Unchained - Why MegaETH Is Delaying Its Token and Rejecting Credible Neutrality

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

Namik Muduroglu and Amir Almaimani walk through MegaETH's launch strategy and why they are delaying the TGE. Thank you to our sponsors! ⁠Figure⁠ ⁠Crypto Tax Girl Months after its oversubscribed initial coin offering, MegaETH's mainnet is live. But the project is not launching its token just yet.  In this Unchained podcast episode, MegaETH strategy chief Namik Muduroglu and Head of Ecosystem Amir Almaimani break down the Ethereum Layer 2 chain’s launch strategy, including its decision to delay TGE. They also explain how the MegaETH is navigating the current market slump and how it is positioning USDM as its long term moat. Plus, why they believe credible neutrality is a “losing strategy.” Guests: Namik Muduroglu, CSO & Founding Team at MegaETH Amir Almaimani, Head of Ecosystem of MegaETH Previous appearances on Unchained: MegaETH Just Had Its Public Sale. Can It Succeed in Building a Web2-Like Experience? Links: Unchained: Ethereum Lets Go of the Rollup Story. Here Are the 6 Tokens That Benefit MegaETH Plans Return of All Pre-Deposit Funds MegaETH Just Had Its Public Sale. Can It Succeed in Building a Web2-Like Experience? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Usually there is this unwritten rule of curb neutrality as far as teams themselves staying somewhat removed from the actual buildout of the application layer. I think myself, No Makes You, we all basically looking back at history and come to the realization that that's very much a losing strategy. I think our focus is on building a really great blockchain, but more importantly, applications which will hit users that aren't on CT, and who then either they can, could benefit from blockchains, but then they will and they won't even know that. Because it's a really past trade. Hey, everyone. Looking to Unchained, your no-hap 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 here on Unchained is investment advice.

This show is for informational and entertain what purpose is solely. And my guest tonight may hold assets described on the show. For more disclosure, visit Unchained Crypto.com. Did you know that figure is giving away $25,000 in U.S. DC. They're a decentralized digital asset platform for earning, borrowing, and lending. Download the Figure Markets app using our link. Figure Markets. Dot co slash unchained DP. 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 Figure Markets. dot co slash Unchained DP 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 slash unchained. Again, that's Cryptotaxgirl.com slash unchained. Today's topic is MegaEath. Here to discuss is Nomick Mutarola, C-A-SO and founding team at Mega-Eath and Amir Amir, Head of Ecosystem at Mega-Eve.

Welcome, Nomik and Amir. I'm sure how to go? Great, excited to chat with you. First of all, congrats on launching Maynet on Monday. How do you guys feel about it? And why don't we start with you, Nomic? Great. I think we've been working on this for a while now.

And it's always been an idea in a lot of people of minds, right? This level of performance, this particular tradeoff, this particular architecture, achieving this level of low agency in production. And it was an idea in my mind until, you know, just a couple months ago when we went onto the frontier mainnet and when we did the stress test and now as we go into public main at it's it's quite exciting i think to be able to bring this level of performance uh deferring ecosystem and have it live in production so it's exciting we're retired above it's very exciting and ameer how about you yeah i know i mean that we have two floors right around my

mouth right now i think it's really about level setting expectations as well um very much a marathon otter springs and this is very much the start of the race too so um we're just getting the foundation plumbing setup 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 several weeks. I already have a lot of mafia teams start to deploy, and just, again, indexing heavily on that new experiences on chain that are uniquely unlocked by real-time chain. So I need to ask you, because obviously this is happening in this broader environment of crypto kind of, you know, having this fall, especially after 1010, even another plummet last

week on February 5th. And, you know, that day we saw Bitcoin, you know, plunged from 70K down a 63K in one day. There's all these rumors about somebody blew up. Something happened. Like, you know, so, you know, I'm curious. Like, even just looking at the price of Eath itself, it's down 35% in the last month. So I wonder, you know, there's been, obviously, some last minute changes also with your launch. So just talk about, you know, how you were thinking about navigating this launch in this environment. So without a doubt, it's been a volatile few weeks. And it effectively forced us to ask ourselves, say, how do we optimize for the success of Meggie, right? When you have scenarios where actually everybody wants to kind of, you know, close our lapops for a few months and, you know, touch some grass, it becomes difficult to build flywheels.

