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 passed.

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 on their original schedule, so the program does not bring them onto the 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 begin unlocking after a one-year wait, followed by monthly releases over 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.