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- [00:00]
A
Usually there is this unwritten rule of credible neutrality as far as teams themselves staying somewhat removed from the actual build out of the application layer. I think myself no make shoe, we all basically have been looking back at history and come to the realization that that's very much a losing strategy.
- [00:17]
B
I think our focus is on building a really great blockchain and but more importantly applications which will hit users that aren't on CT and who didn't even know they could benefit from blockchains. But then they will and they won't even know that because it's really fast.
- [00:40]
C
Hey everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this live stream. Before we get started, a quick reminder. Nothing you hear on Unchained is investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. My guests and I may hold assets discussed on the show. For more disclosures, visit Unchained Crypto.com did you know that figure is giving away $25,000 in USDC? They're a decentralized digital asset platform for earning, borrowing and lending. Download the Figure Markets app using our link FigureMarkets Co Unchainedp deposit into their democratized prime pools and earn about 9% APY paid hourly while you enter. Every dollar you keep in for 25 consecutive days counts as an entry. Again, the link is figuremarkets co unchaineddp for full details. If crypto taxes feel overwhelming, you are not alone. That's why Crypto Tax Girl, a team that's been helping crypto investors since 2017, is offering $100 off on one on one crypto tax help. To get $100 off your crypto tax services, go to CryptoTaxGirl.com Unchained Again, that's CryptoTaxGirl.com Unchained. Today's topic is Mega Eth. Here to discuss is Namik Mutarolu, CSO and founding team at Megaath, and Amir Almaymani, Head of ecosystem at Megaeth. Welcome Namik and Amir.
- [02:15]
A
Hey Laura, how's it going?
- [02:17]
C
Great. Excited to chat with you. First of all, congrats on launching Mainnet on Monday. How do you guys feel about it? And why don't we start with you Natmik?
- [02:27]
B
Great. I think we've been working on this for a while now and it's always been a idea in a lot of people's minds, right? This level of performance, this particular trade off, this particular architecture, achieving this level of low latency in production. And it was an idea in my mind until, you know, just a couple months ago when we went on to different tier mainnet and when we did the stress test and now as we go into public mainnet, it's, it's quite exciting I think to be able to bring this level of performance, the FA ecosystem and have it live in production. So it's exciting. We're retired above. It's very exciting.
- [03:14]
C
And Amir, how about you?
- [03:16]
A
Yeah, no, I mean I have two doors right out of my mouth right now. I think it's really about level setting expectations as well. It's very much a marathon, not a sprint. And this is very much the start of the race too. So we're just getting the foundational plumbing set up in place, making sure that all the teams are prepared for full deployments and then excited for what people will start to get to play with. Over the next couple of weeks we're going to have a lot of mafia teams start to deploy and just again indexing heavily on net new experiences on chain that are uniquely unlocked by a real time chain.
- [03:49]
C
So I need to ask you because obviously this is happening in this broader environment of crypto kind of having this fall, especially after 10 10, even another plummet last week on February 5th and that day we saw Bitcoin plunge from 70k down to 63k in one day. There's all these rumors about somebody blew up, something happened. So I'm curious, even just looking at the price of ETH itself, it's down 35% in the last month. So I wondered, there's been obviously some last minute changes also with your launch. So just talk about how you were thinking about navigating this launch in this environment.
- [04:35]
B
So without a doubt it's been a volatile few weeks and it effectively forced us to ask ourselves, hey, how do we optimize for the success of mega right? When you have scenarios where actually everybody wants to kind of, you know, close their laptops for a few months and you know, touch some grass it, it becomes difficult to build flywheels and we need flywheels to effectively validate the Mega EVE ecosystem thesis. I would say that a decision we had made a long time ago, for better or for worse, was that the, the era of infrastructure for the sake of infrastructure is over and we need to have a proactive role in cultivating and facilitating a vibrant application ecosystem. Now if there's a dev spiral, the applications don't match anymore. So what we did is we basically course corrected the ship a little bit and implemented what we think is a way to enable application and protocol growth and have that directly aligned with the general growth of the ecosystem as known by usdm.
- [05:52]
A
Yeah, and just to like adding to that point too. It's always about optimizing for the longevity of Mega eth, what do we need to do today such that Mega will be here thriving five years from now, seven years from now, ten years from now. So we're playing much longer term games and every step that we, we take is again a step in the direction of the five, seven, ten years as opposed to how do we just draw up a bunch of attention today and then eventually fizzle out over time. That's, that's something that we think is generally net negative, not only for ourselves as neat as a chain, but also just the applications that are being built on top of Mega. So sometimes you have to go with the slow cook.