And we need flywheels to effectively validate the mega-eve ecosystem pieces. I would say that a decision we had made a long time ago for Betro for worse was that the error 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 deaf spiral, the applications are not actually. So what we did is we basically, you know, course correct and ship a little bit and implemented what we think is a way to enable application and protocol growth and have that directly aligned with, you know, the, you know, the, general growth of the ecosystem as known by USDA.

Yeah, and just to add, like adding to that point, too, it's always about optimizing the longevity of Meghese. What do we need to do today such that Mega will be here thriving five years from now, seven years from now, 10 years from now? So we're playing much longer term games. Every step that we take is, again, a step in the direction of the five, seven, 10 years as opposed to how do we just drop a bunch of attention today and then eventually fizzle out over time. 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. 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 Bouturin 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 two that, you know, you would want to focus on features other than scaling. And I wondered how that also affected, you know, things about your launch or like how you were thinking about how to position your chain. I think it was actually, you know, lovely to hear as absurd as that sounds. I remember we've had lots of conversations for other people in the EF ecosystem and obviously the layer one should scale. It's just net out as a poor theory. In fact, when the, when the Vitalik made his article, he basically described what a layer two should be moving forward. And the basic simple statement is something that Ethereum alone can never become, right?

Structurally is impossible for Ethereum or really, in our opinion, these anyhow want 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, you know, a credibly neutral error 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 Meggy from the very beginning, right?

The reason why we built on Ethereum as much as we love Eve is not because of like a unbridled fanboyism towards Vitalik, but because with the design, choices we had made, which was built a truly performance-first architecture offloaded consensus to whoever does consensus fast. Ethereum L-1 does consensus pass. And that allows us to build a very opinionated performance-first architecture because we were able to settle on the Ethereum. And in my opinion, in many ways, the Talix 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 the equation. But I actually think that it was a beautiful moment because in some ways it's like, hey, let's cut the crap. And, you know, if you're a layer two, you need to build something that justifies you're making these design choices that are basically not necessarily the same as what Ethereum stands for. Amare, do you want to add anything? I mean, Adamik just hit the nail on the head there. At the end of the day, just very much validated the entire thesis of Megh.

And also just our general approach to building out the chain and the application model as well. We've been priding ourselves on only possible on MeghEath. If an application doesn't actually harness the unlocks of Meghief itself, if it's something that can be easily hoarded over from another EBM compatible chain, then that's just a massive disservice 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 centralized 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 marching that direction. Yeah, so talk through some of those specs for any builders listening, any users who've been frustrated by poor user experience. Go ahead and just talk a little bit about, what you think technically you've achieved that other time. No, do you want it? Go for it.

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 two giga gas per second. And this very smart individual was basically saying, hey, like, there's no way you're going to have our main net, right? Because we lived in an era where everyone was able to stay like super high test, that numbers, and they never really materialized, right? But like, effectively what Megadeth has done is Megadeth has chosen to fully centralized block production, with the decision

being that the security guarantees are settling onto theory more 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 10-0 second block times. That's really, really, really fast. TLDR feels great. It feels like you're using a Web 2 application. Google actually has done a lot of research on water latency levels which are positive and additive to attention, as opposed to what are numbers where you kind of lose a user. And any scenario we're talking 500 milliseconds or above,

it actually disrupts the 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 high-efficient BFI, high-efficient AHF fees. So now that is to have partnerships with pairs like chain-limp, we're able to enshrine oracles and provide really, really powerful data feeds. and it has immense capacity. So on this stress test, we at 1.5,000 transactions per second

while also having the chain live for end users like ourselves to be able to play a bunch of low-vacency games. So we had a game where you were a rabbit, we had to cross the road, and there were cars that were hitting you, right? And effectively, if the chain, if you weren't able to communicate if the sequencer in back and time,

you get it by a car. 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 develop for certain guarantees, right? While we were doing this level of transaction activity, we were four or five times cheaper than other roadups, right? Which we're doing with, let's say, 80 to 100 TPS. And then again, that's because we decided to use AginDA as opposed to EPA a long time ago, which, to be frank, we got in a lot of trouble with the EFolks for.

