Insights on MegaEth Blockchain Podcast

So when I read the white paper, I was like, wow, this is going to bring that new application to the Ethereum ecosystem. But more importantly, I think it's going to bring more optimism and excitement from builders. And if you remember 2022 or 23, there was not so much excitement, right? Everyone was just busy building another roll up, another new infrastructure. No one was focusing on applications. So I think the role of MegaEth in the greater Ethereum or even just... The crypto industry was this highly opinionated infrastructure, allowed projects like GTE and Enzo and all the mega mafia projects to really reimagine what can be built on chain. Welcome to the Edge podcast. I'm DeFi Dad here with Nomadic from 4RC. Today's show spotlights the high performance EVM compatible blockchain MegaEth. In this episode, we discuss how MegaEth brings Web2 comparable real-time performance to crypto, including high transaction throughput up to 100,000 transactions per second, abundant compute capacity, and millisecond-level response times. But before we do, just a quick word from our sponsors who make the Edge podcast possible. Hey folks, I wanted to tell you a bit about our sponsor, Pith Oracles, your go-to source for smarter data to power smarter contracts. Pith delivers real-time market data for crypto, equities, FX, and commodities to over 80 blockchains. With 120 plus major market participants like Jane Street, Binance, and CBOE, Pith ensures secure low latency feeds trusted by 430 DeFi apps. You can learn more about Pith by going to pith.network. And thanks to the Pith community for supporting us here at the Edge Podcast and Edge Newsletter. Overwhelmed trying to manage your crypto and DeFi investments? 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We're the first to use decentralized sequencers, letting both Bitcoin and Dogecoin secure our network while earning native yield. No nonsense, just your assets working smarter. Our early supporters got it, with over 8 million committed in December alone and already earning returns. Next stop, mainnet launch in Q1 of 2025. Goat Network, where Bitcoin scaling meets real yield. Visit Goat.network, get involved, and start earning sustainable yield. All right, let's introduce the co-founders of MegaEth, Bing and Lei, as well as the co-founder of GTE, Enzo. Guys, welcome to the Edge podcast. How are you doing? We're doing fantastic. Thank you for having us. We are long-term fans of you guys. And we are fans of you. We're going to talk about, you know, today, like, what do you guys mean by what's the first real-time blockchain? If MegaEth is successful, how does this ultimately benefit Ethereum L1 and ETH, the asset? And also love to think about how will you compete with other chains like Solana? Because at this point, the competition is not just L2s. We've learned this cycle with how DeFi has grown on Solana and other chains that MegaEth will have to compete with every other L1 that exists. So that all said, let's talk about. the background of your team. Love to just dig into why you started building MegaEth. So maybe tell us a little bit more about you and the team. Absolutely. I'll start talking about MegaEth and then Anzal can share a bit about GTE's story as well. It's funny you said that MegaEth started from this cycle. We actually started building and thinking about the MegaEth architecture back in 2023. So one of our other co-founder, Elon, graduated from Stanford. He studied low latency data center compute. Dude is not into crypto at all, but somehow stumbled upon it and was like, hey, these people are struggling with building performant blockchain. But the answer is so simple. You just need to measure where the bottlenecks are and solve it. And it turned out the bottleneck was actually the execution environment. And specifically, it was the Michael Patricia track. So Elon started this researching back in early 2023. Then he found out Lei, who's on this pod, Lei studied distributed network at MIT for six years. So he basically spent six years of his life studying blockchain consensus and obviously realized that consensus is redundant, which we can go deeper into later. And then I joined the project earlier last year to lead the business. Before we expand on the vision of MegaEek. Enzo, you're building GTE, which is a totally separate project that I believe is built on MegaEth. So maybe tell us a bit more about you and GTE. Yeah. GTE stands for Global Token Exchange. Essentially, we think about it like there's the London Stock Exchange, which defined an empire's sort of kind of economy, the New York Stock Exchange, which is the same. And And we have the global token exchange now, which represents fundamentally the upgrading of kind of the systems that we transact and the assets that we trade with around the world. My background is very different from a lot of people in the space that are maybe coming from a more financial services background or quantitative trading background. I grew up in Silicon Valley, studied distributed systems, learned kind of like build outs from the hardware level. watched the internet get built in my backyard and ultimately became really obsessed with this idea of decentralization. That led me to doing a bunch of various different things within the industry from investing to building infrastructure and products. And ultimately, I realized that the holy grail is on-chain price discovery. If you're able to have an exchange that has price discovery that's happening entirely on-chain, you're able to build really interesting financial products on top of that. And so... for us, when we set out to build GT, the global token exchange, we looked at every blockchain's architecture. And then we realized that the only sort of architecture that could make what GT is possible is a chain like Meggie, which takes consensus out of the critical path. We can dive more in depth into what that means. But essentially, we've been working on GT with Meggie for the past year and excited to kind of roll this out as people start to realize like, it's not just another exchange on an L2, but a