MegaETH Just Had Its Public Sale. Can It Succeed in Building a Web2-Like Experience? - Ep. 942

Summary

Unchained Episode 942 Summary

Title: MegaETH Just Had Its Public Sale. Can It Succeed in Building a Web2-Like Experience?
Date: November 7, 2025
Host: Laura Shin
Guests: Shuyao Kang (Co-founder, MegaETH), Amir Almeimani (Head of Ecosystem, MegaETH)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into MegaETH—a new Ethereum Layer 2 chain branding itself as the first "real-time blockchain." Laura Shin explores with MegaETH’s co-founder Shuyao Kang and Head of Ecosystem Amir Almeimani what sets MegaETH apart technically and philosophically, their startup-like approach to public token sales, how they're attracting builders, and whether MegaETH can succeed in finally delivering Web2-level user experience and novel apps for Web3. The conversation also covers their unique approaches to decentralization, tokenomics, public allocation, anti-sybil measures, ecosystem growth, and native stablecoin plans.

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Main Discussion Points and Insights

MegaETH’s Mission and Distinction in Web3

• Web2-Like Performance in Web3:
  MegaETH’s core pitch is enabling “real-time,” interactive, Web2-like app experiences on-chain by making radical improvements in blockchain latency and UX.

  • “Solana has about 400 ms latency. Arbitrum has 265 ms. Omega on our testnet right now is 10 ms. That means you can actually unlock immense capital efficiency... This is why we call MegaETH the first real-time blockchain.”
    — Shuyao Kang (00:00, 05:33)

• Moving Beyond Typical L1/L2 Paradigms:
  They intentionally avoid framing MegaETH strictly as a Layer 1 or Layer 2, emphasizing performance and enabling genuinely new applications over old debates about blockchain layer architecture.

  • “People kind of harken back to archaic models of L1, L2. What you should be optimizing for is creating an execution environment that allows for net new experiences.”
    — Amir Almeimani (02:44)

• Breaking the dApp Monotony:
  They're critical of industry stagnation since DeFi Summer—citing repeated copy-pastes of the same apps and a lack of innovation. MegaETH exists to allow both new assets and new interactive paradigms for users.

  • "Every time you have a new chain, you have the same set of applications ... can you bring new assets to trade or create net new experiences and net new assets onto blockchain?"
    — Shuyao Kang (03:22)

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Key Technical Differentiators

• Radical Improvements in Latency:
  The chain’s primary technical boast is latency (10ms), orders of magnitude faster than competitors.

  • “On our testnet right now [latency] is 10 milliseconds and that means you can unlock immense amount of capital efficiency … all the interaction feels real-time.”
    — Shuyao Kang (05:33)

• Novel Data Structures:
  The innovation stemmed from a ground-up critique of EVM bottlenecks, particularly the Merkle Patricia Trie, leading to a complete data structure rewrite.

  • “My co-founder Elon... realized the bottleneck was the Merkle Patricia Trie. So we completely rewrote our data structure...and that eliminates 99% of the slowness.”
    — Shuyao Kang (05:33)

• Sequencer Design (Centralized, With Rotation):
  MegaETH uses a centralized sequencer for speed, with the intention of periodic rotation (“rotating sequencer”) for censorship resistance, aligning more with real-world finance models than with pure decentralization dogma.

  • “We are a centralized sequencer that is building on a maximally decentralized base layer [Ethereum]... what we are trying to do is maintaining one sequencer that's running at any time, but because the sequencer can be rotated, that introduces censorship resistance in a very clever way.”
    — Shuyao Kang (10:21, 11:59)

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Philosophy on Decentralization and Tradeoffs

• Not Anti-Decentralization, But Pro-Pragmatism:
  MegaETH sees their approach as a pragmatic hybrid. Layer 2s, in their view, can be more secure than some L1s, since attacks require bribing the entire Ethereum validator set.

  • “Layer twos are more decentralized than many layer ones... for a layer two... to do evil, you have to bribe the entire validator set of Ethereum and that's a lot more costly.”
    — Shuyao Kang (10:21)

  • “Decentralization is not this binary thing... At the end of the day, what matters is censorship resistance and escape credibility.”
    — Amir Almeimani (11:59)

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MEGA Tokenomics

• Utility Beyond Governance:
  MEGA is not just for “valueless governance;” it’s the mechanism for rotating sequencer access (staking), bidding for low-latency slots (“proximity markets”), and ecosystem governance.

• KPI (Milestone-Based) Vesting for Founders:
  Founders' tokens vest based on hitting measurable milestones, not just on a time schedule.

  • “I do not believe a founding team deserves to take 20% of a protocol token after...two or three years. I believe in a model where if a team does really well, they earn their extra token. So...we’re taking only 9%...with a handsome earn out if the protocol does really well based on KPIs.”
    — Shuyao Kang (13:58)

• No Inflation:
  Fixed token supply, with no emissions or further dilution. (20:02)

• Proximity Markets:
  Stakers can “bid” for minimal latency (physical/data center proximity to the sequencer) for their applications.

  • “You can stake... and decide how close you are to the sequencer, because the closer you are ... the faster your transaction gets executed.”
    — Shuyao Kang (13:58)

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Public Token Sale Design & Participant Selection

• Transparent, Multi-Round Public Sales:
  MegaETH orchestrated several public rounds, including auction mechanisms and NFT sales to prioritize retail price discovery over VC “table dictation.”

  • “The philosophy behind doing this public sale is to make sure retail consumers, investors are participating in price discovery instead of...VCs who dictate price ... and by the time the token launches, it's billions...even though it's all copy pasta.”
    — Shuyao Kang (22:04)

• Selection Algorithm, Not Airdrops:
  Participation wasn't open to all but rather hand-picked, scored, or algorithmically weighted based on a mixture of social proofs, on-chain activity, and ecosystem support.

  • “We build an algorithm ... it was very mathematical so we can point people to their score and be like, this is exactly what you're getting.”
    — Shuyao Kang (29:03)

• No "Mercenaries":
  Avoided airdrops and wide public a allocations to sidestep “mercenary” participants who’d immediately dump.

  • “Airdrops simply incentivize the wrong behavior...we're very focused and very intentional as far as who has access to those additional incentives...same people who've demonstrated demand to have actual skin in the game.”
    — Amir Almeimani (30:53)

• Anti-Sybil Measures:
  MegaETH heavily monitored and fought sybil attacks using Bubble Maps, internal tools, and Echo; claims to have detected and banned large clusters of fake KYC attempts.

  • “In terms of like exact numbers...there are certainly clusters throughout the public sale where it was just very clearly a single individual trying to sybil with 4–600 KYC accounts.”
    — Amir Almeimani (38:12)

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Native Stablecoin (USDM) and Chain Revenue Philosophy

• A Unified, Native Stablecoin:
  Amir and Shuyao argue stablecoins will be central to scaling chain usage, improving UX, and actually aligning chain/app incentives.
  • “Revenue is being generated from priority fees. The issue is priority fees come at direct odds with the actual applications giving users the best possible user experience ... so let's tie a unified stablecoin to solve this ... and have it be the anchor when it comes to transactions."
    — Amir Almeimani (40:12)

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Mega Mafia Accelerator: Cultivating Meaningful Innovation

• Hands-On, High-Conviction Ecosystem Building:
  The "Mega Mafia" program is a year-long, immersive accelerator bringing handpicked, non-forking, innovator founders together to build new things only possible on MegaETH. In-person residencies are core—“we live together in Berlin, Chiang Mai...Copenhagen.”

