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

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

Subscribe to Unchained Daily: https://unchainedcrypto.com/newsletters/ Check out our sponsor Mantle!  Most new blockchains promise to scale. MegaETH promises to feel instant. Fresh off its public sale, for which allocations were revealed on Thursday, the team behind MegaETH joins Unchained to explain why they’re calling it the world’s first real-time blockchain. Co-founder Shuyao Kong and ecosystem lead Amir Almaimani walk through their decision to build as a layer 2 on Ethereum, not a competing layer 1, and why they think the real opportunity is creating onchain experiences that feel like Web2 apps. The pair also dive deep into the tokenomics behind $MEGA, from sequencer rotation to proximity markets, and defend their choice to skip an airdrop in favor of “skin-in-the-game” token distribution. Guests: Shuyao Kong, Co-founder of MegaETH Amir Almaimani, Head of Ecosystem at MegaETH Links: Unchained: Why Protocol-Native Stablecoins May Be Crypto’s Next Big Thing MegaETH Public Allocation Strategy by MegaETH’s CSO Namik Murodoglu Timestamps: 🚀 0:00 Introduction 🧱 1:47 Why MegaETH chose to build as an Ethereum layer 2, not a new layer 1 ⚡ 5:10 How it plans to stand out from Arbitrum, Base, and other successful L2s 🔓 9:53 Why Shuyao says many L2s are actually more decentralized than L1s 🧩 11:16 Whether MegaETH plans to decentralize its sequencer 💰 13:43 The utility of the $MEGA token—and how Tesla and Ethereum inspired it 📍 16:58 How “proximity markets” work ⛽ 18:09 How MegaETH designed its gas model and tokenomics 🎯 21:28 The philosophy behind the public sales 😬 25:13 Why Shuyao says the soulbound NFT sale didn’t go as planned 📊 27:29 How MegaETH decided allocations in its latest sale 🙅‍♂️ 30:39 Why the team rejected the airdrop model entirely 🤝 32:00 How early community members earned 25% of the sale allocation 🕵️‍♀️ 34:46 How MegaETH scored onchain users and detected Sybil clusters 💳 39:36 Why MegaETH has its own native stablecoin, USDm 👷 41:34 How the project hopes to attract the best builders 🔥 46:00 The kinds of apps that are “only possible” on MegaETH 🎯 50:35 What’s next for MegaETH Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Solano has about 400 millisecond latency, Arbitrum has 265 milliseconds. Omega on our test night 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 is the first real-time blockchain. It feels smooth. It feels interactive. It feels like a Web 2 technology.

We want to give Web2 builders a reason to explore an entirely different stack. Take what they're familiar with building on Web2 Rails, but also understand what crypto introduces to those products. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Mantle is pioneering blockchain for banking, a revolutionary new category at the intersection of Tradfi and Web3. Follow Mantle underscore official to learn more. Brief detour. If you've ever opened X and thought,

wait, what happened overnight in crypto? You're not alone. Things move fast and most updates are either too noisy or too late. That's why we created Unchained Daily, our coffee break newsletter that breaks down exactly what mattered in the past 24 hours. If this sounds like something you'd want in your inbox daily, find the link in the description. I'm here with Shia Kong,

co-founder of Meghaeith and Amir Almeimani, head of ecosystem at Bega-Eath. Hey, Laura. Hey, Laura. Thanks for having us. So Shuiang and Amir, congratulations on your massively successful ICO. Since Mega-Eath hasn't actually gotten much airtime on unchained, let's just start with the basics. You're an L-T1 Ethereum. Why did you choose to build your chain as an L-2 on Ethereum and not as a competing L-1? Yeah, so we built mega-eath not to be a layer one or layer two. We built mega-east to be the most performant, the fastest blockchain ever possible.

And the reason to build such a performance chain actually came from a deep frustration that our industry actually has not seen new novel application ever since Dify 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 realize that it's because the infrastructure is actually not ready. It is not akin to Web 2 level. And that's why a lot of developers feel uninspired. And that's the reason we build Megaese. It's not as a layer 1, layer 2, but as a super-performance real-time blockchain. So builders can actually build, you know, Web 3 application that makes you feel like it's a Web 2 applications. Yeah, no, and painting back in 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, and 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, we try to complement that with really incubating net new applications on top of mega.

All right. So yeah, let's talk. I mean, Shiaa kind of started to talk about this, but like what would you say are the main problems that you would like to solve with Mega-Eaf? 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 landing protocol, same AMM, same trading venue. Sometimes you get a game fire here and there, but honestly, no one is using A.

So the problem we're trying to find is, can we do something new, Omega? And what do I mean by something new? There are really two categories of novelties in my head. The first such 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 tap 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.