- [06:29]
C
Yeah, yeah, I have a question for you guys about that later because yeah, there's kind of a certain sense of intentionality that I'm noticing in a lot of your decisions. But why don't we go through some of the choices that you're making first before we get to that question? Well, let's just actually even just talk about the basics. So obviously, you know, as you mentioned, we're launching in this environment in terms of the market. But the other thing that happened before was that Vitalik Buterin published a blog post saying that Ethereum was not going to focus as much on this roll up centric roadmap. It was going to try to scale the layer one he counseled, you know, for teams that are building layer twos that you would want to focus on features other than scaling. And I wondered how that also affected things about your launch or how you were thinking about how to position your chain.
- [07:25]
B
I think it was actually lovely to hear, as absurd as that sounds. I remember we've had lots of conversations with other people in the ETH ecosystem and obviously the Layer one trick, scale, scale, it's just net additive for Ethereum. In fact, when, when Vitalik made his article he made, he basically described what a Layer two should be moving forward and what the basic simple statement is something that Ethereum alone can never become right. Structurally it's impossible for Ethereum or really in our opinion at least any other one to achieve some of those traits. And what does that look like? Ultra low latency hyper specialization of the architecture that's great for app chains. Enshrinement and opinionated decisions that a credibly neutral layer one could really never make. And in my Opinion he also said extreme amounts of scale that the L1 will never achieve. This is all kind of how we decided to build Megy from the very beginning. Right? The reason why we built on Ethereum as much as we love ETH is not because of like a unbridled fanboy ism towards Vitalik, but because with the design choices we had made, which was build a truly performance first architecture, offload consensus to whoever does consensus best. Ethereum L1 does consensus best. And that allows us to build, you know, a very opinionated performance first architecture because we were able to settle on the theorem. And in my opinion, in many ways the Talex article kind of validates at least our decisions on how we went ahead of our architecture. Now he still has a lot, he says a lot that we need to strive to become. We're not a stage one roll up today, even when you take DA out of out of the equation. But I actually think that it was a beautiful moment or because in some ways it's like, hey, let's cut the crap. And you know, if you're layer two, you need to build something that justifies you making these design choices that are basically not necessarily the same as what Ethereum stands for.
- [09:41]
C
Amir, do you want to add anything?
- [09:43]
A
I mean Navig just hit the nail on the head there. At the end of the day, just very much validated the entire thesis of Mageeth and also just our general approach to, to building out the chain in the application level as well. We've been priding ourselves on only possible on Mega if an application doesn't actually harness the unlocks of Mega itself. If it's something that can be easily ported over from another EVM compatible chain, then that's just a massive disservice to user to their actual users. So people should be taking advantage of the technical unlocks here. And again, we've just been very unapologetic about it. We're here to centralize blockbuster block production, decentralized block verification and take throughput and latency to a level of scale that we haven't seen yet. And then we're just going to continue to march in that direction.
- [10:27]
C
Yeah, so talk through some of those specs for any, you know, builders listening, any users who've been frustrated by poor user experience, go ahead and you know, just talk a little bit about what you think technically you've achieved that other time.
- [10:47]
A
Go for it.
- [10:48]
B
So I mean, I think that the stress test we performed on Mainnet kind of paints that story. So I remember a few months ago, while we're still on testnet, I was discussing some of our performance numbers. We were hitting 2 gigahertz per second and this very smart individual was basically saying, hey, like there's no way you're going to have that on mainnet for. Right. Because we've lived in an era where everyone was able to stay like super high testnet numbers and that never really materialized. Right. But like, effectively what megaef has done is Mega has chosen to fully centralize block production with the decision being that the security guarantees of selling onto Ethereum are sufficient for users. What does that mean? It means, you know, you can, if the sequencer fails, you can take your assets back down to the L1 and over time we'll be able to make those guarantees even stronger. And what we get in return is 10 millisecond block times. That's really, really, really fast. TLDR feels great. It feels like you're using a Web2 application. Google actually has done a lot of research on what are the latency levels, which are positive and additive to attention, as opposed to what are numbers where you kind of lose a user in any scenario, we're talking 500 milliseconds or above. It actually disrupts a user's flow and sense of what they're doing. So it is really, really fast. From a UX perspective, it is a massive unlock for hyper efficient defi. Hyper efficient HF keys. It's allowed us to have partnerships with pairs like Chainlink where we're able to enshrine oracles and provide really, really powerful data feeds. And it has immense capacity. Right. So on this stress Test, we at one point at 55,000 transactions per second, while also having the chain live for end users like ourselves to be able to play a bunch of low latency games. So we had a game where you were a rabbit who had to cross the road and there were cars that were hitting you. Right? And effectively, if the chain you weren't able to communicate, if the sequencer in back in time, you get it by a card. And people were able to have really high scores right up to like 100 out of pure skill while we were spamming the chain of just an insane amount of transactions. So it also has a powerful capability component and capacity components. Now that's not necessarily a problem for a while because we need to get user activity up there, but it does give developer certain guarantees. Right. While we were doing this level of transaction activity, we were four or five times cheaper than other rollups. Right. Which were doing with let's say 80 to 100 TPS. And then again that's because we decided to use Eigenda as opposed to EFDA a long time ago. Which to be frank, we got in a lot of trouble with the E Faulk score, but we just thought it made sense given we were optimizing for something that other L2s weren't optimizing optimize them for. So I'd say that's what the value propositions are. Consistent block space and very low latency. And for users, we've been cultivating applications for a very long time. Emir can.