fundamentally different approach to not just a crypto exchange, but an exchange in general. Yeah, thanks, Enzo. I actually didn't know what GTE meant, but that's a great name. Okay, I want to kind of step back a bit and maybe kick it back over to the MegaEase team. Let's just talk about the current state of L2s in the landscape today. I think Enzo was starting to get to maybe some of the bottlenecks or issues that you perceive are present, but would just love to hear it from you. Why? I guess, why build MegaEth and why do you consider it so special? Yeah, I'll take the question on the technical side. So, yeah, I think the current L2 ecosystem is quite interesting. And I think it's kind of actually fulfilling the, I think, the initial vision of why I think Ethereum went to a kind of L2-centric roadmap, which is to kind of stimulate exploration. I mean, there are very different projects sitting on. both ends of the of the spectrum of trade-off between decentralization and performance, right? And so I think what we are missing and I think the key gap that Mediate is fitting in this L2-centric ecosystem is a chain that is just single-mindedly focused on performance. And to kind of demonstrate that, what we believe in is just to kind of tune every single knob in our system for performance and maybe Example is that we use a single centralized sequencer for predictive blocks. And this is, I think, something that is very contrarian in this ecosystem because most of the L2s are kind of looking at a roadmap towards decentralized sequencing or decentralized block production through the reintroduction of the consensus algorithm. And Enzo mentioned it a little bit in his... question on why GTE is only possible on mega-eats, and I can try to kind of expand on that. The thing is that if you kind of have a consensus algorithm sitting on the critical path of producing blocks, like almost every single L1 does, then you kind of reintroduce this latency, which stem from the communication between the previous block producer to the next block producers. Imagine that I have a sequencer sitting in Tokyo and another sequencer sitting in London. And suppose that after the Tokyo sequencer produces the block, next slot is for the London sequencer. So the block must at least travel to the London sequencer before it can keep producing blocks. And this can only happen at most at a speed of light time. And that's usually 100 plus milliseconds in the world. And not to mention usually with consensus algorithms that can... You actually need multiple round trips around the world. So you are looking at maybe 700 even plus milliseconds. I mean, in terms of block interval. And this is all gone when you have a centralized sequencer, which just keeps pumping out blocks because then you don't have to really communicate to anyone or you don't have to kind of wait for anyone to send you the previous block because you are the person who produced the previous blocks. And yeah, so you are looking now at 10 millisecond or even lower block time. And so... Basically, we see that the current L2 ecosystem lacks such a project that just pushes for performance without really worrying about the other aspects of the system. And of course, being a layer two, we can always kind of piggyback, we always enjoy the security guarantees and decentralization guarantees from the Ethereum mainnet. Yeah, so I would say this is kind of how we do things a bit differently from other projects in the ecosystem. I can add a bit and I can talk a bit about personal experiences, right? So prior to joining MegaEth, I was leading global business development at ConsenSys, the mother company of MetaMask. And, you know, I was super early into Solana because as a big company, right, we and our team, we had to have a strong pulse of what's going on. So I wanted the first Solana breakpoint. I even wanted the Avalanche Summit in Spain. And it was extremely interesting to see how performance can bring so much excitement from application builders. And we were missing that in the Ethereum roadmap at all. And back in 2022, ConsenSys also rolled out its own rollout, which is called Linear at DKEVM. And obviously, I, along with my team, was in charge of the business development part of it. And I remember I was so excited. I was like, oh my God, finally, I have my own ecosystem. I can build upon it. I started to tell everyone like, yo, quit your job. You have this perfect fancy zero knowledge rollout that can, you know, be so secure. It's so sexy. Come build with us. But what happened was that, you know, people came to build on Levy and realized that that thing is not performant. Like if you want to build a pub, Dex, you can't build on it. If you want to build a game. The only thing you can put on chain was an NFT. And that was such a big wake-up call. And that was why when I read the Mega East white paper, it was called Mega Rollup white paper, and it was like a million TPS, which now Fire Dancer claim that they are one million TPS. But actually Mega East had one million TPS before Fire Dancer. And I thought it was a joke. I was like, why would anyone name their protocol Mega Rollup? But there's a story behind that. So when I read the white paper, I was like, wow, this is going to bring that new application to the Ethereum ecosystem. But more importantly, I think it's going to bring more optimism and excitement from builders. And if you remember 2022 or 23, there was not so much excitement, right? Everyone was just busy building another rollup, another new infrastructure. No one was focusing on applications. So I think the role of MegaEth in the greater Ethereum, or even just the crypto industry, was this highly opinionated infrastructure allowed projects like GTE and Enzo and all the MegaMafia projects to really reimagine what can be built on chain. That is our contribution to the system. It's not just like, hooray, another EVM blockchain, let's pump it to a billion dollars. Yeah, even when I was just starting to hear about MegaEth, I was like, what the heck is this like i like this name but it was like is this for real like this is kind of a silly name but i like it