Monad’s Blockbuster ICO Stalls — What Went Wrong?

Plus: 🛡️ Vitalik drops new privacy toolkit, 📉 RADAR crashes after shutdown, 🌍 White House eyes taxing offshore crypto.

Author

Juan Aranovich
November 18, 2025

Hi! In today’s edition:

• 💸 Monad’s public sale loses steam

• 🛡️ Vitalik unveils Kohaku privacy toolkit

• 📉 DappRadar shuts down as RADAR plunges

• 🌍 White House considers tax on offshore crypto

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By Tikta

Monad ICO on Coinbase Fizzles 12 Hours After Launch

Coinbase's public token sale for Monad’s native token MON started strong, raising around $50 million just 45 minutes after launching on Monday.

But around 12 hours into the sale, all early momentum had fizzled, with only $95 million raised against the $187 million worth of USDC the blockchain is looking to raise. 

Monad's token sale was widely anticipated as it marked the first major U.S.-regulated public token sale since 2018. It offered 7.5 billion MON tokens at $0.025 each, representing 7.5% of the total supply, with team and investor allocations locked for at least a year to limit early sell-offs.

Coinbase, however, excluded several jurisdictions from participating in the sale for regulatory and compliance reasons. 

Some market participants attributed the lacklustre performance to Monad’s decision to list on Coinbase, sizing up the token sale against the massively oversubscribed MegaETH token sale late last month.

“Nobody wants to deposit into their Coinbase account just to use it for on-chain stuff, and normies couldn’t care less about Monad. After 12 hours it’s still 50% undersubscribed,” wrote X user @Deroidz. 

“MegaETH was, and still is, the clear winner. They simply let us deposit directly into a contract, and they raised almost $1.5B in three days.”

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Join hosts Jessi Brooks of Ribbit Capital, Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos of StarkWare, and Vy Le of Veda as they discuss the Howey test and ICOs, prediction markets, crypto and critics (and why it needs them), and more!

📺️ Where to stream: YouTube, X, PumpFun, or Twitch

Vitalik Unveils New Ethereum Privacy Toolkit ‘Kohaku’

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin unveiled Kohaku, a new privacy-focused framework for Ethereum.

On stage at Devcon, an ongoing conference in Buenos Aires, Buterin said Ethereum was in its “very last mile stage” in its goal of doing better for user privacy. Kohaku could be the step that makes privacy a core attribute of Ethereum while balancing decentralization and transparency.

The toolkit is integrated with privacy tools like Railgun, use of zero-knowledge proofs, quantum-resistant cryptography and decentralized transaction routing.

It also has privacy pools with "association lists" to prevent malicious activity, and modular privacy protocols to isolate identities and bypass public Remote Procedure Cal (RPC) servers.

“in essence, Kohaku creates an ephemeral stealth address with your public key, which lets you execute a private action without revealing the link to your main wallet,” explained onchain analyst Joseph Young on X.

“You can publicly reveal the linkage if required (for regulation, audits, institutions). but the blockchain does NOT automatically expose it.”

DappRadar Token Plunges After Platform Announces Shutdown

DappRadar, the popular platform that tracks decentralized applications across multiple blockchains, announced it will shut down after seven years. 

DappRadar’s native token RADAR dropped 38% after the platform’s co-founders shared the news on X. 

“Running a platform of this scale became financially unsustainable in the current environment, and after exploring every option, we had to make the difficult decision to wind things down,” said founders Skirmantas Januškas and Dragos Dunica.

A decision on what happens to the platform’s DAO are still ongoing, and its token’s future is undecided, but some users criticised the decision to announce the shutdown without first converting the treasury funds into USDC.

White House Considers Bid to Tax Crypto Held in Foreign Accounts

The White House is reviewing a Treasury Department proposal that would allow the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to access information on crypto held by Americans abroad for tax enforcement purposes.

The proposal aims to implement the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), a global OECD initiative designed to facilitate the automatic exchange of crypto account data among member countries to curb cross-border tax evasion.

A global CARF rollout is scheduled for 2027, and the U.S. adoption would align it with major economies like Japan, Germany, Canada, and the U.K. that have already adopted the standard.

“Implementing CARF would discourage U.S. taxpayers from moving their digital assets to offshore digital asset exchanges,” said The White House in a crypto policy report earlier this year.

  • 📱 Aave rolled out a savings-style consumer app promising yields above 5% with deposits via banks, cards, or stablecoins and protection up to $1 million, marking another big DeFi protocol shifting toward neobank-style services after acquiring fintech firm Stable Finance and building on its $70 billion deposit base.

  • 🪙🇸🇻 El Salvador added another 1,098.19 BTC this past week — pushing its national stash to 7,474.37 BTC worth about $685 million — after also buying 1,121.19 BTC over the previous month, according to the country’s Ministry of Finance.

  • 🧩 Brevis unveiled a whitepaper for ProverNet, a soon‑to‑launch marketplace that pairs zero‑knowledge computing jobs with specialized hardware using a bidding system called TODA, aiming to speed up ZK tech across apps plugged into platforms like MetaMask, Uniswap, PancakeSwap, Euler, and Linea.

  • 🌊 1inch introduced Aqua, a new “shared liquidity” system that let every wallet act like its own mini–trading pool, aiming to fix DeFi’s fragmented liquidity by letting the same money be used across multiple strategies without locking it in one place, and offering early developers up to $100,000 in bounties.

  • 🛰️ DIN, a decentralized infrastructure project built by the team behind Infura, launched its EigenLayer-powered service to break the dominance of a few centralized RPC providers by letting hundreds of independent node operators secure blockchain traffic using restaked ETH and earn rewards—or face penalties—for accuracy and uptime.

  • ➡️ Blockchain analytics showed that Forward Industries, a Solana DAT, moved nearly 1.89 million SOL (about $260 million) from several staking accounts into a single Coinbase Prime deposit address, though it’s unclear whether the shift signaled upcoming sales or simple internal housekeeping.