- [14:07]
A
Yeah, and I mean like double double clicking on the applications point as well. It's about expressive applications. We're not here to have very surface level already understood experiences living on Mega. So for us, the fact that there are virtually no gas constraints allows us to build these very expressive kind of apps that people are familiar with when it comes to interacting with centralized systems. So that's the kind of experience that we're looking to bring on Chain. But again, that is very much a longer term process. It's just a matter of creating the sandbox for people to actually start playing in to get to that level of expressiveness.
- [14:43]
C
Yeah. And talk a little bit more, a little bit more about that expressiveness. Like so, you know, Namik gave the one example of the game, but what are some other types of apps that are possible that wouldn't be possible in a different L2?
- [14:59]
A
Yeah, definitely. So I mean when it comes to say having a fully on chain, Roblox or anything that requires real time responses when it comes to social interactions, having a fully on chain social media platform for the first time, those are the type of experiences that people are familiar with when it comes to interacting with a typical AWS app. Okay, I'm using Instagram. I can interact with my friends, get instant responses, get actual streams of information without even having to wait more than 10 milliseconds. Now imagine that same exact experience, but living on truly decentralized rails. Those are the type of experiences that we really want to eventually march towards on Mega. So yeah, it's just a matter of allowing for those unlocks to begin with and then us eventually kind of just trying to tackle it head on.
- [15:54]
B
I tried to convince the team to do Omegle on Chain with voice chats because you could actually do it on Mega, like on Veto, because we were worried that like it'd be a Pandora's box of sorts. But it's formed because Chris Dixon was saying, you know, there's this whole drama right. Kal Somali was like referees that it's a lot less interesting than we all thought it would be. And Chris Dixon's like no, it's actually not true. This is actually still super exciting. It just hasn't happened. Mega's classic use case which I think 99% of listeners here will be interested in. Defi. Right. Like it's beautiful for defi. Hyper efficient, right. Unbelievably low latency and there's a very clear pros for that. Narrow architecture, proximity markets and sequencer rotation effectively enables minimal end to end latency producers. It's similar to how FX markets used to work back in the day. So that's probably what most people want to hear about. But I think we are also for better or for worse still somewhat optimistic about the larger web prefaces. And our opinion is the reason why it didn't happen is actually because the blog space was not truly abundant. Right. Like on all of these L2s would still the second you're having like 50 transactions per second, 100 transactions per second second you would end up in a lot of trouble. And the other app alternative was like an app chain where you break atomic composability. So we have a bunch of games, we have a couple people trying to build very ambitious experiences. But I think what ties all these apps together is that they're built for consumers first and foremost. So we have teams going after payments, we have teams going after gamified options trading, we have teams who have built fully on chain Pokemon games. So there's actually a range now it takes longer than you know, we were me and we really tried our best to have like this big amusement park experience day one of mainnet. But sequencing really is a, it's a really tough time. So eventually founders just want to have a lot of these dependencies sorted on mainnet then to be able to gradually deploy. But you know, for better or for worse, we are optimistic that like some of the web three pieces can come back especially when it's being pronounced true. Meta.
- [18:15]
C
Okay. Yeah. I mean it, it really feels like there. I mean I know that I said I'm going to ask you about this later but if I look at other chains it sort of feels like for them just getting to the launch was the thing. But when I look at how you guys are approaching it feels like you are realizing that's day one and so you're kind of like setting yourselves up for more long term success. I think just, just from. Yeah just looking at the different choices that you're making. But I did want to ask a little bit more about some of the other features of the chain. So you know, you talked about this concept of proximity markets. Can you explain more, you know what that means and like, you know why that is a feature that you, you know are talking about for Mega Eth.
- [19:07]
B
Sure. So I think colocation is named the game for defi and the data is proving this sort of like, you know, at least a salon ecosystem. Our opinion is, you know, don't shun away from market realities. Find a way to make them equitable and democratized. So the idea of proximity markets in the simplest form is hey, if there is activity on Mage, knock on wood, we're trying our best, then there's valuable order flow on magif. Instead of having all of that privatized, build a system around it where people can bid to co locate as a Mega sequencer. And that value is distributed in Mega tokens.
