MegaETH and Monad are setting a new playbook for crypto. 1. Reward the community (+in an engaging way). Fluffle NFTs and Monad Boxes that convert into airdrops. Monad went for wide distribution with smaller rewards. MegaETH rewarded the core community with bigger upside. Which is superior time will tell. 2. Public sale priced far below pre market action. Perps matter a lot as CT judges ICO attractiveness by thin pre market perp charts. "This ICO is no brainer, free money!" Yet requires capital commitment that excludes many less affluent airdrop farmoooors. Pumping the perp before the sale is EV+ 3. Make it inclusive for REAL users but gated for sybil protection through KYC, social presence, and wallet history. This blocks the thousand wallet farmers that crush TGE prices. A bad TGE is hard to recover from, so this new launch model might be the right direction. I expect to see more experimentation with eligibility criteria like Legion's Score (for Kraken) and proof-of-holding of previous ICO token allocations. ---- What's next or is missing? After ICOs, both will need to focus on their ecosystem dapps. This is what breaks or makes an L1/L2. If users have unique apps to use at TGE, they are not only less likely to sell their ICO allocations, but will bring TVL/txs that will boost their app valuations. Will dapps do airdrops or ICOs will vary but I suspect hottest apps to prefer ICOs + some airdrop like Monad/MegaETH themselves. Perhaps the days of pure airdrops are gone.(Ignas | DeFi)