Monad airdrop = Vampire attack 2.0?

Monad released an airdrop checker and will distribute tokens to 230,000 wallets. Only 5,500 of those belong to Monad’s own community, the rest are external addresses from the broader crypto audience.

What is a vampire attack?

Simply it is when a new project sucks liquidity/users from established protocols by offering better incentives (high APR or future tokens).

Classic examples in the past are
1) SushiSwap forking Uniswap in 2020. LPs migrated for SUSHI rewards, temporarily draining billions in TVL.
or
2) Blur, which used incentives to lure NFT traders away from OpenSea.

What Monad did

$MON airdrop hits power users from Ethereum, Solana, and beyond, like DeFi depositors on Aave, Solana NFT holders, and traders on Pump.fun or Hyperliquid. So this is a new wave vampire attack: no straight fork, and the project is already widely known in the industry (unlike Sushi/Blur at launch).

The question is how relevant it is to give tokens to users who didn’t use the product not because they hadn’t heard of it or were loyal elsewhere, but because the product wasn’t live on mainnet yet (even though everyone knew about Monad thanks to its large VC raise).

We will see the answer together pretty much soon.

P/E for Perps

With the shift toward “real business” in crypto, equity-style valuation multiples are appearing, but adapted for tokens. For example, Hyperliquid now has its own P/E.

SWPE (Supply-Weighted P/E) is the classic Price/Earnings adjusted for effective supply: locked $HYPE tokens are excluded since they don’t create short-term sell pressure. The metric better reflects what can actually hit the market.

How SWPE is used (in theory)
If 30-day revenues are rising while SWPE is falling, that can signal undervaluation: at a lower multiple, each dollar of revenue has a stronger price impact via buybacks.

That’s exactly what the screenshot shows right now.

We are confident we’ll see more of these equity-style metrics carefully adapted to on-chain realities.

MegaETH - what valuation is realistic?

The team is selling 5% of $MEGA via an English auction (min cap - $1M, max - $1B). In short: whoever bids higher gets the allocation.

The final price will likely land at $1B FDV, since on Hyperliquid’s pre-market the project is already trading around $4.2B FDV. In that case, tokens would be distributed to roughly 5k wallets, with a $2,650 minimum allocation.

Worth recalling: earlier this year MegaETH sold 5,000 “fluffle” NFTs at a $600M FDV. Expecting a lower valuation now would be odd, and the team knows it.

Market context

Recent months show a trend of lofty valuations and new chains without real MAU: $MON sits around ~$6.5B pre-mainnet. So what prevents $MEGA from being $4B+, given Dragonfly and Vitalik Buterin backed early rounds?

Meanwhile:
◆Tokenomics remain undisclosed
◆Token utility is still an open question.

The main question - does crypto really need another L2?

Interim results of the MegaETH ICO

— Deposits without lock: $692M
— Deposits with lock: $64M
— Almost everyone bid at the max price - as expected.
— Max cap: $49.95M - the locked deposits alone could fill it.

Most likely, the team will allocate the majority to lock-in participants to reduce sell pressure at TGE.

If you didn’t do the testnet / don’t hold the fluffle NFTs, participating likely isn’t worth it, though the team said even those who don’t get an allocation might receive some mainnet rewards.

Proud to team up with Medici Expert.

Together we’ll help teams:

◆ Ship clean, compliant token models + investor-grade whitepapers (MiCA/VARA-ready)
◆ Secure the right licenses and banking rails, faster
◆ Set up holdings & entities with ongoing reporting/audit support
◆ Stand up end-to-end compliance (docs, AML audits, staff training)

Learn more:
Coinstruct: http://coinstruct.tech
Medici Expert: https://medici.expert

Gonka

In a recent interview, the David and Daniil Liberman unveiled their new project Gonka — a decentralized AI protocol.

For context: they’re serial founders from Silicon Valley (sold Kernel AR to Snapchat for $30M; launched a VC fund that “invests in people", not companies; and build Product Science, an AI-driven performance optimizer for apps).