- [19:47]
A
Right.
- [19:47]
B
So they'd have to spend Mega tokens to do so. That's like the simplest form of proximity markets. A lot of this stuff is a bit out in the future because it requires there to be a demand on the chain. Right. Like people want to need to be wanting to do stuff on Mega Eve and that's what Amir and I are spending our days on now.
- [20:06]
A
Yeah. And then like just to that point as well, the need for economic activity. I'm sure the next natural question here is just going to be around Mega the token. For us, everything is kind of taken from like very first principles approach. We want there to be real utility for Mega day one. So for that to happen, what actually needs to take place for us, it's making sure that there's sufficient on chain activity across all of our defi applications, across our consumer applications, such that we can justify the existence of Mega the asset. So that's something that we're working towards. That's very much the impetus for the KPI model that we've started off with and something that we plan to continue to build on as time passes.
- [20:45]
C
Yeah, yeah. And so we'll catch that in one second. I just want to like lay a little bit more of the background here. So Amir, you actually came on the show to talk, I forget when this was, but before about how Mega Eth also decided to launch its own stablecoin as powered by Athena. And obviously that was part of a bigger trend of a bunch of chains that were doing that. But I've seen you guys talk about this as being a big focus for liquidity revenue generation on Mega E. So you know, explain like why and how you're giving the stablecoin a prominent place.
- [21:24]
A
Definitely. Yeah. No, so at the end of the day, like the the idea behind USDM itself was to rethink what economic models can actually look like for change for infrastructure projects. As we understand our infrastructure today, heavily commoditized, you can have some sort of moat to start, but performance itself can be a long term moat. For us, it's a. And at the end of the day, if there's no moat and something can be commoditized, then the revenue model more or less just transferred to zero. For us, it's how can we actually have something that's sustainable, that is synergistic with their application level, that's not something that's cannibalizing our apps, and something that also is passing some value back to users in terms of user experience. Because if you look at typical chains today, a lot of the value that gets passed to the infrastructure is coming at the expense of the user experience in the form of priority fees, network congestion, etc. For us, when it comes to Mega itself, it's always thinking, okay, first in, first out, keeping gas fees as close to 0.0001 cent as possible, and again, allowing for these novel experiences to actually reach escape velocity. That's usually the issue we end up seeing when it comes to chains that have what feel like successful applications. At the end of the day, if you have everything living on the same state layer, they will eventually start to test, step on each other's toes. And again, one success ultimately comes at the expense of others. And then at the end of the day, all that value still finds its way to infrastructure. But for us, it's okay. How can we find a way to retain value here while also making sure that these applications are positioned to succeed? And that came in the form of USDN itself. So USDM is going to be something that again, adoption is very much predicated on us realizing our vision of 10x applications on Mega. When I say 10x applications, I'm saying experiences that are truly 10x relative to what people are accustomed to today. If we if Naming and I are able to kind of realize that vision and give the audience, give the users experiences that have them coming back, and obviously those applications themselves are using usdm, people will be fine taking on that additional friction to interact with the app and use our stable point. So it's kind of taking sort of a reverse approach to, to sort of bootstrapping stables. Usually people would start off with here's the stable, now let's find as many sinks as possible. Whereas for us, Mafia was always creating as many sinks as possible. And then at the back half we're introducing a stable point that ties into these sinks. So again, to my knowledge it's the first of its times. It's still very, very much experimental. We'll see how things unfold. But that was very much sort of the thinking behind USDN itself and, and general gtn.
- [24:06]
C
Okay. And then so you know, you guys are also well known for having Mega Mafia. And again, I feel like this is just another piece of that kind of intentionality and making sure that you're not just launching a chain but a whole ecosystem. But just talk a little bit more about that and how that works and you know, how you're bringing these apps to Mega.
- [24:33]
B
Yeah. So from a, for a long time I think like we were, we were very convinced the fact that we've made design trade offs. Right. Like you know, Mega can, you know, I think the big meme on Twitter over the past couple of weeks is like, oh yeah, you know, all these L2s are going to become L1s now they were only L2s because they're like regulatory cover. On our end it was because we, this is the only way we can have this level of performance and the only reason for this performance exists is if it creates net new applications. So from a very early age we were like, hey, we need to try and find founders and try to get them to build cool stuff. And it actually eventually evolved from being like, okay, we are real time blockchain with ego to capacity build something that justifies megaeap's existence. To if you had no limitations on what you can build, what would you want to build using crypto? Rails. Right. And that became the central prompt and that's how we ended up basically building Mega Mafia. Over the past few years we did a very Ethereum esque approach to it. Right. So it was effectively that we try to find smart founders and work with them. No real expectations. In the end we basically ask them to just use USDM for when the feast is just very much being like, if we try and do some sort of like capture policies, it ends up not creating a, a genuine group. So we, we, we, that was the basic thing from Mafia which was like we need to put the apps into our own hands and work with these pathfinders because if we're not going to do it, we can't expect it to just show up day one of mainnet. I mean we did it for a couple years and it was still hard to get lots of apps to show up. They want to mainnet. Imagine we can do it at all.