But we just thought it made sense given, you know, we were optimizing for something that other altars weren't optimized before. So I'd say that's what the ballot propositions are, consistent block space. and very low latency. And for users, we've been cultivating applications for a very long time.

Ameri can... Yeah, and I mean, like, double-click 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 long-gerture process. It's just a matter of creating the sandbox where people actually start playing in to get to that level of expressiveness. Yeah, and talk a little bit more, a little bit more about that expressiveness. So, you know, Namak 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 elizabeth? to. 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's an exact experience but living on truly essentialized 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 try to tackle it ahead on. I try to convince the team to do Omigo on train with voice shots because you could actually do it on Mera. I go on beta because we were worried with like it be a Pandora's box of sorts. But it's formed because Chris Dixon was saying, you know, there's this whole drama, right, Calciami was like, referee's dead. 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 actually still super excited and just hasn't happened. Mega's classic use case, which you're having 99% of listeners here will be interested in without a defy. Right. Like it's beautiful for defy, hyper-efficient, right, the only low latency. And there's a very clear prose for that. In our architecture, proximity markets, and sequencer rotation, effectively in that enables minimal and density 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're also for better or for worse still, somewhat optimistic about the larger rep free thesis. And our opinion is the reason why it didn't happen is actually because the block 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, you would end up in a lot of trouble. And the other 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 of 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-tching Pokemon games. So there's actually a range. Now, it takes longer than, you know, we were, you know, we really tried our best to have, like, this big amusement park experience day, one of MayNet. 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, for worse, we are optimistic, like, some of the web free pieces can come back, especially when it's being pronounced true media. Okay. Yeah.

I mean, it really feels like there, I mean, I know that I said, I'm going to ask me 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 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 team. 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 Megadiv? Sure. So I think co-location is now in the ground for D5.

And the data is proving this sort of like, you know, that leaves a solar an ecosystem. Our opinion is, you know, don't shrun 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 Meghiv, knock on wood, we're trying to harvest. Then there's valuable water flow on Meghief. Instead of having all of that privatized, build a system around. it where people can bid to co-locate as a mega-e sequencer and that value is distributed in megapotocans, right? So they'd have to spend mega tokens to do so. That's the simplest form of permitting markets. A lot of this stuff is, you know, 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-eat. And that's what the mirror and I are spending our days on now. 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 a very first principles approach. We want there to be real utility for Mega Day 1, so for that to happen, what actually needs that 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. Yeah, yeah. So we'll catch that in one second. I just want to lay a little bit more of the background here. So, Amir, you actually came on the show to talk. I forget what this was, but before about how Meghatea Epe also decided to launch

on a stable coin as powered by Athena. And obviously, that was part of a bigger trend of a bunch of genes that were doing that. But I've seen you guys talk about this as being a big focus, you know, for liquidity, you know, revenue generation on mega-eats. So, you know, explain like why and how you're giving the stable coin a prominent place. Definitely, yeah. No, so at the end of the day, like the idea behind USDAM 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 mode to start, but performance itself can't be a long-term mode. For us, it's a, and at the end of the day,

if there's no mode and something can be commoditized, then the revenue model more or less just trends to zero. For us, it's how can we actually have something that's sustainable that is synergis 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 the terms of the user experience. Because if you look at typical chains today, a lot of the value that gets passed at the infrastructure is coming at the expense of the user experience in the form of priority fees, network congestion, et cetera.

For us, when it comes to mega itself, it's always thinking, okay, first in, first out, keeping gas fees as close to 0.000 cent as possible. And again, allowing for these novel experiences to actually reach escape a loss of date. That's usually the issue we end up seeing when it comes to change that

would feel like successful applications. At the end of the day, you have everything living on the same state layer, they will eventually start to step on each other's toes, and again, one success ultimately comes to the expense of others. And then at the end of the day, all that value still finds to sweep the 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 USDM itself. So USDAM is going to be something that, again, its adoption is very much credited 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 not McKin 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 USBEM, people will be fine taking on that additional friction to interact with the app and use our stable plane. So it's kind of taking sort of a reverse approach to sort of bootchapping stables.