and i think it was kind of like you kind of said it like there's elements of ethereum that sometimes gets a bit stuffy or i think it can be perceived as hey this is kind of like lacking fun or like you know just um i don't i don't know the word but it's just like it was kind of it's just like a refreshing vibe i think that was like introduced and there was a a long time where i was like i don't know what mega youth is but it's everywhere so i know of the name but i don't know even really what's going on so this is this is why it's been great to like kind of dissect that and just curious like now that we have you like why did you call it like like and then i guess to take it even to a further point um i would just like to get into a bit more of that underlying connection and connectivity to ethereum l1 if you can of course um you I think it's kind of a random name. I think our other co-founder Elon came up with the name, as Shriyam mentioned, was Mega Rollup, which I think is slightly worse than MegaEth as a name. But I think what's interesting is that actually we picked Mega, but I think it's only after almost half a year since we came up with the name that we realized that MegaEth can make Ethereum great again. I think it's actually one of our investors who brought it up. And retrospectively, it's an interesting pick. So I, okay, they did not give the right answer. Wipe that out. Sorry. No one has ever actually asked us this question. So Mega is actually 10 to the 6th. That's just the performance inspiration that we inherit. Mega also stands for Make Ethereum Great Again. But also, I think Mega is just a name that is quite empowering. And I think Ethereum always takes pride in being gentle, right? It's kind, but it's gentle. But MegaEast is unapologetic. And I think, you know, I'm going to bring up Anzal's co-founder. I think the fun or the Bronze Age mentality that MegaEast bring in has actually attracted builders from Solana. So I don't know, Anzal, if you want to chat a bit about your co-founder. Yeah, basically, right? Like there's two schools of thought in crypto, right? There's like the decentralization purists. which are people that are really into censorship resistance, missionless composability. And we can think of that as like the Bitcoin maxis and the Ethereum maxis. And there's this second school of thought, which is decentralization at the forefront, but really performance at the top of mind. And that's what we see in like these next generation blockchains that have come out in the past. Solana, SWE, DOS, etc. My co-founders come from that world, right? Where They, yes, care about decentralization, but what they really care about is pushing the limits of decentralization to the max. And fundamentally, what attracted them to GTE and ultimately to build on MegEth was that what they said, MegEth is unapologetically performant. Not only are you inheriting Ethereum's decentralization and security, you're also inheriting the ability to push the limits to places no other chain has gone before. So when I chatted with my co-founders initially, But starting this company, it wasn't a question of, oh, we're decentralizing the sequencer. It's going to be very censorship resistant, very good for like the L1 blockchain, but rather it was, we're going to make this as fast as possible. We're going to write as low level code as possible. We're going to make this the best possible product, not just in DeFi, but in all of crypto. And I think ultimately, MegEath is able to thread both of those kind of schools of thought into one sort of thriving ecosystem. And that's why you see such a, like a plethora of applications that are really fundamentally different than anything that's been tried before, both on an L1 and an L2. I think you all make a really good point that there's been this focus on decentralization and security. And although I understand that, sometimes it's just like a wet blanket on the space, you know, like we just We can't like, you know, speculate on and get excited for like high performance type applications because the network's just never been able to support those. And so there's been a refreshing energy, I think, to what you all bring to the space. And I do think like you've clearly taken notes from the likes of Solana and other blockchains that are like known for having like high throughput chains. I do want to go back, though, then to that high performance. Maybe before we like rattle off like the, you know, impressive like stats that go with that, can you just for a moment talk about like, what are you conceding, though, by focusing on the high performance? Like, there's got to be some drawback here, right? Like, what are we as users or what is someone like Enzo as a builder having to consider when they... They come to build on mega ETH being high performance. Like what's the drawback there? Yeah. So I think to understand kind of the trade-off we're making, I just want to highlight that, I mean, the key architectural design that we took was a centralized sequencer. So with a centralized sequencer, of course, you gain the very low block time, you gain the very high TPS, and also you can focus on, you can focus your organizations. onto this centralized sequence, which kind of tailors hardware, tailors software for your for your performance needs. On the other hand, the drawback of course is that we are centralized sequencer and usually for people in our industry, we do not like centralization by default. So I think that's kind of the trade-off that we're making and I think it's, I would say it's kind of an uphill battle for us narratively. But on the other hand, we are an Ethereum layer 2 and as other layer 2s, as with other layer 2s, yes, if say the sequencer is doing some shenanigans, of course it may be doing, it would be up to the Ethereum layer 1 to catch these issues. For example, if the sequencer, if the centralized sequencer starts censoring your shenanigans, then yes, probably at the moment you cannot really write to the sequencer, but On the other hand, you can still go back to the Ethereum layer one and write your transactions there. And the protocol