Gonka is an open protocol that unites GPU owners worldwide into a single compute network for AI. GPU holders earn the $GNK token, while AI labs and countries gain access to distributed compute without relying on the chip monopoly. The project is community-driven, non-VC, focused on compute sovereignty.

It may sound like another larp, but it addresses a real problem.

Today, GPU capacity is concentrated around the U.S. and NVIDIA; exports are restricted, and many countries struggle to build local clusters due to quotas. The idea echoes Bitcoin: a decentralized compute network, but this time for training AI models rather than mining per se.

Tokenomics
80% - miners
20% - founders’ allocation
The token isn’t trading yet, it can only be mined.

Around the same time, Pavel Durov announced Cocoon - another decentralized AI compute project with rewards planned in the TON ecosystem;
plus was released a one hour film on Bittensor.ai - one of the leading decentralized AI players.

Looks like we’re on the verge of a new meta - DePIN for AI.

Despite the broader bull market, ETH’s monthly returns look more like 2018 and 2022 (bear-market).

If the leading altcoin behaves like this in a bull phase, what should we expect from the rest of the alts?

Are airdrops still needed?

Over the past year, more projects have been running public sales right before TGE. At first this came with airdrops, now it’s increasingly without them.

Pump.fun was the first big example: everyone forgot about the airdrop, the token mooned on buybacks, and FUD vanished with it.

Now we’re watching Monad vs. MegaETH.

MegaETH hasn’t announced an airdrop and there’s noticeably less FUD than around Monad, which did a drop but not at the size users expected.

Why:
◆ Users are most of the time sybil farmers who overvalue their “work” and are unhappy with results 9 times out of 10.
◆ Teams know this. Airdrops still help with early user acquisition, but sales are more attractive: projects get cash, investors have skin in the game, and there’s a clear price anchor.
◆ Previously, airdrops were the only safe way to decentralize distribution; now the industry isn’t afraid to run sales (citing the Trump era and shifting regulation).

As the result, projects that never promised an airdrop feel fine not doing one. Those that lured users with points programs try to sit on two chairs: a sale brings funds and liquidity, while few percents are left for the airdrop (after exchange promos and Kaito yappers).

If you promised an airdrop, expect crisis PR around TGE and it’s unlikely this trend changes anytime soon.

Buybacks are already an industry standard.

In a recent proposal, Uniswap’s CEO shared that the DEX had long wanted to return value to token holders, but they were tied up in legal battles with Gary Gensler’s administration.

Now, with the political climate in the US shifting, a new path has opened, and with it, a new value plan for $UNI.

Uniswap now plans to:
◆ Turn on protocol fees and use them to burn UNI.
◆ Send Unichain sequencer fees to the same UNI burn mechanism.
◆ Burn 100 million UNI from the treasury (about 10% of supply), representing what would have been burned if fees had been on since launch.
◆ Alongside this, they’ll turn off interface fees.

All of this means Uniswap becomes a buyback machine on the level of Pump.fun, burning $38M per month.

For comparison: buybacks on $PUMP are $35M, and $HYPE is $95M.

How the ICO Meta Changed in 2025

OGs remember 2017: anyone could ape into any ICO with any amount, no KYC - a playground for manipulation.
In 2021–2022 CoinList arrived: KYC became the norm, but users eventually created account farms and overwhelmed CoinList with volume.

By 2025 the ICO meta is back. KYC is a basic standard, and successful launchpads now add investor scoring:

◆ Kaito Launchpad relies on AI parsing of X (Twitter): a high Kaito score boosts your odds and allocation size.
◆ Legion uses a composite score - on-chain, X, GitHub + a motivation letter, then the protocol team hand-picks holders.
◆ Buidlpad tightens geo filters and gives better terms to active users of the protocols that are raising.

As the result, it’s getting harder for a regular participant to get into a sale with obvious upside - the line often never reaches them.

