$15B Valuation Before Launch? Hyperliquid Opens Trading on Monad Token Before Launch

The crypto community is turning its attention to Monad (MON), a yet-to-launch Ethereum-compatible Layer 1 blockchain that has already entered pre-market trading.

Hyperliquid, a decentralized perpetuals exchange, has introduced MON-USD perpetual futures, letting users speculate on the token before its official release.

The listing allows traders to take long or short positions with up to 3x leverage, and in its early hours, trading volume crossed $20 million. At the time of writing, MON trades around $0.12, with daily volume around $21.1 million and open interest at $4.6 million.

Hyperliquid’s pre-launch futures experiment

Hyperliquid’s new “hyperp” contracts differ from traditional perpetual futures by removing reliance on external oracle prices. Instead, they peg funding rates to a moving average of the perp mark price.

This design aims to limit manipulation risks often associated with early-market products. The MON-USD hyperp listing, announced on X by Hyperliquid, was framed as a response to community demand.

The exchange also emphasized caution: low leverage and isolated margin are mandatory, and the product carries higher risks due to low liquidity, potentially extreme funding rates, and volatile price swings.

Hyperliquid noted that MON-USD will automatically convert into a standard perp contract once a centralized exchange lists the spot market.

Monad’s pitch: high-speed, Ethereum-compatible layer 1

Behind the speculative buzz is Monad Labs, the team developing MON. The project advertises a blockchain capable of 10,000 transactions per second with one-second block times and parallel execution.

Built to be fully compatible with Ethereum’s Virtual Machine (EVM), Monad allows Ethereum smart contracts to migrate directly without modification.

The design incorporates features like superscalar pipelining and a dedicated MonadDB, both aimed at scaling throughput while maintaining developer accessibility.

For now, though, the project has yet to launch its mainnet, making Hyperliquid’s pre-launch listing one of the first public markets for MON exposure.

Despite its unconfirmed launch timeline, MON’s pre-market trading price of $0.15 at one point implied a fully diluted valuation near $15 billion.

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