Monad activated its MonadTen revision on mainnet at 14:30 UTC on Sept. 2, cutting the cost of reading clustered storage by roughly 98 percent under MIP-8. The upgrade replaces slot-by-slot warming with 128-slot storage pages, charging 8,100 gas for a page's first read and 100 gas for subsequent reads, verified on-chain at block 101672712.
A block-pinned mainnet call has confirmed the steepest repricing of on-chain data access in Monad's short history: reading a storage slot now costs 8,100 gas only once per 4,096-byte page, with every subsequent read on that page dropping to 100 gas.
The MonadTen revision, which carries the MIP-8 proposal, went live at 14:30 UTC on Sept. 2. At mainnet block 101672712, a read of slot 0 cost 8,100 gas, a read of slot 1 on the same page cost 100 gas, and the cold charge of 8,100 gas returned at slot 128, the first slot of the next page. Monad's release record sets activation at Unix timestamp 1788359400, with MonadNine rules applying below that mark.
MIP-8 defines a storage page as 128 words of 32 bytes each, or 4,096 bytes. The first SLOAD anywhere on a page costs 8,100 gas, while later reads inside that warmed page cost 100 gas for the rest of the transaction, subject to rollback when a call frame reverts. Under Monad's prior schedule, two previously untouched slots each cost 8,100 gas even when adjacent; under the new opcode pricing, the same pair costs 8,100 gas followed by 100 gas when both fall within one page.
Common Solidity layouts inherit the discount automatically. Sequential state variables, struct fields, and array elements occupy consecutive slots, so repeated reads are more likely to stay inside a warmed page. A mapping key generally resolves to a separate, dispersed page, but fields inside a struct stored under that key remain contiguous and can share the page-level discount.
Hashed or unaligned storage keeps Monad's existing cold baseline. Reads that cross page boundaries still cost 8,100 gas each, so savings depend on how many slots a transaction touches and whether those slots cluster within the same 128-slot boundary.
MIP-8 preserves EVM execution semantics while changing the assumptions used by tooling that builds access lists, storage proofs, or gas estimates. EIP-2930 entries now warm pages, and proof formats must represent the page model. The specification identifies contracts that hardcode storage-opcode gas costs as the main compatibility-risk class. For developers, the incentive is that data read together is cheaper when it is stored close together.
The pricing shift is the latest bid by Monad to court data-heavy decentralized applications that have historically favored cheaper storage on rival networks, where per-slot cold-read charges made dense on-chain state expensive to maintain. Whether the roughly 98 percent reduction on clustered reads translates into sustained developer migration will hinge on how quickly access-list and proof tooling adapts to the page model, and on whether new deployments structure state to exploit contiguous slots.
Monad's token traded at $0.03, up 6.77 percent over 24 hours, with a market capitalization of $315.02 million and a fully diluted valuation of $3.04 billion, according to CryptoSlate data. The token sits at rank 106 by market cap, with 11.83 billion tokens in circulation.
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