  • “The sole purpose of MegaETH is to give birth to novel applications. But we are not application builders, we are chain builders ... So with that philosophy, we started the Mega Mafia program. The goal is to find the best builders and live with them.”
    — Shuyao Kang (41:43)

• Showcasing What’s Possible: Real App Examples:
  Examples included:

  • Euphoria: Real-time, gamified binary options (“trading Brick Breaker/Snake”).
    “You get to click on the grid where you think the price feed will go ... if it hits, you win the trade. If not, you lose. It’s something that will resonate beyond just crypto.”
    — Amir Almeimani (46:28)
  • Blitzo: Gamified payments app where users can “coinflip” real transactions, potentially paying double or nothing, enabled by near-instant finality.

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Memorable Quotes

• “Latency is the most important performance metric... For all the past 8 years, everybody talks about throughput... It does not deliver actual benefits to builders. What really matters is latency.”
  — Shuyao Kang (05:33)

• "We want people to see what we appreciate in a community...these are folks that have been with us over a year. Their actions are what we want people to look to."
  — Amir Almeimani (34:28)

• “Finding real human hearts. Once you find them, you have to treasure them.”
  — Shuyao Kang (39:10)

• "I'm hoping once we're live, you actually have this inflection point ... the start of the first real time applications ... making Mega the home for the apps that will onboard the next million normies who don't even know they're using crypto rails."
  — Amir Almeimani (53:47)

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Timeline of Important Segments

• 00:00–04:23: MegaETH’s purpose, the problem with crypto app stagnation, and the drive for Web2-like experience.
• 05:10–08:49: Technical design shifts: Latency, data structure overhaul, sequencer rationale, and tradeoffs.
• 09:54–13:09: Nuanced decentralization discussion, rotating sequencers, regulatory pragmatism.
• 13:58–20:33: Token mechanics—utility, staking, proximity markets, KPI-based founder vesting, fixed supply.
• 21:25–26:01: Public sale philosophy and execution, reflections and lessons (esp. the NFT “Fluffle” round).
• 27:26–34:46: Public sale participant selection: social scoring, transparency, “missionaries vs mercenaries.”
• 37:13–39:32: Anti-sybil strategies and results.
• 40:12–41:34: USDM stablecoin and sustainable chain economics.
• 41:43–46:01: The Mega Mafia accelerator’s vision and process.
• 46:01–50:36: Showcase of standout ecosystem apps (Euphoria, Blitzo).
• 50:36–54:45: Next steps, unlock timelines, vision for MegaETH’s broader impact.
• 55:22–56:01: MegaETH brand, swag, creative ethos.

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Conclusion

MegaETH positions itself as a radical break from “copy-paste” app stagnation on blockchains, promising fundamental improvements in real-time interactivity and developer experience. By prioritizing latency, embracing pragmatic decentralization, and rethinking both tokenomics and community selection, they hope to set the conditions for “Gen Z and Gen Alpha” friendly financial and social apps with mainstream appeal.

Their high-touch, hands-on approach extends to ecosystem nurturing via the Mega Mafia accelerator and app selection, while their tokenomics and sale process seek to avoid the common pitfalls of VC over-dominance and mercenary airdrop chasers. With their mainnet and a bevy of experimental apps incoming, MegaETH is a high-conviction bet on breaking the mold and onboarding the next million into crypto without them ever realizing it.

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Notable Quotes (with Timestamps)

• “Solana: 400 ms latency. Arbitrum: 265 ms. Omega on testnet: 10 ms... This is why we call MegaETH the first real-time blockchain.”
  — Shuyao Kang (00:00)

• “If you want to create a system that can rival Web2, you have to make these tradeoffs. Decentralization is not something... immediately lost because you’re making them.”
  — Amir Almeimani (11:59)

• “The megatoken... is very much a dynamic token in that regard. We wanted it to have a pretty integral role in how the system behaves.”
  — Amir Almeimani (19:27)

• “We wanted to be very open on what we do as a team... For years we've had mucky tokenomics... No one knows where airdrop goes. We just wanted to be very open.”
  — Shuyao Kang (34:04)

• “Airdrops simply incentivize the wrong behavior... We're very focused and intentional as far as who has access to those additional incentives: the people who've demonstrated demand to have actual skin in the game."
  — Amir Almeimani (30:53)

• “Finding real human hearts. Once you find them, you have to treasure them.”
  — Shuyao Kang (39:10)

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Transcript

[Shuyao Kang]

Solana has about 400 millisecond latency. Arbitrum has 265 milliseconds. Omega on our testnet right now is 10 milliseconds and that means you can actually unlock immense amount of capital efficiency. You can run complicated strategy for consumer application. All the interaction feels real time. This is why we insist of calling Mega Ether first Real time blockchain. It feels smooth, it feels interactive, it feels like a Web2 technology.

[Amir Almeimani]

We want to give Web2 builders a reason to explore entirely different stack take what they're familiar with building on web2 rails, but also understand what crypto introduces to those products.

[Laura Shin]

Hi everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto.

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[Laura Shin]

I'm here with Shuyao Kang, co founder of Megaeth, and Amir Almeimani, head of ecosystem at Megaeth.

[Shuyao Kang]

Hey Lara.

[Amir Almeimani]

Hey Laura. Thanks for having us.

[Laura Shin]

So Shuyao and Amir, congratulations on your massively successful ico. Since Mega Eth hasn't actually gotten much airtime on Unchained, let's just start with the basics. You're an L2 on Ethereum. Why did you choose to build your chain as an L2 on Ethereum and not as a competing L1?

[Shuyao Kang]

Yeah, so we built Mega east not to be a Layer one or Layer two. We built Mega east to be the most performant, the fastest blockchain ever possible. The reason to build such a performant chain actually came from a deep frustration that our industry actually has not seen new novel application ever since Defi Summer. Every time you have a new chain, you have the same set of applications and people do the same thing. And upon digging further, we realized that it's because the infrastructure is actually not ready. It is not akin to Web2 level. And that's why a lot of developers feel uninspired. And that's the reason we build Mega East. It's not as a layer one, Layer two, but as a Super performant, real time blockchain so builders can actually build Web3 application that makes you feel like it's Web2 applications.

[Amir Almeimani]

Yeah, no, in piggybacking on what you just said too, we basically took it to the logical conclusion. I think people kind of harken back to these archaic sort of like mental models of like L1, L2. In reality, what you should be optimizing for is creating an execution environment that allows for net new experiences. And that's what we really try to double down on. And as we will probably get into later on too, we try to complement that with really incubating. Net new applications on top of Mega.

[Laura Shin]

All right, so yeah, let's talk. I mean, Shuya kind of started to talk about this, but like what, what would you say are the main problems that you would like to solve with Mega Eth?

[Shuyao Kang]

I think the biggest one is lack of applications, lack of novel application. Right. So everyone when they go on a new ecosystem is the same, same landing protocol, is it same amm, same trading venue. Sometimes you get a gamefi here and there, but honestly no one is using it. So the problem we're trying to find is can we do something new? Omega and what do I mean? Buy something new. There are really two categories of novelties in my head. The first set is can you bring new and novel assets that you can trade on chain instead of the typical coins you see here and there, or you can trade on centralized exchange. And the second is can you find novel interactive ways to trade the assets? Instead of selling a chart, can you gamify it? Can you t trading, can you put in different part of your wallet? Or maybe you can trade without wallet. So the problem we're trying to solve is to create net new experiences and net new asset onto blockchain.