It really boils down to just performance as well. I mean, at the end of the day, what mega enables when you, again, centralized block production, decentralized block fabrication and just optimized hardware as well, you create a net new 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 exercise. a 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 Web 2 users are obviously accustomed to at this point in time. 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 L-2s. Describe, you know, because obviously, I mean,

everybody knows there are some very successful L-2s that are already out there. So what are some of the, you know, tech specs that you think set mega-eth apart from the existing L-2s? Yeah. So, I mean, we can compare ourselves to other layer two in terms of architecture.

And I will articulate the difference, but I would end with why being, Layer 1, layer 2 does not matter. So in terms of comparison with other layer 2, the biggest differentiation for MAGA is actually our data structure. So my co-founder, Elon, he went to Stanford, studied low-latency data center compute for six years, finished his PhD, and stumbled upon a blockchain

and looked at a blockchain scaling trawama. And he thought, wait, everyone in the crypto world is actually not that smart because what you can do, 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 solved the problem. So he spent six months basically measuring EVM blockchain and realized that the bottleneck was the miracle Patricia Tri. So then what Megha did is we completely rewrote our data structure. We came up with a new name, which is called salt. 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, it does not matter whether you're 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 TPS and your sons. really sexy, but it does not deliver actual benefits to builders. What we realize 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, Solano has about 400 milliseconds latency, Arbitrum has 265 milliseconds. Omega on our test night 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-eaths the first real-time blockchain.

It feels smooth. It feels interactive. It feels like a Web 2 technology. 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 milliseconds block times. That's a moment, that those 400 milliseconds could obviously grab your attention elsewhere. What we're able to do here is create kind of that web two feel, but on crypto rails. 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 Web2 apps, but then it has crypto capability or something?

Is that how you think about it? I would say that's a crypt framing. So as far as like we're concerned, we want to give Web2 builders a reason to explore an entire 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 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-performance chains. And that's not a coincidence. People are coming from systems that are, again, significantly more optimized for bandwidth, optimize 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.

Okay, so it sounds like essentially part of the way you're achieving that is by making this tradeoff to have a little bit more centralization. So, you know, you're starting with a single sequencer. Shia 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 from the future or not a goal or what are your thoughts on that? 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 a lot of the layer one validator. are controlled by the foundation.

And if you give you the founders on Red Packet, maybe they will give you a little validator. Right. But for a 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 endgame of building a blockchain because we are a centralized sequencer that is building a maximally, decentralized face layer. So I do not believe that decentralization is a buck. I think it is a beautiful feature. But going back to your original question, would we have a decentralized sequencer? I think we would be need-curving building blockchain if we centralize a sequencer and then two years later we decentralized it one more time to reintroduce consensus. We might as well just building a layer one. So what we're trying to do is maintaining a one sequencer that's running at any

time, but because the sequencer can be rotated, that introduce censorship resistant 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. Yeah. And 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 validators, when in reality, we just don't view it as this binary thing of your 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 the 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 validates, a handful of validators or block producers here. So it's basically taking one step further out and optimizing again for like pragmatism. If you need to create a system that can rival Web 2, you have to make these sort of tradeoffs. But again, decentralization is not something that is immediately lost because you're making these tradeoffs. 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 almost maybe, yeah, early on, maybe because of the, I guess you could, yeah, 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 sales. So we're going to get to that, but just let's lay some of the groundwork about the megatoken. Explain to me, you know, what the use cases are for the, or how it'll be used. Yeah. So there are 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 stick, I'm very careful the user was 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 investing. And the philosophy is very simple. I do not believe a founding team deserve to take 20% of a protocol's token after working, let's say, for two or three years. I believe in a tried-fired web two model where if a team does really well, they earn their extra token.

So I think Omega is the only protocol where the team actually, founding team, we're taking only 9.5. percent of the entire protocol. And we will have a very handsome earn out if the protocol does really well based on a set of KPI. So I'm very much inspired from Elon Musk where he took $1 as a salary and then obviously a lot of Tesla stock when things go well. 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 got allocations. I think that was also 9%. So maybe that's the only other one.

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. Oh, yeah, no. And I mean to like choose to 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 performance of Megheith itself, one focusing on Heath decentralization and then Meghe decentralization too. But again, that sort of forces us to know that like as float increases, that float is increasing because the chain itself is meeting these like massive milestones and it's warranted. So yeah, that's very much the philosophy behind it. Okay. And then Shuiya, you very briefly refer 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. Like, how does that work? 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 that. So it is driven by like literal physical proximity. Correct.

