Something interesting is happening with Monad. The protocol has accumulated over $355 million in locked value, which sounds impressive for a Layer 1 network that has only been on mainnet for a few months. But here’s the interesting part: that $355M in TVL generates less than $3,000 daily in fees. It’s like having a city full of people but no one is buying anything.

What catches my attention is that Monad apparently attracts capital, but the actual network activity doesn’t add up. Major DeFi protocols like Uniswap and Curve are there, but the fee numbers suggest that much of the capital came from token rewards, not genuine usage. Interestingly, fees in applications seem to be higher than on the base layer, so some real activity does exist.

The MON token has had its drama. It went from a fully diluted valuation of $4.7 billion to recently dropping to $2.2 billion. But look, in recent weeks it has regained ground. It’s now at a $3.59 billion FDV with an +8.46% increase in the last 24 hours. Additionally, MON/USDT has just been listed on a major exchange, and there are partnerships with tokenization infrastructure, so there’s movement.

The latent risk is real: more than 50% of MON tokens are still locked and will unlock during 2026. Historically, that creates downward pressure. But for now, Monad continues to accumulate TVL, and the token is in the green. We’ll see if the network manages to turn that capital into real activity or if it ends up being just a deposit for speculators.