[Amir Almeimani]

It really boils down to just performance as well. I mean, at the end of the day, what Mega enables, when you again centralize block production, decentralized block verification, and just optimize hardware as well, you create a net new sort of, sort of design space for builders. You have unlocks on the side of latency, unlocks on the side of throughput, unlocks on the side of contract size. And with that you're able to build, as she was saying, order book based lending protocols, fully on chain spot clubs, fully on chain perk clubs. These are experiences that again, when you have consensus in that critical path, you're unable to create these more expressive kind of applications that Web2 users are obviously accustomed to at this point in time.

[Laura Shin]

Okay, yeah. I mean you guys are sort of hinting at this, but let's dive a little into the technical aspects that separate Mega eth from other L2s describe because obviously everybody knows there are some very successful L2s that are already out there. So what are some of the tech specs that you think set Mega Eth apart from the existing L2s?

[Shuyao Kang]

Yeah, we can compare ourselves to other layer 2 in terms of architecture and I will articulate the the difference. But I would end with why being layer one, Layer two does not matter. So in terms of comparison with other layer two, the biggest differentiation for MAGA is actually our data structure. So my co founder Elon, he went to Stanford, study low latency data center, compute for six years, finished his PhD and stumbled upon a blockchain and looked at blockchain scaling trilemma and he thought way everyone in the crypto world is actually not that smart because what you need to do is to measure the bottleneck of an EVM blockchain so you understand why it is slow and once you measure it and then you build a performance system that actually solve the problem. So he spent six months basically measuring EVM blockchain and realized that the bottleneck was the miracle. Patricia Tri so then what Mega did is we completely rewrote our data structure. We came up with a new name, it's just consult and that actually eliminates 99% of the slowness. So that I would say is a big differentiation. The second part is obviously we are proudly using a centralized sequencer, albeit it will be rotating later on so that we can get what I believe is the most important performance metric. Again, does not matter whether you're a layer one or layer two, it is latency. For all the past eight years, Laura, you and I have been in crypto, everybody talk about throughput. It is important. You know you can get to like 10 million TPIs and it sounds really sexy, but it does not deliver actual benefits to builders. What we've realized that what really matter, especially to consumer application founders is actually latency, which basically means the moment you click a transaction and it gets recorded on the block. So for example, Solana has about 400 millisecond latency. Arbitrum has 265 milliseconds Omega on our testnet right now is 10 millisecond and that means you can actually unlock immense amount of capital efficiency. You can run complicated strategy for consumer application. All the interaction feels real time. This is why we insist of calling Mega Ether first real time blockchain it feels smooth, it feels interactive, it feels like a Web2 technology.

[Amir Almeimani]

Especially like given today as well. I mean people's attention spans are virtually non existent. People expect fast feedback loops. So when people are subject to again even 400 millisecond block times, that's a moment those 400 milliseconds could obviously grab your attention elsewhere. What we're able to do here is create kind of that web2 feel. But on crypto Rails.

[Laura Shin]

So it sounds like almost you're not competing with other L2s. It almost sounds like you're trying to compete with some version of just almost like web2apps, but then it has crypto capability or something. Is that how you think about it?

[Amir Almeimani]

I would say that's correct framing. So as far as we're concerned, we want to give Web2Brewers a reason to explore entirely different stack, take what they're familiar with building on web2 rails, but also understand what crypto introduces to those products. To date though, people are typically not necessarily encouraged to participate because of performance limitations. I mean if you even look at, I was actually taking a look at some developer reports a couple of weeks ago and even like top of funnel builders, even though there's been a drop off in builders over the last call it year or so coming into crypto, those top of funnel builders seem to be gravitating towards more high performing chains. And that's not a coincidence. People are coming from systems that are again significantly more optimized for bandwidth, optimized for throughput, optimized for everything in that realm. They want to be able to build something that they're familiar with. If they're building products that can only service 100 people at a time, that's not the point of them ever wanting to come over to crypto.

[Laura Shin]

Okay, so it sounds like essentially part of the way you're achieving that is by making this trade off to have a little bit more centralization. So you know, you know you're starting with a single sequencer. Shuya mentioned that you will eventually go to a rotating sequencer. But are you thinking about like at some point decentralizing the sequencing or is that just very far off in the future or not a goal or what are your thoughts on that?

[Shuyao Kang]

Yeah, I would say something that many of your audience would probably disagree. I think layer twos are more decentralized than many layer ones. So for layer one their security come from their validators and it's very easy to bribe the validators of a random layer one where you know, a Lot of the layer one validators are controlled by the foundation. And you know, if you give your the founders some red packet, maybe they will give you a little validator. Right? But for a layer layer two like Mega or any other layer two, in order to do evil, we have to bribe the entire validator set of Ethereum and that's a lot more costly. So when we chose architecture of being a layer two, we believe that Mega is the end game of building a blockchain because we are a centralized sequencer that is building on a maximally decentralized phase layer. So I do not believe that decentralization is a bug. I think it is a beautiful feature. But going back to your original question, will we ever decentralize sequencer? I think we would be mid curving building blockchain. If we centralize the sequencer and then two years later we decentralize it one more time to reintroduce consensus, we might as well just building a layer one. So what we are trying to do is maintaining a one sequencer that's running at any time, but because the sequencer can be rotated, that introduce censorship resistance in a very clever way. By the way, this is actually how traditional finance work as well. So when the market is up in Tokyo, in the east, you know, your servers are in Japan and vice versa. And in the West.

[Amir Almeimani]

Yeah, I mean to that point too. I mean, I think people are pretty dogmatic when they think about decentralization. Everyone kind of goes back to like, oh, a decentralized blockchain looks like X, looks like Y, has this many ballots validators. When in reality we just don't view it as this binary thing. If you're decentralized or you're not, at the end of the day, what are some properties of decentralization? It's censorship, resistance and escape credibility. Am I able to withdraw my capital whenever I choose to? Are there forced exits? These are the things that matter when it comes to the actual block production as well. With the rotating sequencer, you still see sort of points of decentralization, but at a less granular level. So rather than having block production happen across many validators one by one, we're having block production just rotate across a handful of validators or block producers here. So it's basically taking one step further out and optimizing again for pragmatism. If you need to create a system that can rival Web2, you have to make these sort of trade offs. But again, decentralization is not something that is immediately lost because you're making These trade offs.

[Laura Shin]

Yeah, I mean it feels like we're at this moment in time with it when a lot of projects are taking this sort of hybrid approach of like some pieces are decentralized and some are centralized to kind of optimize for user experience. So yeah, it feels like the strategy is kind of shifting a little. Like, like almost maybe. Yeah, early on, maybe because of the, I guess you could just say threat of regulatory action. A lot of founders kind of optimized for decentralization. But now obviously we're in a very different regulatory climate and so people are being a little bit more pragmatic. Let's talk about the Mega token because I'm sure people want to talk about the sale, so we're going to get to that. But just let's lay some of the groundwork about the megatoken. Explain to me what the use cases are for or how it'll be used.

[Shuyao Kang]

Yeah, so there are a few utilities with the Mega token. Obviously there is a governance component to it. Then the token can also be used to rotate the sequencer. You can stick the token to do that. And then the next one is a proximity market where by using Mega and you can stake. I am very careful to use the word staking because it means so many different things in crypto, as you know. But you can put it somewhere and decide how close you are to the sequencer because the closer you are to the sequencer, the faster your transaction gets executed. And lastly, we have a very novel, I would think a long term tokenomic which is called KPI vesting. And the philosophy is very simple. I do not believe a founding team deserve to take 20% of a protocol token after working, let's say for two or three years. I believe in a tried 5Web2 model where if a team does really well, they earn their extra token. So I think Mega is the only protocol where the team, actually founding team, we're taking only 9% of the entire protocol and we will have a very handsome earn out if the protocol does really well based on a set of KPIs. So very much inspired from Elon Musk where he took $1 as a salary and then obviously a lot of Tesla stock when, when things go well.

