Monad is live and you can already trade on Monad with Matcha. Monad is an Ethereum‑compatible Layer‑1 blockchain engineered that gives you faster confirmations, fewer reverted trades, and even more reliable quotes than ever before, thanks to high throughput, sub‑second finality, and optimistic parallel EVM execution. 

Emerging from a long testnet period, Monad has incubated a vibrant ecosystem of projects offering everything you’d expect from a trader-focused chain: staking, lending, gaming, trading, NFTs, and more. Read on for a taste of everything Monad has to offer, and discover Monad tokens on Matcha from day one with deep liquidity and the precision execution Monad was built for.

Monad in brief

Monad is an L1 designed from a clean slate to bring CEX-level speed onchain. It keeps full Ethereum compatibility, so more of your favorite apps like Matcha can build on Monad, while a new consensus and execution architecture make the chain feel as fast as a centralized exchange. Blocks feel instantaneous, finality takes under a second, and support for 10,000 transactions per second is in scope. For traders like you, that can mean faster order placement, tighter spreads on CLOB‑style venues (we’ll cover CLOBs below), and fewer failed swaps during volatility. 

Try Monad for yourself.

💡Monad Gasless Swaps

With Monad’s abundance of airdrops, you may find yourself with stranded tokens and no MON for gas. That won’t be an issue on Matcha thanks to Gasless Swaps. This is the default trading mode that lets you swap even without holding the native gas token, so you can start trading right away without needing to top up, bridge, or hop between platform. Bookmark matcha.xyz now so you can put your tokens to work right away. 

What’s hot on Monad?

A lot of early action on Monad is clustered around core bluechip tokens, liquid staking projects, and the leading DEXs to emerge from Testnet. With Matcha, you can browse the Monad ecosystem and discover trending tokens in real time, including:

• Monad bluechips: MON paired with USDC and other stablecoins, or WETH and related wrapped tokens.
• Monad Liquid Staking Tokens (LSTs): aprMON from aPriori, sMON from Kintsu, gMON from Magma, and so on.
• Monad Memecoins: All your favorite viral projects from CHOG to CHEWY, MOOLAH, GMONAD and more. 

For all tokens across the Monadverse, you’ll feel right at home with Matcha’s quick and simple trading interface, near-instant availability of new launches, unbeatable performance with aggregated on-chain liquidity that includes professional market-makers.

And, since Monad may be new to you, you’ll find it easy to navigate potential pitfalls with rich token pages that will warn you of any risks hiding in the contract code, like honeypots or transfer taxes, and tell you how deep liquidity is before you make a trade. 

A quick tour of Monad liquidity

Matcha has been working hard behind the scenes to hook up the leading decentralized liquidity sources to ensure you get the optimal routing on your Monad swaps. On Monad, the conventional AMMs you know and love are complemented by CLOBs: Central Limit Order Books where traders place orders at their desired price point, much like you may be used to from centralized exchanges, the difference being that these are onchain orders coordinated by smart contracts rather than a third party. 

As one of Monad’s main differentiators from other chains, CLOBs bring a lot of new names. Matcha will automatically sample, compare, and combine AMMs, CLOBs, and even quotes from Private Market Makers, to find you the best route for the pair you’re trading, in real time, as you trade. Currently, you’ll find over twenty liquidity sources are used, with more added as time goes on:

Spot AMMs

• AethonSwap
• Ambient
• Atlantis
• BeanExchange
• Capricorn
• Curve
• DYORSwap
• Flap
• iZiSwap
• MerchantMoe
• NadDotFun
• OctoSwap
• PancakeSwap
• Swaap
• TraderJoe
• Uniswap

Order books (CLOB)

• Clober
• Crystal Exchange
• Kuru Exchange
• MondayTrade
• Purps

Private Market Makers (PMMs)

On Matcha, any trade you make will compare and combine the above liquidity sources with quotes fetched from Private Market Makers using 0x RFQ. This ensures you always get professional-grade execution, no matter where the best price is found. 

Liquid staking on Monad

Monad staking is natively delegated, but most flow is expected to route through liquid staking tokens (LSTs) rather than plain MON as LSTs can be redeployed for things like lending, liquidity pools, farming, and trading. Right now, three LSTs are in pole position: sMON, gMON, and aprMON. All of these are non-rebasing tokens, so your token balances will remain the same while their value increases over time.

