Olivia Capozzalo & Squiffs _
October 15, 2025

gm, Defiers!

Today’s big story:

Airdrop allocations prove controversial as Monad prepares to launch its mainnet and token

In other news:

Yei Finance’s CLO rallies almost 300% in 24 hours
Gaming sector shows signs of life with OhBaby Games’ NFT launch
MetaMask plans to integrate Polymarket
Who really controls your blockchain? [SPONSORED]

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📈 Markets in the Past 24 Hours

TICKER	VALUE	24H
Bitcoin	$111,772	0.16 %
Ethereum	$4,066.85	2.45 %
BNB	$1,181.05	-0.34 %
XRP	$2.5	2.32 %
Solana	$201.98	2.86 %

Today’s Big Story

Monad Commands $7 Billion Pre-Market Valuation

Following Friday’s mass liquidation event, DeFi users are looking forward to the next big token launch to recoup some lost funds, with Monad finally releasing its airdrop claim portal yesterday.

However, as is tradition in every highly anticipated airdrop, bitter users who feel they aren’t being rewarded proportionately are seeing their voices amplified.

The biggest complaints came from testnet farmers, who were surprised to learn they earned zero MON allocations for all their “work.” Also missing from the equation were Hyperliquid traders and Hypurr NFT holders; however, they are likely to have their allocations fixed in the coming days.

Perhaps most controversial is the Monad Cards distribution, which saw crypto social media influencers and notable traders receive individual 1/1 Monad cards that entitled them to one of the highest airdrop tiers, whether or not they had ever interacted with Monad.

While some innocent farmers were left in the dust by Monad’s influencer-first airdrop strategy, EVM diehards and DeFi power users are being rewarded, with active traders receiving modest rewards for their years of commitment to the industry.

Monad was also a classic example of an industrial farm. The Discord has been a hotbed of bot activity and paid Discord grinders for years, and testnet activity supports that theory. So while there is no perfect way to distribute an airdrop, and rewarding influencers is a controversial strategy, just about anything is better than sending 1-2% of a token’s supply to mass-farmed sybil operations.

The token’s pre-market has been strong, and MON currently trades at a $7 billion valuation, after trading as high as $15 to $20 billion before the Oct. 10 crash. While it’s nice to see yet another new token trade above the $5 billion fully diluted valuation mark, it remains to be seen if Monad will actually earn that price tag upon its launch.

Liquidity fragmentation has been an ongoing issue this cycle, and market participants are growing sick of bridging to new ‘flavor of the month’ Layer 1s and Layer 2s. Even the HyperEVM, which has reasonable expectations of a future airdrop at HYPE’s $40 billion valuation, maintains just $2.2 billion in DeFi TVL.

Investors and farmers have been happy to spam “gmonad” on their timeline and in Discord for the last two years, but only time will tell if they actually put their money where their mouth is and bridge to the chain for anything outside of startup incentives.

Squiffs, resident degen at The Defiant

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🎬WATCH

What Crypto VCs Want Now | Aryan Sheikhalian

In this episode of The Defiant Podcast, we sit down with Aryan Sheikhalian, Research Lead at CMT Digital, to unpack the shift from “crypto as an asset” to crypto as infrastructure: 24/7 markets, instant clearing and settlement, and new structured products that couldn’t exist before.

We talk about tokenized equities, how identity layers and ZK proofs unlock mainstream distribution through banks and fintechs, and where regulation is pushing builders toward partnerships and licensed rails.

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Yei Finance Token Soars 250% on Launch Day Cross-chain liquidity layer Yei Finance just launched its CLO token yesterday, which has rallied nearly 300% in the past 24 hours. Why it matters: Yei is the largest DeFi protocol in the Sei ecosystem with about $220 million in total value locked, accounting for just over 47% of the ecosystem’s DeFi liquidity.
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