[Laura Shin]

Okay. It's funny because of course I'm the one who wrote a book on Ethereum, but I feel like Ethereum's the original allocators. Sorry, the original, you know, people who, who got allocations, I think that was also 9%. So maybe that's the only other one.

[Shuyao Kang]

That'S what he told me. Vitalik told me the same. He's like, oh yeah, you did the same. If you look at our tokenomics, we actually follow quite what Ethereum has done, right? Decentralizing, like giving token to early investors. Amir.

[Amir Almeimani]

Oh yeah, no, and I mean to like Chief's point about KPI vesting too. Time based vesting is just a broken model that makes everyone's lives just insiders at least, like much easier. You're not really expected to do anything. Time passes. The chain itself doesn't have to be successful, but you can still have an exit. Like we're in it for the long haul. And again, like our success is largely predicated on the chain itself succeeding. For that to happen, we need to show and like demonstrate like meaningful, measurable milestones. Which is why for the KPI vesting, we've kind of broken it down into four buckets. One focusing on sort of application level growth, ecosystem growth, one focusing on just general performance of MEG itself, one focusing on ETH decentralization and then MEG ETH decentralization too. But again, that sort of forces us to know that as float increases, that float is increasing because the chain itself is meeting these massive milestones and it's warranted. So yeah, that's very much the philosophy behind it.

[Laura Shin]

Okay. And then Xuyao, you very briefly referred to this, but I want to explore it a little further. So the token also, I guess will be used for bidding for the low latency slots near the sequencer or something. So explain a little bit more about that. I guess this is called proximity markets.

[Unchained News Host]

How does that work?

[Amir Almeimani]

Yeah, so again in the case of. They can be applications that benefit from having market makers kind of live closely to the validator itself or the sequencer itself, simply staking some amount of mega in order to have that sort of access. But again, these are kind of like.

[Laura Shin]

So it is driven by like literal physical proximity.

[Amir Almeimani]

Correct, Correct. So effectively like being in the same data center.

[Laura Shin]

Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, that part is really interesting because this is another trend I feel like I'm seeing. Like there's so much more conversation around that. Yeah. And also even just with like the launch of Double Zero, which is really focused on that. And then I also was wondering. So you know, when I look at kind of how Mega ETH is set up, it looks like there's multiple tokens that can be used for gas. From my reading, I figured it was Mega ETH and musd. Is there anything else or are those the three?

[Shuyao Kang]

So when we launch ETH Will be the main GAS fee. ETH is literally in the name via Paymaster and a bunch of other technology people can use, for example MEGA as gas fee and also usdm which is our stablecoin and Amir is the master brain behind it.

[Unchained News Host]

Oh, USD M. I thought it was.

[Amir Almeimani]

M USD Musd is. We were initially Musd, but then MetaMask took it before us.

[Laura Shin]

Oh, no wonder. Okay, okay. Yeah, so I did learn it the other way. Okay, well, so then what I need to understand here is like just if I think about all the different uses of Mega of the MEGA token, then it almost feels to me like it might eventually be something like a B2B kind of coin. Because it's like very involved in just a lot of these nuts and bolts of how the system works. Is that correct or do you feel like eventually it'll evolve to have more uses?

[Amir Almeimani]

I think it's very much a dynamic token in that regard. It's not something like. As more sources of kind of like utility come up. It's something that we're definitely open to exploring. We love to experiment. I think something that we definitely were trying to avoid is falling into the trap of just being a valueless governance token where people have absolutely no reason to want to interact with MEGA itself. We wanted the token itself to have a pretty integral role in how the system itself behaves. So that was very much the thought process behind it to start.

[Laura Shin]

And will the token also have emissions or inflation?

[Amir Almeimani]

So no inflation, fixed supply. Yeah.

[Unchained News Host]

Wow.

[Laura Shin]

Okay. So there's basically no dilution like looking.

[Amir Almeimani]

Forward or as of now, no.

[Laura Shin]

Okay. Oh, interesting. And do you have any. Would you like to expound on how you designed the tokenomics and why you made these different choices and what you think perhaps other projects could learn?

[Shuyao Kang]

Well, we're not launched yet, so maybe when we launch and become successful then I would have a lot to say. But the Chineseness in me are very shy before I launch anything. I think the philosophy was always as a mere mention. Right. Have real utility and give people a real reason. I think in 2025 just launching a token and pretending that there is any usage to it is gone. We have to be very thoughtful and the token needs to be part of your on chain economy and people maybe business interact with the consumer interact or I think more often in crypto an entity is both business and an individual. And I hope someone finds something to do with our token. And obviously we hope our token can support our ecosystem, which is our accelerator program called Mega Mafia.

[Unchained News Host]

Okay, yeah.

[Laura Shin]

Which we'll Talk about in a little second. So, all right, let's talk about the way you sold this token because. So you've done three public sales. There was a $200 million round with Eko, a $500 million round with your fluffle soulbound NFT and then now the latest which was this. Well, it was, sorry, what?

[Shuyao Kang]

It's called the conviction round.

[Laura Shin]

Right. Which was on sonar, which is related to echo. So explain like you know, why you chose this particular method, like what purpose did you have with each of the different public sales?

[Shuyao Kang]

Yeah. The philosophy behind doing this public sale is to make sure that retail consumers, investors are participating in price discovery instead of, I think for the past many years it was VC who dictate price discovery on their own table. And by the time the token is launched they reach multiple billions of dollars even though the ecosystem is completely copy pasta. So you know, when we first came out our, you know, our lead Investor decided it's $200 million round, it was extremely oversubscribed. So from my perspective, instead of giving to another investor who probably forget about me in six months, I should just give it to retail investor who took an interest or wanted to bet on an early stage ecosystem. And Kobe was one of our andro and you know, we're very happy to work with him. I mean it was the 200 million rounds sold out. I think the first 5 million in 57 seconds or something. I think give us a lot more confidence. And then. So that was the 200 million round was mainly because I think retail needs to get in very early on before the press discover is finished. And then the fluffle round was, was interesting and I would say that it was not as well educated as my other two rounds. I learned a lot of lesson but the idea was we wanted to use crypto native way to involve people and we wanted to embed culture into Mega east. And we happen to be a very fast chain that looks like rabbit. So we're like, oh, why not design a cute sobond token? So that was the fluffle round, it was a 500 million round. And then the recent sonar round was very interesting and I think it was even harder for us to design actually to do it because on the one hand I was worried people would say like, oh look at these mega people, they're launching another public sale. But on the other hand I also do have other VC investors who want to give me more money and building a chain is very expensive in case people don't realize. So I was, you know, faced with two decision One more time, do I take investors money who again will forget about me in six months or do I take from retail? But then here the challenge is how am I going to price my round? I do not know. So, so that's why our sonar round was an auction. People can bid from $1 million up until certain level and then we're like okay, do we, do we cap it, do we not cap it? Like I don't know if we don't cap it, what if it goes to many billions? I don't think I deserve it. So we're like, you know what, we're going to cap it at 9,99 million. So it's not a unicorn round. I think this is a way how we hold ourselves accountable to keep going. And obviously the sonar round was 30x oversubscribed. There was $1.4 billion who are competing for $50 million allocation and over $100 million people who chose to lock the token for a whole year.

[Laura Shin]

Yeah, I mean this is super interesting. I just want to dig in to the one piece. So obviously the sonar one. I'm sure everybody's going to be interested. But before we get to that I just have to ask when you said that you feel like the soulbound NFT was, you know that round, the fluffle one that was where you like made mistakes or whatever, like what, what was it about that particular round that you felt didn't go well?

