[Report] Monad: The Last General-Purpose L1

Monad is the last case in which record levels of capital and time were bet on the thesis of a "high-performance general-purpose chain that can hold everything." It is also the final large-scale experiment testing whether integrated production can beat specialization in an era when chains are dividing into purpose-built roles. Its conditions for success come down to three things: 1) proving the composability premium that only integration can create, 2) keeping successful apps from leaving, and 3) monetizing demand that works without incentives.
Monad's ecosystem is the product of a four-stage funnel: community building designed as a status economy without a token, a founder pipeline represented by Monad Madness, testnet validation backed by 2.6 billion cumulative transactions and the full open-sourcing of its clients, and staged support after mainnet. That process, however, only cleared doubts about the technology. Whether the traffic represents real demand that will remain once costs apply is something only post-mainnet metrics can prove.
Results in the trading sector split sharply. Kuru overtook Uniswap in volume with a 36.4% share even as chain-wide volume shrank, but its fees remain effectively zero. Perpl is small in scale but has been charging fees and growing from the start. LeverUp records the largest volume and fees with its house model, though its thin user base concentrated in a few wallets remains a caveat. The landscape shifted in July, however. The perps segment led a rebound in chain-wide trading volume, with 30-day perpetual futures volume ($1.6 billion, based on the Foundation's figures) overtaking spot volume ($1.3 billion) for the first time. Perpl recorded $1 billion in cumulative volume and more than $800 million for the month, rising to the top of the ecosystem by weekly trading volume.
Lending currently contributes the most to Monad's TVL, but much of that capital is mercenary money that follows incentives. Liquid staking shows the widest gap between expectations and results: combined TVL sits at roughly $12 million against more than $46 million raised. Structural factors, namely native staking built into consensus and the absence of slashing, limit the added value liquid staking protocols can offer.
Stablecoin supply passed an all-time high of $517 million, but the increase was driven by a single asset, AUSD, in tandem with Pendle incentives. Outcomes pointing toward payments, RWA, and institutions, such as MetaMask's Money Account choosing Monad as its sole settlement chain, Aave's official deployment, and joining the x402 Foundation, are only beginning to show up in the data. This trend gained full momentum in July. Aave's total deposits crossed $500 million within a month of deployment, lifting Monad's DeFi TVL to $770 million and placing it in the top 10 across all chains. Stablecoin supply expanded beyond $550 million, and the onboarding of new dollar assets such as Ethena, Maple, and Saturn Credit diversified the sources of inflows. The active market cap of RWAs surpassed $430 million, making Monad the third-largest RWA chain after Ethereum and Solana.
The nearest variable over the next six months is the TGEs of ecosystem projects. Beyond valuation events for individual projects, the TGE cycle will be the first sector-by-sector measurement of how much demand stays on Monad without incentives.

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Monad: The Last General-Purpose L1

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