DuneDigest037

Monad officially launched its high-performance, EVM-compatible Layer-1 mainnet on November 24, delivering 10,000 TPS, 0.8s finality, and 0.4s block times. The launch was accompanied by one of the most anticipated airdrops of the year, with data showing that 3.33 billion MON were claimed by 76,021 wallets out of 289,000 eligible accounts, representing a 70.4% claim rate. At the ICO price of $0.025, the airdrop amounted to $83.3 million in distributed value, rising to $122.6 million at current prices. Although 58.8% of wallets fully sold their allocation, the fact that 31.1% have not sold a single token points to a meaningful base of strong conviction. Airdrop sizes ranged widely, from over 5 million MON for the top 34 recipients to more modest allocations of over 10,000 MON for roughly 36,000 wallets. Alongside mainnet, MON expanded multichain via Wormhole’s Native Token Transfers standard, going live natively on Solana, where it quickly attracted 26,575 unique traders, over 605,000 trades, and over $125 million in volume. The mainnet launch and aidrop capped a rollout that began with Monad’s public testnet in February and quickly became one of the most anticipated Layer-1 launches of the year. The early surge in engagement and liquidity underscores strong initial interest, but the coming months will determine what kind of distinct role Monad can carve out for itself within an increasingly crowded and fast-evolving L1 landscape.

MegaETH’s USDm pre-deposit bridge, launched on November 25, drew 4,589 depositors and $500M in USDC commitments within hours before MegaETH ultimately decided to return all funds and postpone the campaign until closer to Frontier mainnet. Designed to preload collateral for 1:1 USDm issuance using Ethena’s yield-bearing framework, the pre-deposit was meant to seed a reserve whose real yield would help offset the extremely high operating costs of running a 100,000+ TPS, sub-10ms sequencer, allowing MegaETH to keep user fees near zero without relying solely on transaction volume. The sale saw contributions as large as $40 million, $25.5 million, and $16.8 million, with the initial $250 million cap filling almost instantly. In its postmortem, MegaETH linked the turbulence to several coordination issues: an incorrect SaleUUID that caused early transaction failures, rate-limit misconfigurations and brief downtime at Sonar, the KYC provider, and an early execution of the cap-raise transaction due to a standard Safe feature that allows any account to submit a fully signed multisig. As deposits surged, the team attempted to adjust limits to $400M and then $500M before pausing the event to resolve remaining KYC bottlenecks. Despite the rocky rollout, the scale of participation shows how much market momentum sits behind MegaETH’s high-throughput vision and its yield-subsidized fee model, even as Ethena’s USDe unwind and sharply lower funding-rate yields introduce new uncertainty around whether that mechanism can reliably offset sequencer costs.

Nexus Mutual, launched in 2019 as a DAO-owned alternative to traditional insurance, lets members pool capital and buy onchain protection against smart contract bugs, protocol exploits, and specific forms of economic failure using the NXM token for membership, governance, and claims assessment. Over time it has underwritten more than $6.3 billion of cumulative cover and maintains around $90–130 million in active protection across DeFi protocols, custodians, and depeg products, with tens of millions in cover fees collected and over $18 million paid out in claims so far. This model was recently tested in the Stream Finance fallout: after Stream Finance disclosed a $93 million loss on November 4 and halted withdrawals, its xUSD token depegged, creating bad debt across permissionless lending markets that had used fixed-rate oracles and failed to liquidate in time. Because Nexus Mutual’s Protocol Cover explicitly insures against onchain liquidation failure rather than generic credit risk, affected users in integrated vaults on Beefy, Harvest, Euler, and Treevee (via OpenCover) were able to file claims for more than $95,000 in covered losses and receive payouts in under a week following community assessor votes. The episode shows how onchain insurance can absorb shocks that ripple across multiple protocols. As DeFi grows more interconnected and institutional capital moves onchain, protection layers are becoming essential. Aave’s recent introduction of up to $1 million in subsidized smart contract coverage further underscores this shift toward a future where credible onchain safety nets sit alongside yield and composability as core features of the DeFi stack.

Solana’s proprietary AMMs (“prop AMMs”) function like private, professional market-making firms that run high-frequency, algorithmic trading strategies directly inside Solana programs rather than on centralized exchanges. They operate with no external LPs, no public frontend, no crowdsourced liquidity, and closed-source logic optimized for speed, capturing almost all of their order flow through aggregators like Jupiter. These prop AMMs have quickly become a defining force in Solana’s liquidity routing layer, even as traditional DEXs still account for roughly 77% of all trading volume. Enabled by ultra-cheap oracle updates and Jupiter’s dominance as Solana’s aggregator, prop AMMs win order flow by constantly refreshing quotes and delivering CEX-level spreads, especially on SOL-stablecoin pairs. HumidiFi has been the clear breakout, expanding from zero to nearly 70% of all prop-AMM volume in just five months and reaching almost 50% of Jupiter-routed volume by November, more than Raydium, Whirlpool, and Meteora combined. Tessera adds another 13% of Jupiter routing share, highlighting how quickly closed-source, professional AMMs are overtaking public liquidity pools within the aggregator layer. HumidiFi’s upcoming WET token launch on December 3 via Jupiter’s Decentralized Token Formation platform marks the first major token issuance for a leading prop AMM, signaling the beginning of a broader governance and community phase for this emerging category.

Polygon’s payments ecosystem hit multiple new milestones in November, with on-chain data showing a sharp, yearlong acceleration across both consumer-facing apps and payment infrastructure. Local-currency stablecoins such as XSGD, BRZ, and JPYC have now processed more than $10 billion in lifetime transfer volume on Polygon, underscoring the network’s broad geographic reach across Asia, LATAM, and beyond. Payment apps on Polygon recorded a new all-time-high of $1 billion in November, nearly tripling from the $368 million in January, driven by Avenia Pay, Paxos, and Revolut. Stripe alone has already routed $64 million in USDC payments on Polygon this year, nearly matching Ethereum and far outpacing Coinbase’s Base in comparable flows. Small payments between $10 and $100 now represent 50% of all processed transactions, with over 500,000 such transfers in November, up 23% month-over-month, highlighting the network’s suitability for everyday retail activity. On the infrastructure side, payment processors such as Avenia, Paxos (which powers payments for services including PayPal, Stripe, and Mercado Pago), and Coinflow handled almost $900 million in volume in November, up 4.7x from just $188 million in January. These trends confirm Polygon’s increasingly central role as a global settlement layer for stablecoin payments, powering everything from cards and consumer apps to B2B transfers, remittances, and off-/on-ramp flows.

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