[Shuyao Kang]

It was purely execution. So Mega, we are a performing blockchain team. You know we deal with like really deep tech infrastructure but building a soulbound token NFT is pure product and I didn't have people to do it and you know, we had to use an outsourced dev shop to do it. Now obviously they don't care as much about Mega as I do so it was painful. So it was purely the execution.

[Laura Shin]

Okay, all right, so we're going to take a quick break and then when we come back we will dig into what happened, how they made a lot of decisions in this last round because all of this stuff is super interesting. So stick around and we will be watching right back.

[Unchained News Host]

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[Laura Shin]

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[Unchained News Host]

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[Unchained News Host]

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[Laura Shin]

Back to my conversation with Xuyao and Amir. So let's dig into this latest ICO because, I mean, this is so interesting. You, you know, had this auction that you described, but you just posted about how you decided to make these allocations and this post was like incredibly fascinating. There were, you know, multiple different social scores that you used. You know, like, you literally use the word hand selected a few times in, in the description of how you made these choices. So describe for me the whole process and came up with the design as well.

[Amir Almeimani]

Oh, you want me to go? Yeah, okay, yeah. So as far as the general approach, it was really trying to balance it. At the end of the day, the trade off that you're always making here is do you want to cast a super wide net and give everyone exposure, or do you want to go super deep with people who have demonstrated sort of excitement, enthusiasm around the project, have demonstrated to be active on chain users and just generally contributing members within this ecosystem that we're in, which is something that we care quite a bit about because obviously we want people who are going to be with us, not just day one, dump the token and leave. We want people to be contributing members of the mega ecosystem long term. So these were the various dimensions that we were measuring when it came to kind of landing on an official score for each person and then just weighting general bids. But yeah, that was very much the thought process. It was making sure that the people who deserve to have skin in the game get their skin in the game.

[Shuyao Kang]

Yeah, I would add is I basically stare at our Excel sheet and database for three days. I almost went blind. And what something I held myself accountable was, if I open up our algorithm and our selection process, will I be proud? Will I be able to justify each and every one of my selection? That that was really, I think, my own internal benchmark. I think it fundamentally comes to, you know, there are a lot of people with big accounts who would talk to me like, hey, give me allocation, I'm going to talk good about you, but am I going to give allocation to someone like that compared to someone who's been supporting us? You know, even though there were a lot of people who, you know, condemn our approach or did not like our ecosystem. Right. So you got to ask yourself, who are the long term builders here? And, and then there are a lot of human emotion in it. So we build an algorithm so as you can see from the article, it was very mathematical so we can point people to their score and be like, this is exactly what you're getting. And to go more specific, we get over subscribed by LOCKED participants. So for those who did not lock it, unless you are a huge MEGA supporter, you probably are not getting your allocation filled. That's where we get some of the complaints. They're like, hey, I have a, I have 200k Twitter follower. Why don't you give me some allocation? Like bro, you have not done anything you didn't want to lock. Maybe there's a reason there.

[Laura Shin]

And actually I also wanted to ask. So as we mentioned, you had done the three sales, but then why no airdrops? Like it seems like there's a reason that you chose not to do that.

[Amir Almeimani]

I mean, yeah, for what I was saying earlier too. It simply is incentivizing the wrong behavior. At the end of the day, we have to think back to why did airdrops even come into practice to begin with. It was more from legal regulatory kind of side versus simply oh, we're doing this because it makes sense as far as we're concerned. We try to think again from first principles and what is pragmatic and what will actually add to the longevity of MEGA itself. And we simply just don't see airdrops as being that we have a flavor of on chain incentives which we briefly allude to in the public sale, which we plan to have over the course of, call it the first six, eight months of mainnet. But again, we're very focused and very intentional as far as who has access to those additional incentives. It's the same people who've demonstrated demand to have actual skin in the game too. So we're trying to sidestep the, the oftentimes like misstep that projects make, which is simply just handing tokens to anyone regardless of whether they're actually aligned with your project or not. And then they simply just benefit, dump it, move on to the next thing.

[Laura Shin]

Okay, yeah. I mean what was interesting was There is a group that in the post you said did largely, you know, say that you that they were not going to hold it for a year. But it was these early participants and they were part of the like hand selected group. So describe, you know, who those were. And I mean I was struck by the fact that you publicly like listed all of them, which I thought was really interesting. So just explain like who those people were, what they had done, you know, why you decided to name them all those bits.

[Shuyao Kang]

Yeah, so some of them are extremely well known active MEGA supporters. So for example, ZERO X Ultra dude actually build most of our analytics dashboards. Like I think he's like a part time MEGA team member, you know, very, very active. A lot of them are community regional leads in different countries. They've hosted, you know, external events. Even though we told everyone day one that there's no AirDrop, these people still supported Mega. I think probably something that we do, maybe we have a good merch that resonated with them. We have our discord malls for example, or people spread technical article about mega. Because people look at mega, they're like, okay, this name is retarded. This project literally calling themselves MEGA E. They're a centralized sequencer. What is so good about this? But it really takes some smart people to explain the technical nuances behind our technology. So yeah, people who have done many different contribution. In fact, I don't think it matters if you just like yap about MEGA on the timeline. That's not what we care about. We care about the quality of your contribution that is deeply reflected in that list.

[Laura Shin]

Okay. Yeah. And why did you decide to publicly name them? Like just to kind of. What's the word? Publicly appreciate them or transparency.

[Shuyao Kang]

Everything we do is open to the. It's open to everyone. I think for the past many years. We have mucky tokenomics, we have mucky different behavior by the insiders. No one knows where airdrop goes even. No one knows what holds what. Yeah, we just wanted to be very open on what we do as a team.

[Amir Almeimani]

And then public acknowledgment we just think is super important too. We want people to see what we appreciate in a community. These are folks that again have been with us for well over a year. And we want their actions to also be things people look to as far as like, how do I be a contributing member of the Medeath ecosystem?

[Laura Shin]

Okay.

[Shuyao Kang]

Yeah.

[Laura Shin]

I mean this is all around incentives and trying to find your missionaries and not attract mercenaries.

[Amir Almeimani]

Exactly.

[Laura Shin]

So another group that you quote unquote, hand Selected were app builders who selected to lock their tokens for a year. And then the last group was the public participants who just were not part of the community. And what was interesting was, you know, then you, you went into detail on like how you scored those people, even just using that phrasing, like scoring people. That's kind of interesting. So talk a little bit about like how you came up with this scoring system, you know, what kind of behaviors or metrics you valued. Like. Yeah, why? Why did you choose those metrics?

[Shuyao Kang]

Yeah. So luckily there are actually a bunch of existing metrics that we can just plug into as part of the formula. So things we really care about is, is this person active on chain? We are building a blockchain. If the, if our investor base are not using a blockchain and only trading on centralized exchanges probably doesn't help with Mega gdp. That's super important. The second one is, it's called Money score. It's basically a combination of your social score and different reputation system that we're basically pulling API. And then the third one is whether you are supporting Mega. So whether you have a discord row, what you've talked about Mega and again here is not about how many times you yap mega, mega, mega, but actually like real contribution. So. And then we apply weight differently. Oh, sorry. One last one is whether you have supported our Mega Mafia ecosystem.

[Amir Almeimani]

Exactly.

[Shuyao Kang]

Because Mega is nothing without our apps.

