Scammers launched ads in the official Monad Telegram channel, disguising themselves as a future portal for claiming the airdrop.
Project co-founder Keone Hon published a warning on X, urging users not to click on ads even in the official channel. According to him, attackers bought ads that appear inside the Monad announcement channel — even though only posts from the team are published there.
‘It’s crazy that Telegram inserts content into a channel that previously only had one source,’ Hon wrote.
The attack happened amid anticipation for the airdrop, which will open on Tuesday at 13:00 UTC. With increased attention, scammers are trying to mislead users by creating fake pages. Hon reminded everyone not to rush.
‘Don’t act in haste and always double-check everything three times,’ he wrote, warning about phishing attacks.
He also assured that the airdrop will be available for three weeks — plenty of time.
The Monad team warns not to click on links in ads. Source: Monad
Even before the airdrop launch, Monad’s market cap on Hyperliquid exceeded $7 billion
The MON token hasn’t even officially launched yet, but it’s already trading on the Hyperliquid perpetual futures market at about $0.07. With a total supply of 100 billion tokens, this means a potential project capitalization of $7 billion.
Such an early price reflects investor interest in the network’s mainnet launch and expectations that Monad can compete with other high-performance blockchains.
See also: G7 banks unite to launch stablecoins backed by major world currencies
Monad is a layer-1 blockchain with EVM support, focusing on scalability and speed. According to the team, the network can process up to 10,000 transactions per second with near-instant confirmation thanks to parallel execution and optimized consensus.
The project team is confident they’ve solved the so-called blockchain trilemma — the idea that a network can only be two out of three: scalable, secure, or decentralized.
Fake ads violate Telegram rules
Phishing ads that appeared in the Monad channel directly violate Telegram rules. The platform prohibits misleading campaigns, malware, and dangerous financial schemes. Their policy clearly states: no phishing, including services collecting personal data under any pretext.
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But as the Monad incident showed, even with these rules, Telegram filtering can fail. Automated moderators let ads through into a channel that was supposed to be protected from third-party content.
