join us on Monad Public Mainnet soon.