Here's something wild: a project pulls in $244M in funding. Out of that, $187M came straight from retail investors.

Now check the reality. Monad's TVL? Sitting at just $160M—that ranks it 33rd among all Layer 1s and Layer 2s. Their OG NFT collection? Crickets. Nobody's minting. And the network's averaging 23 transactions per second.

The numbers don't lie. You're looking at what might become another empty ecosystem—big promises, massive raise, underwhelming delivery.

Meanwhile, there are established chains already processing real volume and hosting actual users. Sometimes the boring choice is the smart one.