Monad, an Ethereum rival, offered early investors up to $60 million to cash out. Almost all said no

Monad gave some of its earliest investors a chance to cash out their locked tokens months before they could normally sell them. Nearly all of those approached declined the offer.

The Monad Foundation said Tuesday it had finished a program offering to buy locked MON from certain early investors at a discount. It had set aside as much as $60 million for the purchases.

The Foundation did not disclose the price it offered, how much of the $60 million was ultimately spent, or how many investors participated. CoinDesk has asked Monad for the discount offered to holders.

The program was essentially an early exit. Investors willing to take a lower price could get cash now rather than wait for their MON to become tradeable. Any tokens bought by the Foundation remain locked to their original schedule, so the program does not bring them to market early.

Monad is a relatively newer blockchain built to run applications compatible with Ethereum. Its MON token is used to pay transaction fees and help secure the network.

Investors were allocated about 19.7 billion MON, nearly 20% of the original supply. Those tokens were locked when Monad's public network launched last November and began unlocking after a one-year wait, with monthly releases for the remainder of a four-year schedule.

That makes November the first point at which early investors begin receiving tokens they can sell normally.

MON traded around $0.021 on Tuesday, about 16% below the $0.025 price of last year's public sale. Roughly 11.8 billion MON are currently circulating, giving the token a market value near $250 million against a fully diluted value of about $2.1 billion.

As such, the token price has struggled while activity on the network has grown.

The amount of money deposited in Monad-based decentralized finance apps has climbed to about $895 million from roughly $360 million on July 2, according to DeFiLlama, an increase of almost 150% in about six weeks. Stablecoins on Monad are worth about $707 million, while decentralized exchanges on the network handled roughly $79 million of trading over the past day.

That growth does not explain why investors rejected the Foundation's offer. And without knowing how steep a discount they were asked to take, the lack of sellers cannot be read simply as a bullish call on MON.

But the Foundation said the program was meant to provide liquidity to early investors whose needs or investment plans had changed, while keeping the remaining holder base aligned for the long term.