Correct. So effectively like being in the same data center. 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 M-U-S-D. Is there anything else? Are those the three? So when we launch, ETH will be the main gas fee. I mean, ETH is literally in the name. By Paymaster and a bunch of other technology, people can use, for example, MegasG as GAS fee. And also, USDM, which is our stable coin, and Amir is the master brain behind it. Oh, USDM. I thought it was MUSD.

MUSD is, we were initially going with MUSD, but then MetaMask took it before us. Oh, no wonder. Okay, okay, yeah, so I did learn it the other way. Okay. 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 B to B 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 or? I think it's very much a dynamic token in that regard. not something, like as more sources of kind of utility come up, it's something that we're definitely like 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. And will the token also have emissions or inflation, or? So no inflation, fixed supply. Yeah. Wow.

Okay. So there's basically no dilution like looking forward or? As of now, no. Okay. Oh, interesting. And do you have any, you know, would you like to expound on how you designed, you know, the tokenomics and, you know, why you made these different choices and what you think perhaps other? projects could learn? 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 doubtful, 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. Okay, yeah, 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 Echo, a $500 million round with your fluffle, soulbound NFT, and then now the latest, which was this, well, it was convictant. Sorry, what? It's called the Conviction Round. Right, which was on Sonar, which is related to Echo. So explain why you chose this particular method. What purpose did you have with each of the different public sales?

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 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 a retail investor who took an interest or wanted to bet on an early stage ecosystem. And Kobe was one of our Andrew, and 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 gave 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 discovery is finished. And then the fluffo round was interesting.

And I would say that it was not as well educated as my other two rounds. I learned a lot of lessons. But the idea was we wanted to use crypto-native way to involve people. And we wanted to embed culture into mega-ease. And we happen to be a very fast chain that looks like rabbit. So we're like, oh, why not design a kid a Zoban token? So that was the thoughtful round. It was a 500 million round.

And then the recent Sona round was very interesting. chain 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 these 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 decisions one more time. Do I take investors money who again will forget about me in six month 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 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 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. Yeah, I mean, this is super interesting.

I just want to dig into 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 was it about that particular round that you felt didn't go well? It was purely execution. So, Megha, 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 outsource dev shop to do it. Obviously, they don't care as much about mega as I do. So it was painful. So it was purely the execution. 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 right back. Mantle leads the establishment of blockchain for banking, as the next frontier. UR is the access layer that transforms Mantle Network

into a purpose-built vertical platform, the blockchain for banking that enables financial services on-chain. UR unifies and vertically aligns Mantel's focus on payments, trading, and assets, MI4, METH Protocol, functions FBTC, supported by developer grants,

ecosystem incentives, and the industry-leading distribution platform through the UR app, reward station, and by-bit launch pool. All economic activity within UR will be captured by Mantle Network to further drive value to token holders and establish its significance in blockchain for banking. Follow Mantle underscore official to learn more. Brief detour. If you've ever opened X and thought, wait, what happened overnight in crypto? You're not alone. Things move fast and most updates are either too noisy or too late. That's why we created Unchained Daily, our coffee break newsletter that breaks down exactly

what mattered in the past 24 hours. If this sounds like something you'd want in your inbox daily, find the link in the description. Back to my conversation with Shuiyahu and Amir. So let's dig into this latest ICA, 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 used the word hand selected a few times in the description of how you made these choices. So describe for me the whole process and how you came up with the design as well.

Should you go on, sir? Oh, you want me? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so as far as as the general approach, it was really trying to balance it. At the end of the day, the tradeoff that you're always making here is do you want to cast a super wide net? and give everyone exposure? 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 waiting 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. Yeah, I would add is I basically stare at our Excel sheet and database for three days. I almost went blind. And 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 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 say 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've got to ask yourself, who are the long-term builders here? 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 oversubsubscribed by locked a participant. So for those who did not lock it, unless you are a huge mega-e supporter, you probably are not getting your allocation feel. 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? I'm like, bro, you have not done anything?

You didn't want to lock? Maybe there's a reason there. 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. I mean, yeah, for what I was saying earlier, too, it's, it simply is incentivizing the wrong behavior. At the end of the day, we have to think back to like, why did air drops even come into, into practice to begin with? It was more from a sort of like 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, like, 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 air drops 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, we'll 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 actually skin in the game, too. So we're trying to sidestep the,

the oftentimes misstep that projects make, which is simply just handing tokens to anyone, regardless of whether they're actually alive with your project or not. And then they simply just benefit, dump it, move on to the next thing. Okay, yeah. I mean, what was interesting was there is a group that in the post, you said, did largely, you know, you know, say 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. Yeah. So some of them are extremely well known, active mega.

supporters. So for example, Xerox Ultra, dude actually build most of our analytics dashboards. I think he's like a part-time mega team member, you know, very, very active. A lot of them are our community regional leads in different countries. They've hosted, you know, external events. Even though we told everyone day one that there's noirdrop, 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. The projects that are calling themselves Mega-Ease. They're a centralized sequence, so 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 contributions.