[Amir Almeimani]

So interacting with examples of that is like interacting with like Cap. And then whether you hold CUSD for example, or if you hold a, we have a social application called Lemonade, almost like a decentralized Luma. And if you hold their, their flagship NFT Lemonheads or if you're a bad buns holder. So again, these are kind of points. Obviously it's not perfect, but these are ways in which we kind of measure how people are interacting with the ecosystem today. And that buy in is something that we value quite a bit because at the end of the day our success relies heavily on our applications also winning.

[Laura Shin]

Okay. And you also talked about civil attacks. I know that you used a bunch of different tools like bubble maps, Echo, some internal tools to ward those off. How effective did you find that? Like did you catch any major civil farming a lot?

[Unchained News Host]

Yes.

[Shuyao Kang]

Yeah. So all the sources that you mentioned, Echo supplied us a bunch of addresses. We have a killer data scientist internally and yeah, his job is just like a map. Different wallet addresses on chain. And yeah, we ban all of them.

[Laura Shin]

And can you talk about the scale of them or the number? I'm Just so curious. Are people, I mean, were they really trying to gain the game, the system or did. Did they seem to. Yeah. Were they trying to hide it or. I don't know.

[Amir Almeimani]

No. Yeah. I mean like there's in terms of like exact numbers at this very moment. Don't like, don't have that like off the top of my head. But there are certainly like clusters throughout the public sale where it was just very clearly a single individual trying to stibble with call it like 4, 5, 600 KYC accounts. So shout out to Dmitri again. Dimitri did an incredible job of doing a lot of that filtering for us.

[Laura Shin]

And wait, so I'm sorry, they like somehow obtained 400 different KYC, like PII, I guess, or how were they doing.

[Amir Almeimani]

That as far as like their processes? I'm not. I don't have like full visibility into it. But again, to participate in the sale you would have had to gone through kyc. So many folks either had friends of theirs or some other way in which they've managed to sort of amass all of those accounts for them to then participate in the sale. But thankfully we managed to catch all of that.

[Shuyao Kang]

Yeah, a lot of them were connected wallets and you can attach a few wallets under one kyc, so it doesn't mean that there are replicates kyc, But I think one lesson learned I had from this whole process is finding real human heart. Once you find them, you have to treasure them.

[Laura Shin]

I love it. That's a great motto. Okay, so Shiva, you actually were on the show before to talk about Mega ETH's decision to pursue a native Stablecoin. This was even before the whole USDH Hyper Liquid Stablecoin. What's the word? Yeah, their moment on the timeline, which definitely took center stage for a while. But why don't we just briefly touch on that again, Explain why it is that you decided to pursue a native Stablecoin for Mega Eth and just talk a little bit about what role you see that playing for the Mega Eth ecosystem.

[Amir Almeimani]

Definitely. I mean, starting off, we just kind of subscribe to the belief that economic models for chains are broken and if anything, they're at odds with the actual chain itself and the applications reaching escape velocity and seeing real adoption. What I mean by all of that is if you look at existing sort of L2s today, a lot of that revenue is being generated from priority fees. The issue is priority fees are coming at direct odds with the actual applications giving their users the best possible user experience. Because if you're these Applications are forcing their users to pay some additional amount of capital in order to have their transaction get processed. Obviously that over time could discourage people from wanting to actually interact with these applications at all. So as far as we're concerned, we had to think through, like, what are revenue models that allow the actual chain revenue to scale with adoption? And rather than having them act at odds with one another, how do we actually have them move up and to the right with one another? So a very obvious low hanging fruit in doing that. Since we're running our sequencer at cost, we're running it first in, first out is let's tie a sort of unified stablecoin to solve this very pressing issue and have this sort of be the anchor when it comes to transactions across the chain, across our applications, et cetera. So it came definitely from sort of that line of thinking.

[Laura Shin]

All right, so let's talk about your Mega Mafia accelerator. Explain why you decided to start it and how it works.

[Shuyao Kang]

I can talk about why we decided to start it. And then Amir is again the mastermind of Mega Mafia. So as mentioned, the sole purpose of Mega Eth is to give birth to novel applications. But we are not application builders, we are chain builders. So in the early days, I was like, where do I find these application builders who are actually wanting to build, not an amm, you know, and it's almost impossible to go out and just find a random builder. You have to attract the good ones because, you know, what they're trying to do is, you know, spend the next five of their lives, these five years of their life, to build something with you. And so with that philosophy, we started the Mega Mafia program. And the goal is to find the best builders and live with them. What do I mean by live with them? I had this philosophy where I think in the age of AI, the most or the best thing you can do with someone else is to spend quality time where you just spend physical time together. And I think that's the only way you can get to know someone and be close to someone. So when we started Mega Mafia, I reached out to some builder friends and the program was designed in a way where you would pitch your idea to us that leverages our unique technology. The applications should not be working on any other chain other than Mega eth. And then you need to be willing to spend months living with me somewhere in the world. We've lived in Berlin together, Chiang Mai together, and this year we did Copenhagen in August together. And you know, the program lasts for a year, and, you know, we help you with a bunch of go to market fundraising, which Amir can go deep into. But I would say the, the original dream of building Mega Mafia was to get a cohort of really good or hungry builders who are building novel things or who are, you know, okay with living with each other for some time. Oh yeah, definitely.

[Amir Almeimani]

And then just piggybacking on a lot of that. We're very opinionated and I think the biggest issue is that we've seen with a lot of recent ecosystems, ecosystems of the past, is if you kind of leave everything up to chance, you end up seeing an ecosystem form of just forks from other EVM environments. Again, we've built this massively new design space for builders. We wanted to take a very curated approach to showcasing what it is that's actually possible on this new real time chain. So Mafia is our way of kind of establishing that standard of excellence that the rest of the ecosystem can kind of understand, recognize and also try to compete within, if that makes sense. So when it came to kind of like Mafia itself, it's focusing heavily on builders that and again like the builder profiles are very eclectic. We have people who come from tradfi backgrounds working as former directors at BlackRock & Goldman and kind of list goes on there. And then we also have the real crypto natives, seasoned veterans from DeFi 2.0. We have first time founders that are just leaving university right now, coming into crypto, super curious, super hungry, have been in the trenches for the last three, four years. So the beauty is you kind of bring all these different personalities and put them in a room for a month at a time. And you also start to see how strengths start to rub off on others, how they start to lean on one another for input. And it's sort of like this very beautiful collaborative environment that emerges. And I think that's where a lot of the superpower is. And to Shu's point about just spending a lot of time in person, you don't get this when you just have a bunch of builders building in silos and usually that's what people default to because it's just the easier path of oh, this person wants to build on my chain. Here's a grant, do what you have to do. Here's just like very basic set of KPIs. That's not what we're optimizing for. We want people who want to build something that will be able to stand on two feet, something that will play a meaningful role in just the general on chain economy. Not only on just Meg, but just broader Crypto. And we want these defining applications. That's what we care about, that's what we're optimizing for.

[Laura Shin]

And Shuya, you. You mentioned briefly that you wanted the apps to build something that's not possible on other chains. So are there any specific ones that you want to call out? I know, like in the very beginning of the episode, you, both of you had named just types of apps. But yeah, maybe talk in specifics about certain ones that you feel are, yeah, new and different and only possible on Mega Eth.