Usually people would start off with here 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 things. So again, to my knowledge, it's the first one that's times. It's still very much experienced. We'll see how things unfold, but that was very much sort of the, thinking behind USDA itself and general GtM. Okay.

And then so, you know, you guys are also willing for having mega mafia. And again, I feel like this is just another piece of that kind of intentionality and making sure that we'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-eat. Yeah, so for a long time, I think like we were very common in the fact that we've made design tradeoffs, right? Like, you know, Meg Eve can, you know, I think the big meme on Twitter over the past couple weeks is like, oh yeah, you know, all these altos are going to come out once now. They were only out of twos because of a regulatory cover.

On our end, it was because we, this is the only way we can have this level performance. And the only reason for this performance exists is if it creates netting 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, you know, it actually eventually evolved from being like, okay, we have a real-time blockchain, a really good capacity, built saying that justifies Megamy's existence, to if you had no limitations on what you can build, what would you want to build using crypto rails? 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. So it was effectively that we tried to find small founders and work with them. No real expectations in the end we basically asked them to just use USDM. And the thesis is just very much being like if we try and do some sort of like capture policies, it ends up not creating a genuine group. So we, we, we, that was the basic thing from the Mafia, which is like we need to put the apps into our own hands and work with these founders because if we're not going to do it,

we can't expect it to just show up day one of maintenance. I mean, we did it for a couple of years, and it was still hard to get lots of apps to show up day one of main net. Imagine we can do it as all. And I mean, the entire approach also is just like very hypothetical to how people think about, the build out of crypto ecosystems, right? Usually there is this unwritten rule of critical neutrality

as far as teams themselves staying somewhat removed from the actual buildout of the application layer. I think myself, No Makes You, we all basically, looking back at history and comes to the realization that that's very much a losing strategy. Some of the most successful ecosystems today, Solana, Bayes, etc., 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, 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 the division be realized. All right. So in a moment we're going to talk about your recent decision to post-public. own your token generation event, but first we're going to take a quick word from the sponsors

to make the show possible. Want a chance to win $25,000 in USDC? Figure, a platform to earn yield, 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, Figure Markets.com slash Unchained DP. 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.com slash unchanged DP, which is also available in the show notes.

If you're looking for help with crypto taxes, CryptoTax Girl is offering $100,000.000. dollars off for Unchained listeners. They provide personalized crypto tax reports and returns and spots before April 15th are limited. Go to Cryptotaxgriil.com slash Unchained to save $100.

Once again, the link is Cryptotaxgirl.com slash unchained. So at the last minute before your main at launch, you decided to delay the token generation event. I explained why. I think you said,

wow, right? We are setting ourselves up for structural success over the long run. And we want to make sure that we, maybe it is as successful as possible. So there's a layer two. You know, maybe if we're not being the lay token because we never said we'd have a token live day one. In fact, I would say, I don't know if any L2 that's launched a 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 wouldn't, I don't want to like that assumption. But fundamentally, like, the way the mega token operates in our system is directly correlated to basically proximity markets and USDM day one and the future sequence or rotation. So I mentioned that briefly, have this a sequence or move. it leveraged the PLA model. In all these scenarios, there needs to be a baseline usage and activity on the like blockchain, right, for the fire rule to be relatively successful, again, knock on wood. And we folded these three KPI's adequately gauged when mega was ready for KG. The three KPI's being one, an application, three applications after KKKADRIV for 30 days,

to ask for the hardest of all their KPI so achieved. We obviously looked at other case studies. We think it's reasonable, but it means that there's apps that people they're using. The second KPI is $500 million in USDM on the chain. That creates a flywheel for the USDM app relationship. And finally, 10 market-mof-the-application support on that age. And that means not gated, but actually available to all users. Any one of these free hitting would result in us deciding the PG.

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 all created a thesis of maximum priority. Again, everything we're doing is because, I mean, 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 the pie out there. And we thought this was a fair way to boostrap the ecosystem for a place where it be ready. And, you know, have Meg Eve grow as a result. Amir, what do you think?