will enforce the centralized sequence, bring these transactions back to the layer two. Otherwise, the sequence will face stashing. So I would say this kind of design is more nuanced for people to kind of fully understand and also fully kind of trust. So I think this is kind of a conscious trade-off that we're taking, right? It's basically, as I mentioned. For every knob that we untune, we go for performance, and then we worry about the implications a bit later. But we do worry about them, and we use the Ethereum layer 1 to solve them. But it will be kind of a longer story to tell, right? And similarly, I would say for execution correctness, yes, the sequencer can decide to incorrectly execute the transaction. But again, these kind of actions are always accountable. And the sequence will be forced to correct itself and also lose its stake the moment the layer one detects it. So I would say that's kind of the uniqueness about the design, but also it's something that is true for almost every single layer too. So to answer your question more straightforwardly, I would say we're kind of in the same ballpark in terms of trade-offs with almost every other layer too. Only that we're a bit more centralized. The kind of logic here is that if you're already making this kind of trade-off, if you're already using this layer 2 architecture, why don't you kind of exploit the architecture further and just push it to the extreme? The way I've been thinking about it, I think Megadeth is almost more decentralized than a layer 1 that no one uses. It's just like four validators in the founder's basement. Guys, something else I want to talk to you guys about. We sometimes LARP. is technical, but we're not. So having you on, this is like a great opportunity to ask some of these technical questions that I'm just kind of like curious how you're thinking about this stuff that's kind of facing our industry. But we kind of like alluded to this blob congestion that's happening. And from my vantage point, it looks like potentially base OP arbitrum could have some tough decisions ahead when, you know, DA congestion happens and they have to decide whether they're going to, I guess, put the extra cost. when Ethereum L1 is congested onto their own customers, users, or... I don't know what they're going to do, and I don't know if Ethyl-1 is scaling fast enough right now. So this is less of a mega-Eth maybe question, but just kind of curious how you're viewing the state of what's happening with these Ethyl-I and L2s, call them, and what's going to happen in your opinion. And I mean, I feel like you don't have this maybe decision because I believe you're going with Eigen-DA. But yeah, that's kind of like a... a mixed bag of questions, but whoever wants to jump at that one. I'll just add one thing. If either of you are able to just quickly explain, what is this issue with blobs? How does it affect us as users? If I'm someone who uses DeFi on base, because I think this sets us up, of course, for an advantage, let's call it, of mega ETH. And then let's talk about that. bad advantage for megaeth yeah so um this blob issue is really because that to to build a to build a secure layer 2 be it a a zk rollout or a zkl2 or um an optimistic l2 you need to write um you need to make sure that the content of your layer 2 blobs of the layer 2 blocks are available for for anyone to read and i'll just i'll just quickly describe why you this is the case, right? So imagine that you're building, imagine that you're using an optimistic layer 2. And the key of an optimistic layer 2 is that if the sequencer dares to do something scammy, others can kind of replay these blocks and verify the blocks for themselves. And they can then go to the theorem layer 1 and complain that, hey, this layer 2 sequencer's doing something wrong and here's the proof right however remember that for for anyone to kind of participate in this kind of the challenge game they must have access to the blocks so that they can replay it right so making sure that this blocks is accessible is the key behind like this data availability stuff and ethereum native blobs is one way to provide data availability because if you write your blobs to the ethereum blockchain that we know that ethereum blockchain is publicly accessible so Arguably anyone can read it and it's also the story behind every kind of alt DA provider. The case is basically that they will host a decentralized network and you instead of writing our data to Ethereum you write to their networks and they will also try their best to make sure that the data remains accessible for those potential challenges. So this is why it's important and it's also why it's kind of a problem that can never be sidestepped I would say by any layer too. And I think you mentioned this question of Ethereum blob being congested. Yeah, I actually spent quite some time on the DA problem and trying to scale DA for Ethereum. But turns out that it's actually a very hard problem because it's almost like you're trying to build a cloud storage out of tens of thousands of servers loosely connected without any kind of fixed topologies. across the world. So, I mean, intuitive is a pretty hard problem. And I would say that's also why Ethereum is facing congestion potentially in terms of flop. And the kind of implication for DeFi users or for any user of a layer 2 is really that the transactions will become more expensive. It's a very simple demand and supply issue. Imagine that the highway can only accept, say, 10,000 cars per hour. And if you just want to go on the highway and there are already a ton of cars in front of you, then what can you do, right? Either the highway, I mean, either the state starts charging fees, charging a tire toll, like the congestion relief pricing for New York, right? And hoping to drive away some of the cars and kind of match the demand with the supplies, kind of accent the demand, right? On the other hand, you can try to... expand on it just kind of expand the highway but as i mentioned it's a very hard problem so um my prediction my prediction is that it's not even a producer i think a fact is that given a