[Amir Almeimani]

Yeah, no, definitely. So we have a team that's building, as she was saying earlier, Tap trading. We have a team called Euphoria. Incredibly, incredibly talented co founders in Nathan and Casey. What they're basically looking to do is take something that is sort of only familiar to a very small cohort of people being like binary options trading, but making it something that is very digestible, interactive and just very gamified. They want the experience itself to be so intuitive that you're playing a game of Brick Breaker Snake. So what you basically have, and I wish we could show a demo right now because they actually just pushed out their official prod version and it's very, very cool, but you basically have a trading grid right in front of you and you have the price feed, which is updating in real time on chain. They're pushing, I think, feed every 2 milliseconds, working closely with Redstone on doing this. But you basically get to click on the grid where you think the actual price feed will go. So if you think it's going to be at this price at this point in time, you drop a square there and then if the price feed hits, you win the trade. If it doesn't, then you end up losing the trade itself. So that's one that we're really excited about in terms of just general enthusiasm and novelty of apps. I think that was something that, when I first played with it, it was like a light bulb eureka moment. You can see how something like this will resonate and it's something that will resonate beyond just with more than just a crypto audience. People who enjoy the gamification that Robinhood brought to the table, they're going to see something like this and it's going to be a massive wow. This is so much fun. This is an entirely new way of me interacting with this financial instrument. So Euphoria is an example for me. Blitzo, which is in the second cohort, they're gamifying payments. So it's funny because in crypto Even like specifically for Mega too. Until the second cohort, we didn't really have many people show so much enthusiasm around building in the payments realm. I think people conflate payments applications with wallets in crypto, but in my opinion wallets are sort of pushing for very passive behaviors where it's simply you connect a wallet, you don't really do much in there. It's just acting as sort of a ledger for you to check in, see what your assets look like, et cetera. Whereas here will Albert, Mark, they're looking to basically disrupt what people kind of do today with like Venmo or Cash app where you kind of have that payments feel but you also loop in this feeling of like dopamine inducing like sort of like gambling behaviors. So imagine a world where you're kind of at Starbucks, for example, you go, you tap your Apple pay, they have their own Blitzo card which will act as a wrap around people's existing credit cards. You actually get a dropdown at the moment of transaction where you can either choose to, you can coin flip basically to double or nothing your transaction. So you basically either pay double or you can get your transaction for free. The actual transaction itself settles in again like 10 milliseconds. So these are kind of the real time experiences that Mega itself is enabling that will resonate with an audience. Again, that goes beyond crypto. I think the best data point I got of this is when I was chatting with my girlfriend's father and he was vehemently against this idea of hyper gambling. But funny enough, my girlfriend's sister, who's in that kind of 20 year old profile, who typically doesn't care at all about crypto, wasn't even listening to the conversation or seemed as if she wasn't listening. And then as soon as we were done talking, she lifts her head up and she's like, wait, I would actually use that Apple. And that's the exact reaction kind of like that we want, we're tailoring experiences that will resonate with Gen Z, Gen Alpha and take these behaviors that they so very clearly demonstrate but don't necessarily know how to verbalize as an ask in terms of a product. And I think that's what the mafia builders are so great at doing too. Basically doing a lot of pattern recognition and creating products, very structured products around these very broken behaviors that you see on a day to day basis.

[Laura Shin]

Yeah, honestly when you were describing those apps it made me think, do you remember when? Well, yeah, hopefully. Hopefully. I don't know, some people might be offended so if you're offended. I'm just describing what other people were saying. But back when the Tap to Earn games were taking off on ton, a lot of people were like, oh, but they're not fun games. Like you don't want to play them, you just want to make the money. And like hearing you describe this, it sounds more like, oh, the game itself is actually fun and you actually want to play. So, so it is kind of like, yeah, a further evolution of, of that previous craze. Okay, so you're in this place where you know now you've just had what I'm assuming is your, is your last public sale, is that correct? Yeah. And, and then next, and then next year you're going to face this moment where there's going to be these unlocks. So I'm assuming that that feels like a sort of deadline to you of like, you know, you would want to accomplish certain things by that point. So talk a little bit about that, you know, how are you thinking about this next year before those unlocks happen and just like, yeah, talk a little bit more about your vision I guess because I would say over the next like two or three years.

[Shuyao Kang]

Yeah. So I am incredibly excited for not even next one year, but the next six months because Mega again is nothing without our applications. And I'm very excited for people to actually see experience crypto apps for the first time and not make them proud. I think there's so much stigma. Yeah, I don't know, maybe I'm. It's a, it's a very, it's an emotional I think endeavor for the Mega team because I think we just believe that crypto will take over the world. It's strictly a much better system. So I think my goal is for the next one year we're able to showcase the Mafia application to builders. We're going to welcome more independent application builder who can leverage the real time technology. To me, I would love to see usdm, Amir's brainchild to really fly. We have a very healthy economic. I'm hoping the proximity market, the rotation sequencer would work out. I'm not super worried about a year later our investors unlock. I hope they double down in a year later and then in the next two or three years we have an incredible amount of products we want to push both on the chain performance level but also on the consumer level. So I think us as a company, our goal is to build a, almost like an operating system in crypto that enable, that enable peer to peer technology or experiences to your average Consumer users. Lastly, I would say that I think Mega has the best WAC in crypto, so I wish to continue winning in that category. Amir, to you.

[Amir Almeimani]

Yeah, no, everything that Chu says and like, ideally I would just like us to see just become this like black hole for on chain innovation. I would love to like, I've been yearning for kind of like the, the feeling that I had when I was like playing with Yearn for the first time or just like experiencing Defi Summer for the first time. Obviously you can never like recreate those exact experiences, but I'm hoping once we're live over the first year or two years, you actually have this inflection point too where it's sort of the start of the first real time applications and the kind of experimentation that comes along with that. So again like we have visibility into everything that we have going on in the Mafia, which we're all super excited about. But I can't wait to see what third party builders start to do. Especially when the chain is live and just like being able to support them and just like again, making Mega the home for the applications that will onboard the next. Call it million normies that don't even know that they're using crypto Rails. That's personally what I'm optimizing for.

[Laura Shin]

Okay, you guys, this is hilarious. I decided to Google Mega Eth swag because I was like, what does their swag look like? And I didn't realize, but the first link that I clicked on was for Megadeth swag.

[Amir Almeimani]

Exactly.

[Laura Shin]

I was like, whoa, okay, that's an interesting aesthetic they have. But anyway, anyway, yeah, I, I did, I think find some of your swag and yeah, it is, it is really cool. It's like a little bit more of a. An anime aesthetic. Is that right? Am I looking at the right thing?

[Shuyao Kang]

It's very much Megadeth and Cypher punk vibes.

[Laura Shin]

Okay. Okay.

[Shuyao Kang]

And our hat is perhaps the most sought after hat in the entire crypto.

[Amir Almeimani]

I have it somewhere over there in the other room.

[Laura Shin]

Okay. Okay.

[Amir Almeimani]

Yeah, and just like the general feel of the project too. Just like first like big shout out to Rose, our creative director. Just very much around like retrofuturism, creating that like very interesting, like duality between the two.

[Laura Shin]

Okay.

[Unchained News Host]

All right.

[Laura Shin]

Is there anything I didn't ask you guys that you would want to mention before we wrap?

[Shuyao Kang]

So anything about Mafia you want to mention, Amir?

[Amir Almeimani]

About Mafia? No, I mean, just like we've seen like quite a bit of success so far in aggregate. Teams have raised between Cohort 1 and Cohort 2, which we have about 30 some teams at this point north of $80 million from Tier 1 funds like Paradigm, Dragonfly, kind of like list goes on from there, which is very sort of humbling for us as a core team because it really speaks to the quality of builders we've been able to attract. As far as they're concerned, they're not incentivized by kind of like grants or anything of that matter. We don't have a grants program. We don't provide any sort of financial incentive. They're excited about the actual tech. Like our responsibility is being able to give them an execution environment that allows them to kind of realize their visions for what on chain products should look like. So they've been incredible to collaborate with so far and we have a few more coming out of stealth relatively soon.