- [26:21]
A
And I mean the entire approach also is just like very antithetical to how people think about the build out of crypto ecosystems. Right? Usually there is this unwritten rule of credible neutrality as far as teams themselves staying somewhat removed from the actual build out of the application layer. I think myself no make sure we all basically looking back at history and come to the realization that that's very much a losing strategy. Some of the most successful ecosystems today, Solana Base, et cetera, there is this level of opinionatedness with how the core team itself decided to build out the ecosystem. So Mafia was very much sort of the meeting through which we're able to express those opinions. And again, it's some will hit, some won't, but it's very much a volumes game. There won't be a single app that will define Mega. It will be a collection of apps and we'll just continue to be working towards making that kind of division be realized.
- [27:21]
C
All right, so in a moment we're going to talk about your recent decision to postpone your token Generation event. But first we're going to take a quick word from the sponsors who make the show possible. Want a chance to win $25,000 in USDC figure? A platform to earn yields, borrow against crypto and access lending markets is running a $25,000 USDC sweepstakes tied to their democratized prime product. Here's how it works. Download the Figure Markets app using our link FigureMarkets Co UnchainedDP deposit into a democratized prime lending pool and leave your funds there for 25 consecutive days. Every dollar equals one entry, so $1,000 equals 1,000 chances. While your funds stay in the pool, you're also earning around 9% APY paid out hourly. To learn more and enter, go to FigureMarkets Co UnchainedP which is also available in the show. Notes if you're looking for help with crypto taxes, Crypto Tax Grill is offering $100 off for Unchained listeners. They provide personalized crypto tax reports and and returns and spots before April 15th are limited. Go to cryptotaxgirl.com Unchained to save $100. Once again, the link is cryptotaxgirl.com unchained so at the last minute before your main at launch, you decided to delay the token generation event. Explain why I Think you said, well.
- [28:55]
B
Right, we are setting ourselves up for like structural success over the long run and we want to make sure that MEGA is as successful as possible. So there's a layer two. You know, maybe we're not doing the layer token because we never said we'd have a token live layer one. In fact I would say I don't know of any L2 that's launched token day one. But regardless, the expectation that clearly some people had is that there'd be a token day one. And I think that's a valid expectation. I don't want to gaslight that assumption but fundamentally the way the MEGA token operates in our system is directly correlated to basically proximity markets and USDM Day 1 and the future sequencer rotation. So I mentioned that briefly have this sequence, remove it, leverage the POA model. In all these scenarios there needs to be a baseline usage in activity on the leggaf blockchain. Right. For the flywheel to be relative, to be truly successful. Again, knock on wood. And we folded these three KPIs adequately gauge when Mega was ready for TG. The three KPIs being one, three applications that 50k daily route for 30 days. So that's probably the hardest of all the KPIs to achieve. We obviously looked at like other case studies, we think it's reasonable but it means that there's apps that people are using. The second KPI is a $500 million in USDM on the chain that creates a flywheel for the USDM app relationship. And finally 10 MAG mafia applications deployed on the right. And that means not gated but actually available to all users. Any one of these three hitting would result in us deciding the pge. We thought it was fair to share all of this publicly as opposed to, you know, just saying something like soon. I think that's not very fair on Mega token holders and mega investors. And we operate with a thesis of maximal priority. Yeah, everything we're doing is because, I mean we, we believe in crypto world domination and we believe in like the token being a component of a larger system. Right. Not necessarily just like rushing to get one piece of pip pie out there. And we thought this was a fair way to bootstrap the ecosystem to a place where it'd be ready and you know, have negative grow as a result. Amir, what do you think?
- [31:39]
A
You said it all. At the end of the day I feel as though a lot of folks kind of optimize too much for that short term attention, whereas for us it's very much about setting the groundwork for real traction and real economic activity to exist. So as far as the KPIs themselves, it's a matter of making sure that people don't lose sight of what they're product is and making sure that people are incentivized to actually interact with the product itself. I think again, like token ends up taking up everyone's attention day one and it comes at the expense of what we've been building towards for the last two, three, four years. So KVI gave us an opportunity to get the applications in front of everyone, get everyone actually interacting with the chain itself. And then again it's from there it's just a matter of making sure that we do our job to, to build something that is sustainable over the long run.