certain amount of bandwidth available on ethereum natively for those layer tools that do use ethereum native blob there's only a certain amount of like transactions per second that can go through this very narrow channel and uh basically it's Then once we reach that capacity, yeah, the fee would start to go up and that would just drive away the moms. So the end result of all of your efforts, I want to call out, is 100,000 transactions per second. At least that's what you quote on the website. That's one of, I think, the reasons we as users and builders get excited. This is probably more of a question for Enzo. As a builder, Enzo, what will look or feel different about DeFi on MegaE? Is there more in terms of applications? that become available because of the infrastructure of MegaEth. So I'm of the fundamental belief that there have been like three major paradigm shifts for DeFi, but also smart contract-based applications. The first is Ethereum, right? Enabled Uniswap, Aave, Compound, etc. Expressing the idea of like blocks of code that can be executed permissionlessly without having to have anyone maintain them or run them. The second sort of paradigm shift was Solana. right introduce more centralization into the validators and you're able to get really strong defy based applications think pump fun jupiter drift etc and and that is like a really apparent kind of differentiation this cycle where new users they think of defy right now they think of slotta right they think of they think of moonshot they think of jupiter they don't think of uniswap ave or compound anymore i'm of the fundamental belief that the The next major paradigm shift has been Megi, in which we introduced this concept of a real-time blockchain, which enables real-time based applications. And you can notice kind of like in applications on both Ethereum and Solana, there's still a notion of transaction processing time, right? You submit a transaction and you have to confirm the transaction. You have to wait for the transaction to settle or to execute. And this is because we have global consensus happening around the world. On a chain like Megi, that whole notion is removed. There is no global consensus. There is no transaction settlement time besides the time it takes for your machine to reach the sequencer and back, which is faster than you can blink your eye. And so when you have that fundamental paradigm shift, the type of applications you're able to build are radically different than the applications that exist in its current form. You have a decentralized exchange. Does it have to look like Uniswap? Or could it be fundamentally different? Could it be designed like a centralized exchange? You have a social media application. Do you have to introduce the notion of a transaction signing and even the notion of latency? Or could you have the like feel as good as the like on Instagram or a like on Twitter, right? These are all questions that we've set out to answer. And I think as we start to roll out not only GT, but the other applications in MegEth, you'll start to see what real-time applications really feel like, in which the user will ultimately be the happy customer. Because as we've seen, right, The more centralization you have both in just Web2 and also in crypto, the happier the user is, right? And so if you have max centralization for mega-yield-based applications, you're able to have max user delight, in which ultimately that's what we think is really, really important. One thing I would like to add is that fundamentally, I believe that users are after benefits that they can actually enjoy, not decentralization, but guaranteed. correctness of execution guaranteeing censorship freedom, right? And the decentralization is one way to achieve it, but it's just a means to an end. This episode is brought to you by Mantle, the ultimate Ethereum L2 for builders. With over $2.16 billion in TVL, Mantle powers multi-billion dollar yield-bearing assets like CMETH and FBTC, driving sustainable growth and capital efficiency. Plus, Mantle offers a unique reward station for airdropping different tokens to MNT holders, including one ongoing campaign for 4 million Athena tokens and another for 570,000 Aigen. To learn more, go to Mantle.xyz. And thanks to Mantle for supporting us at the Edge podcast and Edge newsletter. Guys, kind of on this point, I would love to get an idea of your ecosystem building philosophy. I've heard of this mega mafia team. I know little to nothing about it. Yeah, maybe just tell us how you're approaching this because we've talked to a ton of L1 teams, L2 teams. This cold start problem of building a base, a community, an ecosystem is like nearly impossible in my mind. Like you can even throw all the money in the world at it. That does not guarantee success. We've seen a ton of failures that have been well-funded. So yeah, what's like your philosophy and approach to- to building this part of the mega ETH kind of piece of the puzzle. Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first principle and also absolutely my nightmare is as a user, I go on experience the chain and I don't know what to do. I don't know where to swap tokens. I don't know what NFTs to buy. I don't know what consumer apps use. That is a nightmare I need to avoid. So day one, the goal was, okay, Mega ETH is a civilization. When people come to this civilization first, they need some basic building blocks. So DeFi could be what is must be the largest sector. And for example, GT is building that building block. then there have to be something that people are doing for fun. So having things to do on Mega Ease day one has been the first principle. So with that new start, we were thinking like, oh God, how do we find people to build this really important first set of application? And having built a linear consensus for over a year, I think it's a nightmare if you present a lot of options and most of the options are very mid-curve. applications to users, they will run. They will run to your competitor. They will run back to Solana. So then we came up with this program, which is called Mega Mafia. We like to cabal things at