MON drops 61% in one month: What happened to Monad? An in-depth analysis from price collapse to project bottlenecks

December 16, according to Gate market data, MON (Monad) is currently trading at $0.019, down 8.87% in the past 24 hours, with an intraday high of $0.022 and a low of $0.019. The 24-hour trading volume is approximately $12.96 million. Over a longer time frame, MON has fallen from a high of $0.049 in the past month, with a total decline of over 61%.

Such a significant correction is no longer just a short-term fluctuation issue but more resembles a systematic reassessment of market expectations for the project’s phase. To understand why MON continues to decline, one must consider price structure, token supply logic, and the actual development pace of the Monad project.

What is Monad, and what was the market initially expecting

Monad is a high-performance Layer 1 blockchain focusing on compatibility with EVM. Its core selling point is achieving much higher throughput and lower latency than Ethereum mainnet through parallel execution, optimized memory models, and underlying architecture design. From a narrative perspective, Monad aims to address the “performance bottleneck under the EVM ecosystem,” a positioning that still leaves room for imagination beyond high-performance chains like Solana, Sui, and Aptos.

In early market expectations, Monad was seen as a potential candidate for the “next-generation EVM performance chain,” with its team background and technical route once attracting significant attention. This expectation also drove the rapid initial price increase of MON.

However, expectations alone cannot sustain prices long-term, especially without synchronized delivery.

The direct reason for MON’s continuous decline over the past month

From a price behavior standpoint, MON’s decline is not a one-time event but a typical “high-level pullback + stair-step decline” structure. This usually indicates that selling pressure is not from a single negative factor but from multiple factors stacking up.

First, early token release and increased circulating supply are unavoidable factors. As the project enters the public trading phase, some early holders choose to realize profits when liquidity is ample, leading to insufficient market absorption at high levels. Once key support levels are broken, technical stop-losses and trend trading can further amplify the downward movement.

Second, the overall market risk appetite is not friendly. When funds favor Bitcoin, Ethereum, or assets with clear cash flow narratives, high-valuation, infrastructure projects that have not yet fully materialized tend to be sold off first. MON is in such a high Beta segment.

But a deeper reason still lies in the development bottlenecks faced by the Monad project itself.

The current core development bottlenecks faced by Monad

The first bottleneck is the mismatch between product delivery pace and market expectations. Monad’s core technical narrative centers on high-performance execution, but for most market participants, what can be perceived is not the TPS number but applications, users, and funding scale. Without large-scale verifiable ecosystem data, technical advantages are hard to translate into actual demand.

The second issue is the “cold start dilemma” in ecosystem building. High-performance public chains are not scarce; what is truly scarce are developers and real users. Monad needs to answer a practical question: why would developers choose to deploy on Monad instead of continuing on Ethereum L2, Solana, or other mature ecosystems? Without attractive incentives or differentiated applications, ecosystem expansion will be limited.

The third bottleneck comes from the diminishing marginal returns of narrative competition. Keywords like high-performance, public chain, and parallel execution have been repeatedly used over the past few years, and the market’s excitement threshold for similar narratives is continuously rising. If Monad cannot introduce new variables at the application layer or in business models, its valuation logic may be compressed again.

Is MON’s price decline already “oversold”

From a short-term perspective, MON has fallen over 60% in a month, and technical indicators often enter high volatility and emotional phases. In such cases, the price may experience a temporary rebound, especially when trading volume increases or market sentiment recovers.

But from a medium- to long-term investment perspective, whether it is “oversold” depends not on the decline itself but on whether the project’s fundamentals have shown new marginal improvements. If Monad can demonstrate clear progress on mainnet development, ecosystem growth data, or key partnerships, the current price range could be viewed as a new starting point after re-pricing. Conversely, if project progress remains slow, downward pressure will not naturally disappear just because of the large decline.

Key points to watch for future trends

The main variables influencing MON’s future movement mainly focus on a few aspects. First is the milestone progress of the Monad network itself, including testnet and mainnet schedules and whether performance metrics are validated in practice. Second is ecosystem changes, such as the emergence of flagship applications, TVL, or user growth data. Lastly, token supply-side changes, especially the unlocking schedule, which could continue to exert pressure on the market in the short term.

If positive developments occur in these variables, MON may break out of a purely emotion-driven downward trend.