I mean, 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 KPI themselves, it's a matter of making sure that people don't lose sight of what the 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 KBI's gave us an opportunity to get the applications in front of every, 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 jobs to build something that is sustainable over the long run. 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 USDM in circulation?

And that's like a based on, what was it, a 30-day? time-lated supply, then the 10 mafia apps that are fully deployed, and then the 50K USDA daily and fees for 30 days on, I think it's, is it any app? Any app that's the ad on the shade. Or no, it's three apps it looks like for 30 days. Yeah. So, yeah, how did you, you know, what was your thinking behind each of those? So important to know, it's one of any.

So one of any of the KPI sit, MegatGs, and they were all directly thinked as downstream of what we really need, which is activity on the chain. For Mega to work, for Meggi to succeed, people need to think that there's something here that's for a while. 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 code. But you never know when a brilliant founder shows up and just built something amazing. And that's great. If you're listening, please do deploy. And that's what the second KPI is designed for, all right? So having any application be able to achieve basic fee numbers shows to us that, hey, there's demand for co-location, there's the amount for proximity markets, and there is activity on this chain that's organic, right? And this makes sense. And USDM was effectively a mixture of ball.

In all scenarios, the visionists of USDM act as the fundamental flywheel, the fundamental tide between all of these. different mega-eaf applications in 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. We have a sum from an order book. The entire thing is nominated and paired against USDM,

Burlington founder. And he definitely would love if there's equity for USDM. So all three of these KPIs, I think, create a safe and safe. my yeah well into the us the end point as well it's not just a matter of 500 million dollars of us the end and that's it um at the end of the day we want to make sure that we're we're maximizing capital efficiency here so we want that capital actually deployed into the ecosystem so in addition to the 500 million dollars in the usdm supply 25% of that actually actually has to be deposited into

non-custodia smart contracts so be it into avon ava 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 headline number and that's it, but we want to make sure that there's real use actually taking place. 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 at about like 13 cents or so, 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 approach building? Yeah. So we had nothing to do with any of the pre-markets that went live and leave the pre-market on how predicted 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 saying that we pay too much attention to. I think our general policy is that the megatope, we're not going to be giving the megatoken away to different vexes or sexes for listings. And our general thesis is that it all is downstream of product market fit in PMF, and that's really what we're optimizing for. Short-term things like premarkets are, you know, speculators will speculate, let them enjoy it. I think our focus is on building a really great blockchain, but more importantly, applications which will hit users that aren't on CT, and who didn't know that they could benefit from blockchains, but then they will, and they won't even know about it, because it's really fast trade. Yeah, it doesn't really make much sense to kind of lose sleepover relatively ill-liquid pre-markets.

it's just kind of, again, it's a matter of not being, not taking like this 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 supreme market was on February 10th, 2026 in like 2028. So again, playing more of a long-term game, taking more of a long-term approach. 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 TG media, 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 in 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 position. So I'm just curious, like, how, you know, is that what I'm seeing? is that what's going on behind the scenes? And if so, how did that become a part of your team culture? So the fundamental truth is that like, you know, and I think this actually comes from Shiao, you know,

Brother Bing, Da Bing, whatever people know where it was. You know, before Mega, Shua had like a pretty great career in crypto, right? And Elon and Lay, 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 mean, it's also very smart.

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 Lay are interested. But, you know, always I don't think that's true. I think it's really everyone who leaves the crypto will eat the world. And at least I felt like I want to have a role to play in guests, right? I'm not an American.

I think crypto is very good for, like, the world, right? And this is like what we're doing. This is what we're building. And we only get one straw off of building this. and we're quite serious about it. So we're not here for like a couple weeks, and we're 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. I think maybe the reason why we're being very, you know, quote-unquote faultful with mega, because we're very unrealistic about what we can build. And we're also quite native, in the way as like we understand, at least like we've spent a decent chunk of coming up there. Yeah.

I mean, we also be doing ourselves at this service 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 happens? 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 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 and 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 the most informed step that we can possibly take. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty obvious because, yeah, 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, missionary issue 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 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, no, I know the ICO is 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 to the purpose. Yeah. Basically, we end up having a lot more demand than we had initially expected.