Mega East. And the goal of Mega Mafia is to gather really world-class founders, right? Founders who are hungry. Founders who believe in crypto's world domination and really to co-build and iterate together. How do we do it? I am a fan of in-person co-building, co-living. So the first cohort of Mega Mafia actually happened in Berlin last year around May. So I rented a hotel, rented a WeWork space and got some people, whether through referral, friends of friends, flew them to Berlin and be like, guys, I'm going to lock you down for a month. In this month, you need to iterate on what you want to do. And the goal of these apps is they have to be fully on-chain. They have to be only possible on MegaEth, which is what we call Omega. And they have to be fun. So after a month, Enzo was in that cohort. I think we got five or six teams out of it. Immediately, these five, six teams raised money. Ventures were flooding into MegaEth because I guess no one got the MegaEth equity and everyone was going after the ecosystem. But more importantly, these apps are actually not new. And then the second iteration of the Mega Mafia happened in Chiang Mai, where we basically, again, rented a hotel and we call it Mega Zoo, and invited more builders to iterate. And this time the focus was more on applications that provide emotional values, right? The consumer apps, the gaming, the DPN, to really build out this ecosystem that's not only efficient, but really fun. So in summary, Mega Mafia are basically the first set of applications that really showcase the power of mega ETH. But more importantly, the mega mafia is here to bring delightful experience to end users. Everyone is f***ing tired of another EVM blockchain. And no one really cares what your chain is, but people would love to trade on GTE. That was our thesis. I'd like to add something, which is, I don't think anybody has ever asked an app on mega ETH what they thought about that perspective. And like, I would like to add this. I think the analogy of MegEth as a civilization is quite prescient, meaning when we think about these networks, it extrapolates down to like really a state. And when I mean a state, I think of like a real world state, right? Like a country. A network is defined by the amount of kind of belief that people have both in the network and the applications on top of it. And if we extrapolate that out to the state or civilization analogy, the reason why I chose to build on MegEth and so many other people, is because ultimately the civilization had resources that were net new, right? And that's really important to think about. When you're looking to settle down to a new country, when you're looking to move to a new state, when you're looking to do things in the real world, you think about what can this land, what can this state bring me? What sort of opportunity is possible here, right? And I want to double click both on like the principles, but also in like the technology perspective of like the ecosystem and how exactly... and why exactly people are attracted to building on Megi. Because it represents opportunity. It represents an opportunity to do things that are very fundamentally different than on any other blockchain. Not possible on Bitcoin, not possible on Ethereum, not possible on Solana, only possible on Megi. This is like really, I think, what it means to me, an Omega type of application. And fundamentally, when, you know, I got reached out by Megi, that's what they talked about, right? It wasn't a question of grants or handouts or... It wasn't even, hey, we'll guarantee your fundraising, right? It was, we have like a chain that will enable you to build better applications that for people that see these sort of applications, both in your technical architecture and also the way you're able to talk about them, they will invest in you. They will believe in you and they will ultimately want to use your product, right? That's why you've seen MegaEth have more funding in its ecosystem than the entire chain has raised itself. Because you're able to build. applications that are net new. It's a question of what constitutes the greatest countries in the world. It's the opportunity that its constituents are able to pursue independently of state sponsorship. And I feel like that's the same sort of relationship that you have with MegEth and its applications. Speaking of fundraising, MegEth raised, I believe, $10 million in three minutes on Echo. And I believe that's the biggest cost. fundraise that's taken place on Echo. So congrats on that. What can you tell us about that? What can you tell us about the experience of raising on Echo? And why did you choose to raise money on Echo? I'm sure you could have raised it from VCs, angels, all the usual paths that other teams have taken. Yeah, absolutely. We were approached by VCs actually almost every other week, and I've been saying no. The reason was, I think most VCs are extremely mid-curved. Very few VC had independent thinking. So they were going after mega-EC probably because of this parallel EVM, similar to other layer 1 chain. That's just not true, right? And then when I think about who do I want to have skin in the game in my ecosystem? Again, if we're building a mega-civilization, I need to give the people skin in the game. It's not a few VCs, right? It's just basic principle. And that's how Ethereum started as well. So we were talking to Kobe back in July, thinking about using Echo. And then things progressed a lot later last year, because what we realized was that this high FDV, low float ecosystem is not going to work out. And luckily, we have not been raising quite a lot from VC. So the idea of doubling down. letting people in early became extremely attractive. And we believe that was the right thing to do. The process was pretty pleasant, to be honest, but also stressful. We broke Echo. By the way, GTE also raised from Echo. I think we were the largest. They are the second largest. They also broke Echo. So I think the interest from retails was extremely palpable. And the reason is quite simple, right? You got both MegaEats and GTE at very low valuation. You know the team is