So, second-tier launchpads are popping up:

🔹 Legion has external curators Nozomi and Cookie (same rails, lower thresholds).
🔹 Buidlpad launched Vibe with smaller sizes and simpler projects.
🔹 Each chain is spawning local platforms. On Solana alone: MetaDAO, Soar, Believe, Pump.fun, Daos.fun, Letsbonk.fun, Heaven.

It feels like there are already more launchpads than quality projects to launch on them.
If you’re a strong builder, the window to raise a presale is open. The hardest part isn’t launching technically, it’s winning attention and cutting through the larps.

Aqua by 1inch: TUV (Total Unlocked Value)

If liquidity is water, DeFi still pours it into a hundred cups. 1inch is proposing a faucet that can fill several at once.

Aqua is a new shared-liquidity layer: your capital stays in your wallet but can work across multiple strategies simultaneously (AMM/RFQ/limit orders/auctions, etc.) with no locks and no transferring assets into third-party pools.

How it works (simplified):
You set wallet rules (permissions). On demand, the protocol pulls exactly the liquidity needed for a trade and returns it with fees (pull & push; auto-compound). Virtual balances let the same capital back multiple strategies in parallel.

The focus shifts from TVL to TUV: not how much is locked in protocols, but how broadly and efficiently the same dollar is utilized over time (your funds remain withdrawable at any moment, yet can earn extra yield while idle).

In doing so, Aqua aims to solve liquidity fragmentation and provide liquidity on demand wherever it’s needed.

A basic initial use case is supplying liquidity to solvers - they find optimal swap/arbitrage routes and share a portion of the profits with LPs.

Will Monad fail to hit $400M?

Right now the $MON presale pool on Coinbase sits at $155M out of the needed $188M, with 2 days left.

On Polymarket, trading implies 67% odds of $300M+ and 33% for $400M+.

Technically, Monad’s raise targets still look more than achievable, but with pre-market pricing +50% vs presale, a stronger inflow would’ve been expected.

Why?
🔹 KYC frictions seem tougher for parts of emerging markets vs. Pump.fun/MegaETH.
🔹 $MEGA ran 4x on pre-market (even with unclear timing); Monad lists on the 24th, yet sits at only +50% (only, lol).
🔹 Market mood: BTC 86k and $MON on Hyperliquid has been drifting down all the time.

Watching the final hours closely - most of the capital usually arrives right at the end.

$TNSR is a perfect example of why, without legal protections, a token can end up as exit liquidity.

The Tensor team had two products: Tensor NFT Marketplace and Vector.fun. Both routed 50% of all fees to the $TNSR treasury. That was the token’s core value.

Then Coinbase acquired Vector along with the team.
The token and the NFT marketplace were left to an “independent foundation.”
Founders got paid by CB.
Token holders got zero from the acquisition.

In the 48 hours before the announcement, the token did an 11x move (from $0.034 to $0.365) on $1.9B volume. A wallet linked to the Tensor treasury bought 725k $TNSR at $0.045 and sold around $0.38, netting roughly $156k (+740%).

Now they propose 100% of marketplace fees to the treasury and partial supply burns, but that’s nothing in comparison with acquisition upside left for founders.

Until a token has a legal wrapper with real holder rights, it’s just a pretty package for a founders’ exit.

At Coinstruct, we architect differently.

How teams burn treasury on buybacks for nothing

We talk a lot about buybacks, but some teams use them absolutely straightforward. Case in point: $WLFI.

The team periodically buybacks from a reserves wallet, but does it in a way that significantly moves the market.
One wallet typically pumps price by 1–2%, while a second bot wallet pushes 8–15% (I’ll leave the addresses in the comments).
That spread goes to arbitrageurs, the chart looks choppy, and the team ends up with a higher average buyback price than necessary.

How to do it smart and bake buybacks into tokenomics:

🔹TWAP/VWAP execution with sliced orders + randomized intervals.
🔹Set limits as % of volume/liquidity, not a fixed $.
🔹Public dashboard: rules, budget, execution (transparency reduces FUD and rumor front-running).

1 USDT is effectively backed by only 87 cents.

S&P Global Ratings lowered USDT’s rating to 5 - the lowest possible score on their scale. We checked Tether’s reports to calculate the risks. Spoiler: the math isn’t very pleasant.