We thought maybe we'd be slightly oversubscribed victim. We put a cap, so it's possible. But it ended up being quite a lot. I think we wanted to raise $5 million of the max of $999. We had, I think, $1.3 billion in the oversubscription. And what we have to do is we have to kind of slip 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 at 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 call. Who else is going to be a power user of mega, is really bullish on crypto, is really bullish on Eiff. That might be like just power users of EF1, just basically like that's for their life, super active during the DGen days of DFI summer or just even last cycle. But it could also be people who were like, you know,

fundamental in the mega you start, for the past couple years. And that was some of our community members, for example, Ultra comes to mind. You know, he's created like so many dashboards that the guy's like honorary

person, he's awesome. But also some people who contributed meaningfully like the Ethereum story 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, it would be our honor to have them

invest in mega. I think it was contrarian. I think most people had designed. Most guys CEOs were like, oh, you know, if there's oversubscription was to everybody at five bucks and call all today. What we want to do is we want 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 or at least maybe it's an overly optimistic. And then just like to add to that this point, because not expect a lot of time going through each and every person that tried to participate. I also noticed a lot of people try to misrepresent how we went about the actual selection process because at the end of the day, people just see a larger account 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 our 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

proving 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. 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. Yeah, so there's a couple of utilities for the mega token, I'm particularly excited about. Those would be proximity markets as well as a future sequencer vocation architecture. So proximity markets, as we 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 co-location to build and use true.

real-time flows. Now, for me and you, we can be wherever we are in the world and it once really affect us. You know, we all need to be collocated with the sequence or have a great U.S. But for HFTs, for DFI apps, it really can make or break the world, right? So that's one of the major functions of the megatoken. In a similar vein, sequencer rotation will also be powered with the megatoken. So a sequencer rotation means is that right now, it's a It's, you know, I'm in London. It's about a 10 p.m. You guys are in the U.S., East Coast.

I assume, well, I know mirrors, and the day is basically ending, while it's still kind of, you know, rampaging in 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 out. So we will have an architecture where the sequencer moves around the world, where economic activity is most vibrant. and who will be running the sequencer will be a function of a POA-like model using a megatocon.

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 of Monad and Slan and become way more enticed, right? But by rotating the sequencer, and so it convincer is no longer being run by one singular entity over in a seven period of time. Being run by a similar entity for X amount of blocks.

And again, that's also using measure as a system for which has made possible. There's also the way that USTM ties to mega. So USDM buys back mega tokens. Whenever there's USDM, there's a reward, that are made from USDM, and those rewards are then used to buyback a mega token. So that's like a fun thing too.

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 API you think will be hit first, that will trigger the TG8. And you want to start? KPI at his first. 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 team's going live, but my hope is that we hit that $500 million USDN number before we have the 10 Mafia teams live. Not a bit. I mean, the easiest one stuff in Mafia one, I think we have, we have a Firefire day one, so five more. But I curse the big fan of the app fees hitting 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 is from the apps that is not

meant for, like, the 2,000 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 app I'm most excited for. I'd love to hear Amir's opinion. I'm definitely going to send you the apps from their bar.

But I think I'm a sucker for Euphoria. I think that's like I'm really excited for us. And I would say my close stack can probably be Rocket or Hit One. What about you, Amir? Yeah, so for me, something I care a lot about going into 2026 as well is around NetU assets, asset issuance on Naga. So I would say fairly dark horse in this race, but Bricks is a team that I'm very excited about.

They're looking to tokenize the traditionally or carry trade, bring EM yields on chain, which are very kind of comparable to what people are accustomed to today when it comes to defy, except this time around the yield itself is very scale. 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 Trade team as well. So the Hello Trade team, former directors from BlackRock,

they are building out of perfect for equities, but eventually we want to expand that vision now to building a spot market for tokenized stocks, commodities, etc. So that's something that Nubikina are very, very much excited about going into this year. And something that we plan to spend a lot of our time is focusing on as well. All right. Well, you know, for the audience members who thank those ass 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 on Change. I'm thank you, for obvious.