cooking really hard. You know that there's like no large VC who have big bags and is going to dump on you later on. It was a pretty sweet deal. Enzo, I want to ask you a question. Just watching the rise and success of Hyperliquid, you're building the global token exchange. I see a ton of similarities. Not that I know, you know, a lot of behind the scenes of how GT is going to operate, but it seems like kind of two teams converging on a similar goal. How do you view them? Do you view them as a competitor? Where do you see... differences or similarities? Yeah, it's a good question. I think Hyperliquid has done a lot of things really well. I think in particular, the insight they had of having four validators co-located in a single area to create a superior product, UIUX over DYDX and Drift and the rest of the other end of on-chain order books was a really good insight. So I'll take the opposite approach. Most people point out that Hyperliquid is not decentralized. I'm going to say that that GT will be even more centralized than hyperliquid. And so if people like hyperliquid with four validators, they may like GT with one, essentially, is the stance that we like to take. That's kind of coffee pasta, but it's really not, right? It's like, look, they have four validators, but you still have global consensus within the critical path. So hyperliquid's block time is about 200 milliseconds. And for the EVM, it's going to be one second. And then I think they have like larger blocks that are going to be like one minute. Maggie's block times I've seen it with my own eyes are 5 to 10 milliseconds. Coincidentally, that's the exact same time it takes to process orders on Binance or Coinbase. So when we think about the notion that we talked about at the very beginning of on-chain price discovery, is it really possible on a chain like Hyperliquid? I would argue no. And you can look at it when you look at the sort of perpetuals offering that they have over their base spot asset, in which it's not as high leverage as you have on the major assets. And the reason for that is because price discovery is happening for those assets on centralized exchanges. On GTE, but perhaps you have the same exact environment as Binance. So assets that live exclusively on GTE and on Magi will be able to have much more interesting financial products derived from the base spot prices that are happening entirely on the chain. So we actually see great products can be built when you have more centralization. And GTE is pretty unapologetically saying, it will... we will be the world's fastest decentralized exchange. Not really fast, not kind of fast, but the world's fastest. And we're always going to be the world's fastest unless somebody is able to invent like a black hole, but even then we would be there too. Right. And that is kind of the stance that I want to position Ginty is within the industry is like, all right, like you like this, like let's turn this off to 10. What a great answer. I just like pictured people trading in a black hole there too. Amazing. okay so like taking the binance example then let's just riff on that a bit more enzo um What else will people be able to do on GTE that they can't do on Binance? Like, give me the why would I even go to GTE if they're same same? You know what I mean? Like, what are the features and benefits that GTE can go to that Binance will be either slow to get to or can't? Yeah, it's a great question. So the way I think about it is essentially GTE has all the steps for the hero's journey of a token, right? Like, as we see right now, like... Trading on-chain is happening in the so-called trenches, right? People that are just grinding the trenches, going from token to token. I saw yesterday somebody had launched 18,000 Pumped.Fund tokens, right? Those are the proper trenches. And as we think about smart contracts, smart contracts enable price discovery for longer tail assets, right? And so-called all of these tokens that are being launched right now, even the United States president's token, that token is being launched on-chain. Because- Smart contracts enable price discovery for an asset that may not have sophisticated market quoters. We'll also have that. We'll have a launchpad for launching tokens. We'll have an AMM for price discovery of those tokens. And then we'll have really robust order books. As a token grows bigger, as more sophisticated market makers, think the best market makers in the world, think the top 10 of Binance and Coinbase and OKEx are starting to quote markets that exist only on GT and subsequently Maggie, you're able to see. the entirety of a token's life cycle happen on one exchange in one venue. This is only possible because everything is on chain. Binance has their order book, which is off chain, but they have BNB as well. So you as a user have to think about the fragmentation between different trading venues. You have to learn what MetaMask is. You have to learn what BNB is. You have to learn what PancakeSwap is. And then you have to hope that Binance listing team is feeling really good to list that on Binance, right? You're not able to really stay in one place. And then you have to wait. And we observed the same dynamic in Solana right now. You want the very bottom of the trenches? Go to Pump Fun. Then you get to Radium. And then you get to Jupiter. And then you may get to Eye for Liquid, or you may get to Drift, right? But that's four different UIs that I just talked about. That feels like shit, to be honest with you. It doesn't feel great, right? And when people think about GTE, they're just going to think, oh, I can play whatever sort of game I want to play at whatever time I want to play. Because there are multiple sort of games happening in one sort of venue, one sort of environment. And this is only possible on an exchange that's built on a chain like Baguio. It would not be possible anywhere else. Egg. A quite astonishing commodity. The cause of your desire. Egg. Which fills the inner void. Eggs. Eggs. Eggs are pretty epic, but you know what's more epic? Paying for them with crypto. Borrow, earn, and now pay with Moonwell. Say hello to Puffer