- [32:29]
C
And tell me how you came up with those three metrics as the KPIs that you would use to trigger the TGE. So you know this, what about the $500 million USD in circulation and that's like a. Based on what was it? A 30 day time weighted supply, then a 10 mafia apps that are fully deployed and then the 50k USD daily and fees for 30 days on. I think it's. Is it any app?
- [33:05]
B
Any app?
- [33:06]
A
That's the app. Let me show you.
- [33:08]
C
Oh no, it's three apps it looks like for 30 days.
- [33:11]
A
Yeah.
- [33:12]
C
So yeah. How did you, you know what, what was your thinking behind each of those?
- [33:17]
B
So important to note. It's one of any. So one of any of any of the KPI set mega TGs and they were all directly thinked as downstream of what we really need, which is activity on the chain. Right. For Mega to work, for Mega to succeed, people need to think that there's something here that's worthwhile, that's really what matters here. And again, so what does that look like? Well, we have spent a couple years facilitating and incubating a bunch of mafia applications. We feel good about those apps, we want those applications live so everyone can use them. So that's one option, that's one user flow. But you never know when a brilliant founder shows up and just build something amazing. And that's great, you know, if you're listening, please do deploy. And that's what the second KPI is designed example. All right, so having any application be able to achieve, you know, basic fee numbers shows to us that hey, there's demand for colocation, there's demand for proximity markets and there is activity on this chain that's organic. Right. And this makes sense. And USDN was effectively Mixture of both. In all scenarios the visionists of USDN act as the fundamental flywheel, the fundamental tie between all of these different mechanism applications and one another. And we thought that having a baseline of liquidity would allow minimal friction for future developers to be able to adopt usdm. We have a few Dexes like we have assumption and order book that's the entire thing is denominated and paired against usdm. Brilliant founder and he definitely would love if there's liquidity for USDN. So all three of these KPIs I think create a safe and mind into.
- [35:13]
A
The USDM point as well. It's not just a matter of $500 million of USDN and that's it. At the end of the day we want to make sure that we're maximizing capital efficiency here so we want that capital actually deployed into the ecosystem. So in addition to the $500 million in USDM supply, 25 of that actually actually has to be deposited into non custodial smart contracts. So be it into Avon A when world markets goes live. World markets and then again as more applications go live as well. So we, we try to make sure that it's just not a, a headline number and that's it but we want to make sure that there's real use actually taking place.
- [35:51]
C
So one other thing that I have to ask about is the pre market perpetuals obviously have been trading and you know people are talking about that and we're seeing that you know it's, it's at about like $0.13 or so which, which is above the ICO price. But I just wondered you know, is that something that you're watching and is that affecting your decision making or you know how does that factor into how you approached building?
- [36:22]
B
Yeah, so we had nothing to do with any of the pre markets that went live and leave the pre market on hyperdic events live shortly after we announced our public sale a few months ago. And you know it's something that people do, it's not something that we pay too much attention to. I think our general policy is that the Mega Token, we're not going to be giving the Mega Token away to different dexes or sexes for listings. And our general thesis is that.
- [36:55]
A
It.
- [36:56]
B
It all is downstream of product market fit and PMF and that's really what we're optimizing for short term things like pre markets are, you know speculators will speculate, let them enjoy it. I think our focus is on building a really great blockchain and but more importantly applications which will hit users that aren't on CT and who didn't even know they could benefit from blockchains. But then they will, and they won't even know about it because it's really fast.
- [37:31]
A
Yeah, it doesn't really make much sense to kind of lose sleep over relatively illiquid pre markets. It's just kind of, again, it's a matter of not being, not taking like this like short sighted approach to building things out. It's a matter of just thinking over the long run. At the end of the day, no one will remember what Mega's pre market was on February 10, 2026 in like 2028. So again, playing more of a long term game, taking more of a long term approach.
- [38:01]
C
Yeah, so let's talk about that. I know that I've alluded to this observation that I've made, but yeah, it basically seems as I'm just watching you guys that you're being super thoughtful and you are very clearly trying to avoid the pitfalls that we've seen other chains fall prey to. And so it almost feels like I'm watching you in real time kind of learn from the mistakes of other teams or something. I don't know. You tell me if that's what's going on. But you know, if I look at the. So again, I don't know if you postponed the tge, maybe you didn't, but you know, just not launching a token on day one, the Mega Mafia program, the way you decided, decided even like the allocations and the ico, even the, you know, rescinding of the token allocation to ICO Beast, you know, because he posted on social media that he planned to hedge his, his position. So I'm just curious like how, you know, is, is that what I'm seeing? Like, is, is that what's going on behind the scenes? And if so, how did that become a part of your team culture?