The main reason for the downgrade is the growth in the share of high-risk assets. Over the last year, it grew from 17% to 24%. Tether looks less like a digital dollar and more like a hedge fund.

USDT has a total of $181 billion in reserves (as of the 09/30/2025 report).
Of this, safe assets (US Treasuries, REPO, cash): $139.8 billion.
No questions here.

But here are the risky assets ($41.1 billion or 24%):
🔹 Secured loans: $14.6 billion (issued to whom? possibly the affiliated Bitfinex).
🔹 Precious metals: $12.9 billion.
🔹 Bitcoin: $9.8 billion.
🔹 Certain "other investments": $3.8 billion.

Let's simulate a stress test.
Imagine a crisis where Bitcoin and Gold drop by 50%, and secured loans + "other investments" turn out to be unrecoverable (go to zero).
The company is left with $151.1billion in assets. Liabilities to USDT holders are $174 billion (amount of USDT in circulation).

The real value of 1 USDT becomes $0.87.

Yes, this is a pessimistic scenario. But the lack of reserve segregation and the registration in El Salvador (where oversight is minimal) do not add optimism.

This is a masterclass in how NOT to launch a Tier-1 token.

Monad raised a record $400M. Now it is trading below its presale price.

1. The Artificial Pump
The sale valuation was $2.5B (0.025 per token).
To ensure the Coinbase listing didn't look like a flop, Market Maker aggressively pushed the FDV up to $4.8B.

2. The Reality Check
Once the MM stopped propping up the price, the uncomfortable truth came out: The ecosystem is empty.

🔹 Failed Incentives: The Monad Momentum program (designed to distribute $MON to protocols to attract users) has gone silent. No user acquisition is happening yet.
🔹 Liquidity Issues: On-chain pools are largely paired with USDC, not the native $MON token. This kills the organic demand for the native asset.
🔹 Community Sentiment: The project seems to be FUDed by its own community.

As the result, We are now trading lower than the presale price of $0.025.
We don't want to gloat, but this is starting to look a lot like Berachain 2.0.

5 hard truths that became obvious this year.

2025 didn't go exactly as the crowd predicted. It was a year of sobering realizations.

1) The Echo Chamber is Real.
Crypto marketing currently feels like selling to the same 100,000 people on Crypto Twitter over and over again. The new blood? They are mostly buying Bitcoin ETFs, not your new L2 governance token.

2) Diamond Hands is a Losing Strategy.
In 99% of cases, holding a token post-TGE just makes you exit liquidity for VCs.
Don’t be naive about lockups: Even if VCs have a 1-year cliff, they are often hedging their positions via futures/OTC desks on Day 1. The sell pressure starts immediately, you just don't see it onchain yet.

3) Crypto Crime is real.
And It is apparently fine... as long as it pumps our bags.
The moral compass was thrown out the window in favor of PnL. We saw this with $TRUMP, $ASTER, $MMT, $COAI. If the chart goes up, nobody asks questions.

4) Mass Adoption is Still a Myth.
We made progress with Chain Abstraction and smoother onboarding via Robinhood-like apps, but the average retail user is still far away. We are largely just digging in our own sandbox, moving the same liquidity between different pools.

5) We are Drowning in Infrastructure.
Every month brings a new "revolutionary" L1 or L2. But where are the consumer apps?

The only real product-market fit we saw this year was in Decentralized Perps (mostly gambling), Prediction Markets (mostly gambling), and maybe Yield Basis LP hedging.

Most L1 Altcoins are walking zombies. We expect another 60-70% drop over the next 2 years.
(Excluding BTC/ETH).

The market structure has fundamentally shifted from the "Partnerships" and "Roadmaps" era to the era of P&L.
And the P&L of your favorite L1 looks terrible.

