🟣 Buzzy Monad Blockchain Launches Public Testnet. The EVM-compatible chain took a big step toward its eventual public debut.
🇳🇬 Nigeria Demands Binance Pay $81 Billion Penalty. Nigeria escalates its regulatory war on Binance.
🇺🇸 Binance.US Restores USD Deposits. For the first time since 2023, Binance's independent U.S. arm is allowing U.S. bank transfers.
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Daily Market Snapshot: Even as the S&P 500 smoked a new all-time closing high, BTC continues to languish through what has been an extremely flat February for the asset.
Monad’s testnet is officially live, and with an advertised 10,000 transactions per second, this EVM-compatible blockchain is anticipated to supercharge Ethereum’s DeFi programs with high speeds to rival the performance of their Solana competitors.
Is this the breakthrough moment that blue chip DeFi has been waiting for? Find out for yourself by exploring these top five Monad-native opportunities before the rest of crypto catches on! 🚀
Perpl Trade is a central limit order book (CLOB) perpetual futures exchange built for the high throughput enabled by Monad. The exchange intends to offer perps on a number of top crypto assets, including USDC, AVAX, SUI, DOGE, and ETH (among others).
The Perpl team will utilize Monad’s high throughput (i.e., fast block speeds) to “offer DeFi as it was originally envisioned” by eliminating off-chain matching engines to create a fully verifiable, onchain exchange that is optimized for composability and capital efficiency.
Fully on-chain, best-in-class trading. No shortcuts.
Meet Perpl, Monad's native pricing engine. Purpose-built for peak efficiency and composability, Perpl offers an unparalleled trading experience on Monad's parallel EVM. pic.twitter.com/AF1TnzNUKi
Launching on Monad’s testnet on day one, Towne Square is a DeFi abstraction hub that will allow users to bridge from multiple assets and chains to Monad protocols in one click, eliminating the need for third-party interfaces to provide access to everything in one place!
Towne Square aims to become Monad’s go-to abstraction hub for everything DeFi and will provide access to Monad-native primitives like liquid staking, exchanges, lending, and more. Upon launch, Towne Square will introduce unique NFTs, onchain domains, and testnet rankings. With a customizable onboarding flow, shareable data, and multi-wallet support, Towne Square aims to meaningfully accelerate adoption for all applications within the Monad ecosystem.
Hot off its $600k Echo raise led by CMSHoldings that sold out within nine minutes, Mu Digital aims to empower global stablecoin holders with access to Asia's top tokenized yield products.
Promises of high returns, fast growth, and ample liquidity could make Asia the next frontier of digital asset adoption; the Mu Digital team hopes to use its expertise in Asian capital markets to provide onchain capital markets with access to high-quality investment opportunities.
Mu Digital’s co-founders have a decade-long working relationship, dating back to their Merrill Lynch Singapore roots, and bring to the table longstanding Asian business relations – spanning from financial institutions to emerging businesses to established corporations.
Excited to announce our US$600K @echodotxyz community round is filled. Initial allocation gone in 9 minutes 🤯
Harkening back to Blast’s sensational fantasy.top trading card game (also deploying to Monad), Kizzy is a social media betting platform that will allow its users to bet on how influencers and celebrities will perform on popular social media platforms.
While Kizzy’s website was devoid of official information at the time of writing, the platform is envisioned to be a Monad equivalent to Polymarket, with a slick UI that will set it apart from alternative Web3 projects and create the standard for other mobile applications.
Backed by leading crypto venture firms such as Pantera Capital, Yzi (f.k.a. Binance) Labs, Consensys, and OKX Ventures, aPriori raised $10M in July 2024 to build MEV-powered liquid staking primitives for Monad.
Similar to Solana-native Jito staking, aPriori aims to utilize priority gas payments made by Monad users to increase staking yields, hopefully increasing network validation participation to improve decentralization and strengthen consensus.
gMONAD.
aPriori is now live on Monad testnet!
Jump in and: ⨀ Claim MON from our team-run faucet ⌘ Stake MON and receive aprMON
Monad’s testnet just went live, and even though its ecosystem is brimming with novel applications intent on fulfilling end-user edge cases, true success will ultimately be measured by onchain adoption and requires users to bridge real capital onto an eventual mainnet.
Thanks to Monad’s full EVM compatibility, existing Ethereum applications can seamlessly unlock higher speeds by deploying to the L1. It’s still early to declare a winner, but Monad has certainly positioned itself as a serious contender in the race to become crypto’s top blockchain. 🚀
The Fraxtal ecosystem is expanding at lightning speed—this month’s biggest highlight is IQAI.com, the newest Agent Tokenization platform from IQ and Frax. IQ is building autonomous, intelligent, tokenized agents launching on Fraxtal in Q1. Empower on-chain agents with built-in wallets, tokenized ownership, and decentralized governance—all within a fast-growing Fraxtal ecosystem.
Not financial or tax advice. Bankless content is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
Disclosure. From time to time, we may add links in this newsletter to products we use. We may receive a commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless team holds crypto assets.