- [39:14]
B
So the, the fundamental truth is that like, you know, and I think this actually comes from Xiao, you know, Brother Bing dubbing whatever people know. Before Mega, Shu had like a pretty great career in crypto, right? And Elon and Lei, the other two co founders, are really smart, like PhDs from MIT and Stanford. And you know, Amir is also really smart, like everyone on the team. Like I'm really great. I'm.
- [39:48]
A
It's also very smart.
- [39:50]
B
The point is, I think like all of us are in crypto because we believe either in crypto as like this fascinating technological system. Right. Maybe that's why Elon and Lei are interested. But I Don't think that's the case. I think it's really. Everyone believes that crypto will eat the world and at least I felt like I wanted to have a role to play in best. Right. I'm not an American. I, I think crypto is very good for like the world. Right.
- [40:23]
A
And.
- [40:26]
B
This is like what we're doing, this is what we're building and we're, we only get one shot of building this and we're quite serious about it. So we're, we're not here for like a couple weeks and we are here to play long term games just because we think that this industry is going to get infinitely larger and we think that we can help facilitate just like a really awesome outcome. So I think maybe the reason why we're being very thoughtful of Mega, because we're very idealistic about what we can build and we're also quite native in the way we understand. At least we spend a decent chunk of time.
- [41:09]
A
Yeah, I mean we also, we'd be doing ourselves a disservice if we didn't look towards the history of this industry and actually being acutely aware of the mistakes that have been made in the past. What works, what had, what hadn't, and then also working that into our strategy. At the end of the day, we're also not perfect. I'm sure looking two years out when another team is looking to come up, they'll see some of the mistakes that we've made and we'll look to make sure that they don't make the same mistakes. So it would be unhealthy of us to try to optimize solely for perfection. But we definitely try to pull from the history books to make sure that every step that we take is one that is most informed step that we can possibly take.
- [41:51]
C
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty obvious because there's been multiple chains where just. Yeah. After launching that sort of seemed like almost where things started going downhill, which is unfortunate. But it's happened multiple times. I mean, I do think, yeah, kind of this mercenary missionary, you know, issue is, is something that people have come up against over and over again. And you know, crypto is about money. So there is going to be some level of kind of short termism. But yeah, it, it just feels to me like a lot of your decisions are very intentional and not incentivizing more of the short term behavior. So. Okay, so actually let's talk a little bit more about the ICO maybe just so I know that ICO was, you know, a few months ago but maybe just talk a little bit about, you know, how you decided upon those allocations and then we can kind of go a little bit more into the purpose.
- [42:53]
B
Yeah, basically we ended up having a lot more demand than we had initially expected. We thought maybe we'd be slightly oversubscribed. We put a cap, so it's possible. But it ended up being quite a lot. I think it was. I mean we were, we wanted to raise 50 million of the max of 999 val. We had I think $1.3 billion in over subscription. And what we have to do is we have to kind of sit down and use a bunch of data to try and figure out who's going to be here over the long run. Now I think here a pre market didn't help because people thought that there was free money on the table. But what we did is we basically wanted to use a variety of on chain and off chain data to tell us who's also missionaries. That was really the goal. Who else is going to be a power user of Mega is really bullish on crypto, is really bullish on eth. That might be like just power users of e file 1 just because of their life, super active during the djen days of defi summer or just even last cycle. But it could also be people who were like, you know, fundamental in the Mega Eve story for the past couple years. And that was some of our earliest community members. For example, Ultra comes to mind. He's created so many dashboards that the guy's like honorary person, he's awesome. But also the people who contributed meaningfully like the Ethereum star as well. Yeah, we basically just tried to find people who believed in crypto the way we did and if they wanted to have, if they wanted to invest in Mega, like it'd be our honor to have them invest in Mega. I think it was contrarian. I think most people had designed most ICOs were like oh, you know, if there's over subscription, let's give everybody that five bucks and call it a day. What we wanted to do is we wanted to say like hey, let's find people that really mean it and give them, you know, allocations that they wanted to have to begin with at least. Maybe it's an overly optimistic.
- [45:08]
A
And then just like to add to this point because Nunik spent a lot of time going through each and every person that tried to participate. I also noticed a lot of people tried to misrepresent how we went about the actual selection process because at the end of the day people just see the larger accounts on Twitter to the point where they try to brand the ICO as something that's a quasi Kol round, when that was fundamentally the exact opposite thing of what we were trying to do. Obviously you will have the names that have large social media presences, but we were very, very diligent in making sure that people that again, don't have that social media presence, but have that true on chain history, they also had the opportunity to kind of get their skin in the game. Those are the kind of people that we care deeply about. So again, it's just a matter of looking for folks that are here for the long run, proven users, and not just people who are here to sing the gospel of Mega for two, three weeks and then move on to the next project.