Here is the math:

1. The Fee Generation Trap
L1 business models rely entirely on transaction fees. Fees come from trading.
But who is trading heavily on Monad, Aptos, Polkadot, or TON right now?
To justify its current valuation with a generous P/S ratio of 15, a chain like Aptos needs to generate $80M in annual fees.
That is simply not happening without massive, unsustainable incentives.

2. The Treasury Illusion
"We have a huge treasury!"
No, you have a pile of your own native tokens.
You cannot liquidate them to fund operations without crashing your own price. It is a death spiral waiting to happen.

3. The Super-App Fallacy
Blockchains try to be Super Apps - infrastructure first, users later.
History shows this fails. Successful Super Apps start with a killer product that generates cash, then expand. L1s are trying to skip the product phase and go straight to platform.
(Hyperliquid is one of the few exceptions here that actually started with a product).

4. The Institutional Dilemma
Why would institutions build RWA on an aging 2021 L1 when specialized chains (like Canton) or shiny new 2025 chains exist?
More importantly, why choose a generic L1 over Ethereum or Base?

The Valuation Reality Check:
— Code: Hard to value.
— Assets: Illiquid native tokens.
— Profit: Near zero.
— Userbase: Mostly bots or airdrop hunters.
— Goodwill: Non-existent.

Crypto Spot Trading is dying.

We pulled the data for ETH/USDT on Binance to compare the market structure of 2020 vs. 2025.

March 2020:
Perpetual/Spot Ratio: 1.38
For every 1 of Spot volume, there was 1.4 traded in Perps.
People were buying assets to hold.

December 2025:
Perpetual/Spot Ratio: 9.70
For every 1 of Spot volume, there is nearly 10 traded in Perps.
People are not buying the asset anymore. They are just betting on its price.

The Second Shift: CEX vs. DEX Perps
PerpDEX are eating the centralized giants alive.

Just look at the market share of DEX derivatives volume:
2022: < 1%
2024: 4%
2025: 15% (and growing rapidly).

Protocols like Hyperliquid are now doing volumes comparable to Tier-1 CEXs (reaching 14% of Binance's volume on some days).

The market has matured, but in a weird way. Real spot demand (accumulation) is becoming a niche sport for ETFs and institutions. The rest of the market has moved entirely to leverage and hedging.

This crumpled piece of paper turned into $1.5B in Client TVL.

4 years ago: No team, no clients. Just a sharpie and a belief that Tokenomics needs engineering, not guessing.

They told us the niche was too small.

Today:
🔹 70+ Token Economies built
🔹 $25M+ Raised by clients
🔹 Team of 20+

We turned a napkin sketch into a full-stack economic lab.

We are gwowing and in 2026, we are releasing our internal AI tool to the public. Stay tuned.

a16z crypto just released their "Big Ideas for 2026".

We read the full report so you don't have to.

Here are the 5 trends that will actually define the next cycle:

1) Privacy is the New Moat.
Privacy is no longer just a feature for cypherpunks. It is becoming a core competitive advantage for businesses.
"Secrets-as-a-service" will emerge. If your protocol exposes user data by default, you are building legacy tech.

2) From KYC to "Know Your Agent".
This is a massive paradigm shift. As AI agents start transacting autonomously, traditional ID verification becomes obsolete.
The new trust layer isn't about checking passports; it's about verifying reputation and logic specs of AI agents.

3) The Internet becomes the Bank.
We are moving past the "crypto as an asset class" phase.
Stablecoins will turn the internet itself into a banking layer. Storage, transfers, and yield will be embedded directly into the web's fabric, bypassing traditional fintech rails entirely.

4) Trading is a Feature, not the Product.
For the last 5 years, crypto business models relied on speculation.
a16z predicts that trading is just a waypoint. The next generation of unicorns will build models beyond speculation. (This aligns perfectly with my previous post about the death of empty L1s).

5) RWA goes Crypto-Native.
Stop trying to just copy-paste stocks onto the blockchain.
The future belongs to assets that are created on-chain and leverage programmability, rather than just mirroring the old world.

The infrastructure phase is maturing. The Casino Phase is peaking. 2026 will be about Privacy, AI Agents, and Programmable Money.