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. 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.

Everything we do is open to the. It's open to everyone. I think for the past many years, we have murky tokenomics. We have marquee different behavior by the insiders. No one knows where ourirdrop goes even. No one knows what holds what. Yeah, we just wanted to be very open on what we do as a team. And then public acknowledgement, we just think is super important too. Like we want people to see like what we appreciate in a community. These are folks that, again, have been with us for well over, 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 Medi Heath ecosystem? Okay. Yeah. I mean, this is all, yeah, around like

incentives and trying to find your missionaries and not attract mercenaries. Exactly. 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 wanted to 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 the scoring system, you know, what kind of behaviors or, you know, metrics you value.

like, yeah, why did you choose those metrics? 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 our investor base are not using a blockchain and only trading on centralized exchanges probably doesn't help with mega-GDP. So that's super important.

The second one is it's called MoneySk, 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, where 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. Exactly. is nothing without our apps. So interacting with, example 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 flagship NFT, lemonheads, or if you're a bad buns folder. 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. 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, yes. 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. And can you talk about the scale of them or the number? I'm just so curious. Like, are people, I mean, were they really trying to? to gain the system or did they seem to, yeah, were they trying to hide it or I don't know? 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 civil with call it like four, five, six hundred KYC'd accounts. So shout out to Dmitri again, Demetri, Dmitz, doing an incredible job of doing a lot of that filtering for us. And wait, so I'm sorry, they, like, somehow obtained 400 different KYC, like PII, I guess, or how were they doing that? As far as, like, their processes, I don't have, like, full visibility into it. But, again, to participate in the sale, you would have had to go on through KYC.

So many of 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. Yeah, a lot of them were connected wallets. And you can attach a few wallets under one KYC, so it doesn't mean that they are all replicates KYC. But I think one lesson learned I had from this whole process is finding real human art. Once you find them, you have to treasure them. I love it. That's a great motto. Okay, so, Shia, you actually were on the show before to talk about Mega-Eath's decision to pursue a native stable coin. This was even before the whole USDA-H hyper-liquid stable coin.

What's the word? Yeah, their moment on the timeline, which definitely took their stage for a while. But why don't we just briefly touch on that again, like, you know, explain why it is that you decided to pursue a native stable coin for Mega-Eath? And just like talk a little bit about what role you see that playing for the mega youth ecosystem. Definitely. I mean, like 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 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 what a revenue model that allow the actual chain revenue to scale with adoption. rather than having them act at odds with one another,

how do we actually have them move up into 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 and first out, is let's tie a sort of unified stable coin 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, etc.

So it came definitely from sort of that line of thinking. All right. So let's talk about your Mega Mafia accelerator. Explain like, you know, why you decided to start it and how how it works. I can talk about why we decided started and then Amir is again, the mastermind of Megamafia. So as mentioned, the sole purpose of mega-ease 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 this application builders who are actually wanted to build not an AMM, you know? So, 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 the 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 Meghaease. And then you need to be willing to spend months living with me somewhere in the world. We've lived in Berlin together, Chalmai together, and this year we did Copenhagen in August together. And, you know, the program lasts for a year. And, you know, the program lasts for a year. you know, we help you with a bunch of go-to-market, fundraising, which Amir can go deep into. But I would say the original dream of building Mega Mafia was to get a cohort of really good or hungry builders who are building novel things,

who are okay with living with each other for some time. Oh, yeah. Definitely. 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 EBM environments. Again, we've built this massively new design space for builders. We want 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 like Tradfai backgrounds working as like former directors at Black Rock and Goldman and kind of list goes on there.

And then we also have the real like crypto natives, seasoned veterans from like DFI 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, like, collaborative environment that emerges. And I think that's where a lot of the sort of superpower is and like two shoes point about just like 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, launch an economy not only on just Megheeth, but just broader crypto. And we want these defining applications. That's what we care about. That's where we're optimizing for. And Shia, you mentioned briefly that you wanted the apps to build something that's not possible in other chains. So are there any specific ones that you want to call out? I know, like in the very beginning of the episode, both of you had named just types of apps. But yeah, maybe talk in specific. about certain ones that you feel are, yeah, new and different and only possible on Mega-Eath.

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 like Brickbreaker or Snake.