- [46:04]
C
Okay, so once you do launch the token, talk a little bit about, you know, what function it will serve and what goals you're trying to accomplish with it.
- [46:12]
B
Yeah, so there's a couple of utilities for the Mega Token I'm particularly excited about. Those would be proxy proximity markets as well as a future sequencer rotation architecture. So proximity markets, as we've described before, effectively allows people to bid using Mega to be very close to the sequencer. And now what that effectively allows is for them to be able to really harness the power of colocation to build and use truly real time flows. Now for me and you, we can be wherever we are in the world and it won't really affect us. You know, we all need to be co located with the sequencers, have a great UX, but for HFTs, for DeFi apps, it really can make or break the world. Right. So that's one of the major functions of the Mega Token. In a similar vein, sequencer rotation will also be powered with the Mega Token. So what sequencer rotation means is that right now it's, you know, I'm in London, it's about to be 10:00pm, you guys are in the US East Coast, I assume. Well, I know mirrors and you know, the day is basically ending while it's still kind of, you know, rampaging on the west coast. So why shouldn't the sequencer be where the most economic activity is? And how do we know where the most economic activity is? It's where the sun is at. So we will have an architecture. The sequencer moves around the world where economic activity is most vibrant. And who will be running the sequencer will be a function of poa like model using the Mega Token. This is our way of decentralizing the sequencer. We don't think that consensus, reintroducing consensus into a layer two makes any sense. Right. Like you're giving away the pros of the trade offs you've made. At that point, architectures like Monad and Solana become way more enticing. Right. But by rotating the sequencer, the sequencer is no longer being run by one singular entity over an extended period of time, being run by a similar entity for X amount of blocks. And again that's also using Mega as a system for which that's made possible. There's also the way that USDM ties to Mega. So USDM buys back MAGA tokens. Whenever there's usdm, there's rewards that are made from USDM and those rewards are then used to buy back auto Mega token. So that's like a fun thing too.
- [48:50]
C
Okay, great. So you know we're coming up on time, but I definitely wanted to check in to see first which apps you're most excited about. But then also I'm curious if you want to make any bets on which KPI you think will be hit first that will trigger the TG8.
- [49:09]
A
Anything you want to start KPI that hits first. The I want to say the $500 million of USDM. I would love to see that. Obviously the easiest one on this list is the mafia teams going live, but my, my hope is that we hit that $500 million USDL number before we have the 10 mafia teams live.
- [49:32]
B
I, I, I mean the easiest one stuff in mafia one I think we are, we have five live day ones so five more. But I personally big fan of the app fees to think first. Right. Because again for me like I love growth and I love the power of like you know, if some of these apps are doing well and that, you know, ideally it's one of the apps that is not meant for like the 2000 users in crypto. If something like euphoria hits the 50k app fees, we know that's happening because people are like playing this thing and I think it's a similar story for something like a Blitzer or a Rocket. So yeah, I mean I'm quite excited for any of those to hit. So you asked what's my what app? I'm most excited for more. I'd love to hear Mirror's opinion. I'm definitely going to send you the apps from their pipe bar, but I think I am, I'm a sucker for Euphoria. I think that's like I'm really excited for it and I would say my close second would probably be rocket or hit one. What about you, Amir?
- [50:37]
A
Yeah, so for me, something I care a lot about going into 2026 as well is around, you know, net new assets, asset issuance on mega. So I would say fairly dark horse in this race. But BRICS is a team that I'm very excited about. They're looking to tokenize the Turkish lira carry trade, bring em yields on chain which are very kind of comparable to what people are accustomed to today when it comes to defi. Except this time around the yield itself is very scalable. So the BRICS team is looking to do that. They should be live in the next few weeks on Mainnet. So that's something that I care a lot about. And then the hello trading as well. So the HelloTrade team, former directors from BlackRock, they are building out a perfect equities but eventually want to expand that vision out to building a spot market for tokenized stocks, commodities, et cetera. So that's something that Navic and I are very, very much excited about going into this year and something that we.
- [51:37]
B
Plan to spend a lot of our time focusing on as well.
- [51:40]
C
All right, well, you know, for the audience members who think those apps sound interesting, keep an eye out for those. And Namik and Amir, this was so fun chatting with you both. Congratulations again and thanks so much for coming on Unchained.
- [51:57]
B
Okay, you're having us.