[Laura Shin]

Okay, great. All right, well this was super fun. Thanks so much for coming on Onchained.

[Shuyao Kang]

Thank you Laura.

[Amir Almeimani]

Thank you.

[Unchained News Host]

Welcome to this week's news recap. Let's begin. Analysts diverge on Bitcoin's path as institutions reassess outlook Bitcoin's recent downturn has prompted sharply divided forecasts among leading financial institutions. Galaxy Digital cut its year end target from $185,000 to $120,000 after the cryptocurrency slipped below $100,000 for the first time in six months. The firm cited reduced volatility and growing dominance of institutional investors as signs that bitcoin is entering a quote maturity era. Alex Thorne, Galaxy's head of research, blamed October's 400,000 BTC whale sell off and a $20 billion liquidation cascade for dampened sentiment. At the same time, Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood revised her long term bull case downward by $300,000, acknowledging that stablecoins are absorbing some of the real world use cases her firm once envisioned for bitcoin. Stablecoins are usurping part of the role that we thought bitcoin would play, Wood told CNBC, noting their rapid rise across emerging markets. In contrast, J.P. morgan analysts foresee renewed upside projecting bitcoin could climb to around $170,000 within six to 12 months. The bank said October's record liquidations have flushed excess leverage from the system, creating what it called a quote, cleaner setup for recovery. Their model, which compares bitcoin's volatility to gold, suggests a 67% upside potential if market stability persists.

[Laura Shin]

Together, the contrasting views highlight a market.

[Unchained News Host]

At a crossroads where institutional control macro competition from assets like gold and AI stocks and the rise of stablecoins are reshaping Bitcoin's trajectory heading into 2026. Balancer hack drains $116 million Decentralized exchange Balancer suffered one of 2025's largest DeFi exploits on Monday, with over $116 million drained from its V2 stable and composable stable pools. Blockchain data showed stolen assets, including 6850 EOS ETH, 6590 W ETH and 4260 WSETH transferred to a new wallet. The balancer team confirmed the breach, paused affected pools and offered a 20% white hat bounty for the fund's return. An emergency hard fork was also executed on the Barachain network to recover compromised assets. A preliminary postmortem later attributed the hack to a flaw in Balancers rounding function, which the attacker manipulated alongside Flash loans to convert internal credits into real withdrawals. According to security firm Cyvers, it was one of the most sophisticated on chain attacks to date. The incident sparked debate across the crypto industry. Some analysts called the breach quote, a serious warning for decentralized finance, while others argued it underscored the inherent risks of smart contract investing. Despite Balancer undergoing more than 10 security audits, critics questioned their effectiveness, warning that quote, audited by X means almost nothing, end quote. The protocol's total value, locked, dropped nearly 50% within 24 hours, reflecting shaken confidence even among veteran DeFi users. MetaPlanet leverages $100 million Bitcoin loan to expand holdings Tokyo based Meta Planet has secured a $100 million loan backed by its existing bitcoin reserves to finance additional crypto purchases and share buybacks. The company, often called Asia's MicroStrategy, used its 30823 BTC, worth about $3.5 billion, as collateral under what it described as a quote, conservative loan structure, though specific terms were not disclosed. The move aligns with Meta Planet's aggressive accumulation goal of holding 210,000 BTC by 2027, roughly 1% of Bitcoin's total supply funds may also support its 75 billion yen, $500 million share repurchase plan, initiated after the company's net asset value briefly fell below market parity last month. While the strategy underscores metaplanet's deep conviction in Bitcoin, it could expose the firm to heightened risk if market volatility intensifies. Credit rating agencies have already flagged such concentration as a concern. We remain fully committed to our Bitcoin strategy, the company said in its Filing Ripple raises $500 million amid questions over valuation Ripple Labs has raised $500 million in a new funding round that values the company at $40 billion, drawing participation from major investors including Brevin, Howard, Citadel Securities Affiliates Marshall Wais, Galaxy Digital and Pantera Capital. The raise comes as Ripple expands aggressively, acquiring custody firm Palisade Prime Brokerage, hidden Road and stablecoin platform Rail, while its RLUSD stablecoin recently surpassed $1 billion in circulation. However, industry observers told Unchained the deal may have less to do with Ripple's operations and more with access to its vast XRP reserves. The company holds nearly 35 billion XRP, worth about $80 billion at current prices, leading some analysts to describe the investment as quote, buying discounted XRP through equity. Despite Ripple's large balance sheet, its blockchain Network generates under $200,000 a month in fees, raising questions about XRP's intrinsic value. Investors may view Ripple as a quote digital asset treasury play rather than a traditional fintech bet. In related news, Ripple joined forces with MasterCard, Gemini and WebBank to let Gemini credit card payments settle in its RLUSD stablecoin on Ripple's blockchain, marking one of the first US bank backed credit card settlements using stablecoins as the global market surges toward a projected $4 trillion by 2030. Sam Bankman Fried appeals conviction faces skeptical Court Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman Fried returned to court this week seeking to overturn his 2023 conviction for defrauding customers, lenders and investors of the now defunct crypto exchange. The appeal, heard by the US Court of Appeals for the second Circuit, argues that Judge Lewis Kaplan unfairly limited evidence supporting Bankman Fried's claim that he acted in good faith. Based on legal counsel, the three judge panel appeared unconvinced. Quote, if you're not challenging the sufficiency of the evidence, are you conceding it was sufficient to convict? Asked Circuit Judge Maria Araujo Khan, pressing defense attorney Alexandra Shapiro on the argument. Prosecutors countered that the evidence of wrongdoing was, quote, overwhelming, citing testimony from three former FTX executives who said they conspired with Bankman fried to misappropriate $8 billion in customer funds. Legal analysts say the defense faces, quote, a steep uphill battle. Even if the conviction stands, observers expect his family to intensify efforts for a presidential pardon, though experts view the chances as remote. Franklin Templeton Launches Hong Kong's First Tokenized Fund Franklin Templeton has unveiled Hong Kong's first fully tokenized money Market fund, marking a major step in the city's fintech and blockchain development strategy. The Franklin On Chain US Government Money Fund registered in Luxembourg, invests in short term US Treasuries while recording ownership via blockchain tokens. The fund, launched for professional investors, was developed in partnership with HSBC and OSL as part of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority's Project Ensemble, which explores tokenized deposits and potential CBDC integration. Quote this launch shows our commitment to expanding tokenized investment products in Asia, said Tariq Ahmad Franklin, Templeton's head of APAC. The initiative supports Hong Kong's FinTech 2030 plan and its goal to become a hub for institutional digital assets, distinguishing its regulatory approach from mainland China. Retail versions of the product are expected pending regulatory approval. Gemini files for CFTC approval to launch prediction market Gemini has applied to the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission to operate a regulated prediction market platform called Gemini Titan. The exchange's filing seeks approval to run a designated contract market for event based derivatives covering economic, political and sports forecasts. The move comes as prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket report record activity surpassing $2 billion in weekly volume. Bloomberg reported that Gemini plans to offer the service directly rather than through partners, signaling a strategic shift toward institutional clients. The exchange, owned by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, faces mounting financial pressure. Since its September IPO, shares have fallen nearly 50%, and Gemini reported a $282 million loss in the first half of 2025 as revenue and retail activity declined. Unchained is produced by Laura Shin, with help from Juan Aranovich, Margaret Curia and Pam Majumdar. The weekly recap was written by Juan Aranovic and edited by Stephen Ehrlich. Thanks for listening.

[Shuyao Kang]

It.