Wormhole Labs Launches Liquidity Gateway Sunrise; Offers Support for Monad

Quick Breakdown

• Sunrise has officially gone live, providing instant liquidity for incoming external assets on Solana.
• Monad’s MON token became the first asset to pass through Sunrise, available for transfer and trading on Solana.
• Solana DeFi platforms now support Sunrise, which uses Wormhole NTT to provide smooth cross-chain liquidity.

Sunrise Launches as Solana’s New Gateway

Wormhole Labs officially launched Sunrise on November 24, serving as a single gateway that brings external on-chain assets into Solana with liquidity available immediately. The launch represents a key upgrade for Solana’s infrastructure, which, for a long time, lacked a uniform process for onboarding tokens from other blockchains.

Wormhole X announcement. Source: Wormhole

With Sunrise now operational, developers describe it as Solana’s long-awaited “front door” for new assets. Sunrise acts as the “standard route” for introducing external tokens, whether from Ethereum L2s, Monad, or institutional networks, into Solana in a consistent and unified flow. The platform tackles the persistent issue of fragmented onboarding and liquidity challenges within Solana’s growing ecosystem.

Assets entering Solana previously had to navigate multiple bridges or wait for liquidity pools to be manually seeded. Sunrise simplifies this by allowing users to move tokens in a single step and trade immediately. This capability is a significant boost for users who wish to buy crypto easily on the Solana ecosystem.

Sunrise integrates directly with Solana-native platforms, including Orb, Jupiter, and other DeFi protocols that have pledged support for assets arriving through the gateway, ensuring instant market access. Sunrise brings these routes together through Wormhole’s NTT system, allowing tokens to move onto Solana without using wrapped versions or complex bridge steps.

It meshes closely with Solana’s leading DeFi infrastructure, including native crypto wallet apps and decentralized exchanges, unifying liquidity and giving users secure, straightforward access to new assets.

Monad Public Token Sale and Mainnet Debut

Monad began its journey with a major $225 million Series A funding round in 2024, led by Paradigm Venture Capital, signaling early confidence in the project. Interest built steadily through 2025 and surged when Monad announced that its public token sale would run through Coinbase’s new platform. The collaboration gave Monad global access, guaranteed listings, and transparent distribution, favoring smaller buyers, curbing the dominance of whales common in public sales.

The sale ran for 5.5 days, from November 17 to November 22, 2025, offering up to 7.5 billion MON tokens at a fixed price of $0.025 each, to raise $187.5 million in USDC. It opened with a fixed price of $0.025 per MON and ran for 5.5 days, offering up to 7.5 billion tokens, or 7.5% of the initial supply.

According to data from The Block, demand was immediate as $43 million flowed into the sale within the first 30 minutes, but enthusiasm cooled quickly, and by the six-hour mark, the sale had reached only about 45% of its target. By November 19, the sale had crossed $130 million in commitments.

The mood shifted heading into the final stretch. 24 hours before the deadline, the sale experienced a surge on the platform, pushing total commitments to $216 million, which is 115% of the $187.5 million maximum raise.

The Monad mainnet launch today marked more than just network activation. It included the token generation event (TGE), where tokens sold during the public sale and airdropped quantities became claimable by holders, alongside the official start of block production on the secure, scalable network.

The wider ecosystem launch gives users instant access to decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap and Kuru Exchange for liquidity and trading. Monad would also expand into NFT markets, with expected support from Magic Eden and OpenSea, allowing fast minting and trading on a high-performance chain.

Critical infrastructure and bridging partners have gone live alongside the mainnet, including Chainlink for secure data oracles and LayerZero for cross-chain bridging, with Wormhole’s Sunrise gateway enabling seamless crypto onramp into Solana.

Sunrise’s gateway connectivity is poised to handle the anticipated activity spike thanks to Coinbase’s “fill from the bottom” allocation method, which fulfilled smaller orders first and partially filled larger ones with automatic refunds.

This approach delivered one of the broadest retail token distributions for a Layer 1 launch, minimizing concentration risk and whale dominance. Combined with anti-flipping rules preventing quick resale for 30 days, the sale created an engaged investor base, setting Sunrise up for heavy initial traffic.

Sunrise Powers Cross-Chain Liquidity, Expanding Solana’s DeFi Reach

Sunrise leverages Wormhole Labs’ NTT system to support efficient cross-chain liquidity flow, allowing tokens to move natively between chains without the fragmentation of wrapped or multi-bridge transfers.

Issuers can push assets into Solana easily while liquidity providers pre-seed markets, ensuring new assets launch with ready liquidity, solving Solana’s historic fragmented pool problem. Sunrise connects deeply with Solana’s DeFi ecosystem. Major venues, including Orb, Jupiter, and other DeFi protocols, are listing Sunrise assets.

By leveraging Coinbase’s innovative, retail-favoring token distribution approach, Sunrise’s top-tier Wormhole NTT infrastructure, and deep Solana ecosystem integrations, this launch positions MON and Sunrise as flagship examples of next-generation cross-chain financial infrastructure. Beyond cryptocurrencies, Sunrise is designed to accommodate a broad range of asset types, offering a smooth and liquidity-rich entry path for non-native tokens from day one.

This aligns with the vision expressed by Wormhole Labs CEO Saeed Badreg, who noted that Sunrise provides “any asset from any chain a liquid on-ramp to trade on Solana at TGE,” with MON marking just the beginning.

Solana Foundation Growth Lead Kuleen Nimkar noted that Solana’s vision of “internet capital markets” allows free engagement with any asset, even non-native ones. Sunrise ensures tokens, tokenized commodities, and equities have immediate liquidity, supporting trading, lending, and other protocols.

Conclusion

With Sunrise active, Solana now has a standardized pathway for external assets, accelerating ecosystem inflows and strengthening its role as a liquidity hub. MON’s launch provides early insight into how large assets perform with immediate access to Solana’s trading stack, a milestone in cross-chain finance.

As more projects adopt Sunrise, it could become a core component of Solana’s capital markets, transforming the blockchain into a global venue where any asset, from anywhere, can access deep liquidity from day one.