Interview

Coinbase launches retail token sales platform with Monad as first offering at $2.5B FDV

Nov 11, 2025 with Scott Shapiro

Key Points

  • Coinbase launches a retail token sales platform with Monad as the first offering at $0.025 per token and $2.5B fully diluted valuation, allocating $187.5M exclusively to individual US investors before exchange listing.
  • Terra Nova, a Berkeley robotics startup, raises $7M seed led by King Bruin to deploy underground wood chip injection systems that raise land elevation in flood-prone cities at a fraction of conventional seawall costs.
  • Terra Nova's technology processes roughly 20 semi-truckloads of wood chips daily through an on-site robot fleet, targeting markets like San Rafael facing $500M-$900M seawall bills it cannot afford.
Coinbase launches retail token sales platform with Monad as first offering at $2.5B FDV

Summary

Coinbase is launching a retail token sales platform with Monad as its first offering, priced at $0.025 per token and carrying a fully diluted valuation of $2.5 billion. The platform's allocation to Coinbase is worth $187.5 million in Monad tokens, which will represent the bulk of circulating float at launch, meaning the tradable market cap will be a small fraction of the long-term FDV. The structure is a deliberate float-management play, concentrating early liquidity in a single venue.

Terra Nova, a Berkeley-based robotics startup, has emerged from roughly three years of stealth with a $7 million seed round led by King Bruin, with participation from Outlander, Valor, Ponderosa, and Gotham. CEO Lawrence Allen, a former SpaceX employee and recent Berkeley graduate who left Stanford's graduate program, is building what the company calls terraforming robots designed to physically raise land elevation in flood-prone urban areas.

The core technology injects wood chip slurry underground, where it compacts within approximately two hours to achieve target elevation gains such as three feet. Wood chips are the feedstock of choice over dirt because they are typically free and delivered as a waste byproduct from tree removal, sawmills, and wildfire clearing operations. A single processing unit, which Terra Nova calls the ARC, handles roughly 20 semi-truckloads of wood chips per day through a fleet of on-site delivery robots branded Prometheus.

The market rationale is grounded in cost comparisons with existing flood mitigation options. Terra Nova points to Highway 37 in Marin County as a representative project sized at $8 billion, and notes that San Rafael, a city of roughly 60,000 people, faces a seawall bill estimated at $500 million to $900 million it cannot afford. Conventional alternatives, including demolition, fill compaction, and reconstruction, are characterized as slow and cost-prohibitive at city scale. Allen frames the company's founding directly around saving his hometown from that exact fiscal bind.