Kintsu (sMON)
Kintsu is one of the simpler liquid staking protocols on Monad. You can stake MON into a smart contract to receive sMON, an ERC-20 that can be used elsewhere in DeFi, and the underlying MON is given to a set of validators regulated by the Kintsu DAO, who contribute their MON staking rewards to a Kintsu vault. As the vault value increases, the value of sMON goes up. sMON is meant to be used as collateral and LP, and positioned to be the “safe, composable” base LST, a good collateral candidate where you don’t necessarily want exotic MEV exposure on top.

Magma (gMON)
Magma offers more elaborate restaking mechanics, built to capture MEV and use it to boost rewards. In exchange for staking MON on Magma, you receive gMON at a 1:1 ratio. gMON is designed to stay fully redeemable while routing stake through a more complex MEV stack that captures more of the block-level value. Governance, validator sets, and incentive programs are community-run through a DAO. gMON is aimed at a“maxi” crowd that wants staking APR + MEV + restaking in one asset. 

aPriori (aprMON)
aPriori leans hardest into MEV as a yield source, whereas Magma uses MEV to complement rewards, and parallels can be drawn with EigenLayer in that staked MON is assigned to an extra service layer that backs MEV-coordination services, all purpose-built for Monad’s parallel execution. Users who stake MON through aPriori receive aprMON at a 1:1ratio. This reward-bearing non-rebasing token’s value grows over time as the protocol combines validator rewards plus MEV yield from block production, meaning it’s likely to be attractive wherever protocols want max yield rather than more ‘vanilla’ staking.

Monad communities and tokens

Monad communities are clustered around a few prominent trends, including NFTs, onchain games, and prediction markets. Many of these projects either already have a token, or are running points campaigns that may suggest an airdrop on the horizon.

Monad NFT projects 

Chog: the purple porcupine mascot brings profile picture (PFP) NFTs, mystery boxes, and talk of a CHOG memecoin.

Molandaks: another ‘monanimal’ NFT that slots into the broader Monad lore, with promises of a DAK memecoin.

Poply Otters: these otter PFPs are the house NFT collection of the Monad-native Poply launchpad, paired with a points system that has been promised as a precursor to a POPLY token 

Purple Frens: the flagship collection of Monad Pad a token and NFT launchpad on Monad. Purple Frens sold out in testnet and now act as utility passes into the MPAD launch flywheel.

Monad apps, games and launchpads

Breath of Estova: a 2D MMORPG on Monad that brings the addictive grind cycle onchain with ESTOVA as its main in-game token plus NFT items.

Lumiterra: an open-world survival MMO built to incorporate AI agents in a 3D world, with a tokenized in-game currency LUA.

Nad.fun: a Monad-aligned version of pump.fun, this no-code memecoin launchpad saw a lot of testnet activity spawning dozens of Monad memes. 

RareBet Sports: a Web3 sportsbook hub with with real-time odds, lineups and other data made available on-chain for Monad and other EVM chains.

Levr Bet: Decentralized leveraged betting exchange that brings perps mechanics to sports bets, with LEVR as the exchange token. Having processed millions of bets on testnet, Levr is expected to roll out to other chains.
Kizzy: Prediction market for social metrics, where users bet on metrics like likes, views or follower growth.

How to trade on Monad

Matcha brings simple, intuitive trading to Monad with powerful search and discovery complemented by a simple trade module that lets you tap into aggregated on-chain liquidity and professional market makers. Stay safe with Risk and Liquidity scores on every token page, use Gasless swaps to get started without needing MON, and benefit from best-in-class execution without worrying about slippage. 

1. Connect your wallet: HaHa wallet, Backpack, Zerion, Rainbow and more all support Monad from day one.
2. Choose a token: Use the homepage to discover new tokens, or enter a contract or name in the search bar.
3. Set up your trade and hit confirm: Enter an amount to sell and the token to buy and approvespending the token if needed, once you confirm you will be shown a message tracking progress.

While we already have most liquidity available on Matcha from day one, we’ll keep tuning routes as the ecosystem grows, just like we do on other networks Matcha supports.

Discover more with Matcha

Monad has bet big on performance, while keeping itself compatible with the broader EVM ecosystem. With CLOBs, real-time consumer apps could become more prolific and more user-friendly than previous attempts. That said, Monad  is just one of hundreds of chains competing for users. You can discover the best of all worlds by using Matcha, with 15 of the most popular chains now available with fast token indexing and rich token information, and stay safe while doing it with a host of features built to deliver actionable signals at a glance. Start trading today at matcha.xyz.