So what they're basically, what you basically have, and I wish we could, like, show a demo right now because they actually just pushed out their official like 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 like two 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 burrito moment. you can see how something like this will resonate and it's something that will resonate beyond just like with more than just like a crypto audience. People who enjoy the gamification that Robin Hood brought to the table,

they're going to see something like this and it's going to be like 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 get shows 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 just acting as sort of a ledger for you to check in see what your assets look like etc whereas here will albert mark They're looking to basically disrupt what people kind of do today with like Venmo or cash shaft, 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 blitzel card, which will act to wrap around people's existing credit cards. You actually get a drop-down. 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 Meg 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, like, hypergambling. But funny enough, my girlfriend's sister, who's in that, like, kind of 20-year-old profile,

who typically doesn't care at all about crypto, wasn't even listening to the conversation or seemed like 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 app. And, like, that's the exact reaction, kind of, like, that we want.

We're tailoring experiences that will resonate with, like, 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. 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 it is kind of like, yeah, a further evolution 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 last public sale. Is that correct? Yeah. And. 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, 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. 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

experienced crypto apps for the first time and that make them proud. I think there's so much stigma. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe 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 a 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 are lock. I hope they double down, right, 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 almost like an operating system in crypto that enable peer-to-peer technology or experiences to your average consumer users. Lastly, I would say that I think mega has the best swag. in crypto. So I wish to continue winning in that category. Amir to you. Yeah, no, everything that she 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 feeling that I had when I was like playing with yearn for the first time or just

like experiencing the defy 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 like inflection point to 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. Okay, you guys, this is hilarious. I decided to Google Mega Eath 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 Mega Death swag. Exactly.

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

And our hat is perhaps the most sought after hat in the entire crypto. I have it somewhere over there in the other room. Okay, okay. 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. Okay, all right.

Is there anything I didn't ask you guys that you would want to mention before we wrap? So anything about Mafia you want to mention, Amir? about mafia um no i mean just like we've seen like quite a bit of success so far um in the aggregate teams have raised between cohort one and co-hor two which we have about 30 some teams at this point uh north of 80 million dollars from tier one funds like paradigm dragonfly kind of like list goes on from there um which um 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. Okay, great. All right. Well, this was super fun. Thanks so much for coming on onchained.

Thank you, Laura. Thank you. 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, Arc Invest CEO Kathy 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. Quote, 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 a 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, end quote, for recovery. Their model, which compares Bitcoin's volatility to gold, suggests a 67% upside potential if market stability persists. Together, the contrasting views highlight a market at a crossroads, where institutional control, macro competition, from assets like gold and AI stocks, and the rise of stable coins, are reshaping Bitcoin's trajectory heading into 2026. Balancer hack drains $116 million. Decentralized exchange. Balancer suffered one of 2025's largest defy exploits on Monday, with over $116 million

drained from its V2 stable and composable stable pools. Blockchain data showed stolen assets, including 6.6. 850 oath, 6,590 W.Eth, and 4,260 W.S.Eth, 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 Barachane network to recover compromised assets. A preliminary post-mortem 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's civers, 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, end quote, 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,

edited by X means almost nothing." 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 Metaplanet has secured a $100 million loan, backed by its existing Bitcoin reserves, to finance additional crypto purchases and share buybacks. The company often called, quote, Asia's micro-strategy, end quote, used its 30,823 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 Metaplanet'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. Quote, 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 Waste, Galaxy Digital, and Pantara Capital. The raise comes as Ripple expands aggressively, acquiring custody firm Palisade,

Prime Brokridge, Hidden Road, and Stablecoin Platform Rail, while its R-L-U-S-D 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, 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, end quote, 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 stable coin on Ripple's blockchain, marking one of the first U.S. bank-backed credit card settlements using stable coins as the global market surges toward a projected $4 trillion by 2030. Sam Bankman-Fried appeals conviction faces skeptical court. Former F.TX 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 U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, argues that Judge Lewis Kaplan unfairly limited evidence supporting Bankman Freed'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 Arraoucahn, pressing defense attorney Alexandra Shapiro on the argument. Prosecutors countered that the evidence of wrongdoing was, quote, overwhelming, citing testimony from three former FTCX executives who said they conspired with Bankman Freed 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 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-Chane U.S. Government Money Fund, registered in Luxembourg, invest in short-term U.S. 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 tokenized deposits, and potential CBDC integration.

Quote, this launch shows our commitment to expanding tokenized investment products in Asia, said Tariga-Mod, 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 U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, CFTC,

to operate a regulated prediction market platform called Gemini Titan. The exchanges 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 percent, 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 Aranovich and edited by Stephen Erlich. Thanks for listening.