Unify. Puffer Finance is expanding beyond native liquid restaking with new products such as Unify-based roll-up and Unify pre-confirmations AVS. Unify is not just another L2. Unify is a base roll-up. one that will solve L2 issues, such as slow withdrawals versus instant withdrawals with Puffer Unify. Puffer Unify is fast, capable of sub-second transactions. Unify also has boosted Puffer points, which means if you bridge assets, you earn boosted Puffer points and rewards from dApps on Unify. Puffer's core products mean a bright future for Ethereum. Learn more at Puffer.by. So we touch on... Binance, we touched on how MegaEth might compare with HyperLiquid. And I feel like we started to talk a bit about Solana. I think it's worth double-clicking on that. So, yeah, how are we as users or as builders supposed to compare what will be MegaEth with Solana? I think the goal or the philosophy, at least there's kind of some similarity in the philosophy here, which is kind of a push for performance. But I would say MegaEth is doing it far more extremely than Solana does, because as we know, Solana is still a layer one, and they have to worry about their own consensus. They have to worry about their own decentralization, and to produce a block to actually have some sort of confirmation on it, they still have to run to a consensus algorithm. On the other hand, MegaEth, again, as I mentioned, we use a single centralized sequencer at any given point in time, and... no consensus is involved in the critical path of producing blocks. And for finality, we have to delegate, we delegate it to Ethereum so that we basically have the freedom to be far more extreme in our push for performance when we design the system because we only have to worry about block production and we only have to run the block production on one single server and you can run it as fast as you want. But also there is, I think, on the technology side, apart from block production, you also need to use a pretty robust peer-to-peer network to disperse those blocks to to send those new blocks and those new state updates to your users. I think on that front, we're kind of also similar. But again, MegaEth is going to be just far more extreme in the chase for performance than Solana does. And I'd like to add something here, which is, I think a chain should not be defined by its technology. I think a chain should be defined by the applications that exist on the chain. and the yields that these applications bring, right? And yield can come in many different ways, and applications can come in many different forms, right? But ultimately, the yields and applications are made by users, transacting back and forth with each other, protocols interacting with users, etc. When we think about MagEth in comparison to not only Solana, but every other blockchain in existence, I want you to evaluate MagEth. based off the applications that exist on MegEth. Not just the fact that, you know, Lay and the MegEth team or FRAC, MIT, Harvard, Stanford researchers that it's, you know, it's one to 10 millisecond block times, right? Like I could sell you Solana and I could say, oh, it's 400 millisecond block times. Like Anatoly went to Qualcomm, he's a genius, but you don't care about that if you're the user. You want to log on and you want to participate in DeFi. You want to buy the token you want to buy and you want to make sure it works. I think fundamentally when people use MagEth, it will work. And that's the most important thing. And it will work to a scale that has been never seen before. And I think the yields that you'll be able to experience as a user and the opportunity will be a reflection of that. In which the opportunities that will be possible on MagEth strictly for the user will be very different from the opportunities possible on any other blockchain. Not just on a layer one or not just on a layer two. Any blockchain like that has existed before and any blockchain that will exist in the future with this sort of architecture and these sort of applications that are possible. So one of the talking points we hear with a lot of ETH L2s is are they ETH aligned? And then there's also a lot of talk about the issue of fragmentation across these L2s. So how are you as MegaEth thinking about addressing these concerns for users and for builders? Yeah, absolutely. I often say that we're the most unaligned Ethereum ecosystem. We are actually really far away from the center of the EF technical roadmap. We're extremely opinionated. But I would say that we're aligned in terms of bringing that new applications, bringing young builders, and really trying to do our best to do something with ETH as an asset. because they are multi-dimensional with the alignment philosophy. That's one thing. And the second part is, with the fragmentation, I think it's just not layer two fragmentation at this point. We have entered into a new era where everything is freaking PVPing everyone else. Liquidity is truly moving to places. So I think in this era, we have to be differentiated or penalized in order to win. It's not just a layer two. So now question is, you know, you're just another EVM chain, like, you know, people, liquidity will come, liquidity will go. So how do you make sure that liquidity stay with you? That is the trillion dollar question. And that goes back to our principle of having net new applications that are only possible on MegaEth. Once you come to mega civilization, you can't leave. Because why would you leave? It's fast, it's quick, it's efficient, it's full of fun applications. You know, we have things that's just going to gamify your entire trading experiences. We're bringing the metaverse back with the new manifestation of fully on-chain games. We have a decentralized VPN, but everyone and their mother uses VPN in crypto. Why do you use a Web2 VPN when you can have a Web3 native one that's as fast, but also actually protect your data? We have things that's just going to, you know, record the entire world and, you know, create a fully on-chain museum. It's like wacky ideas. But our philosophy is if we don't experiment on these new applications, We could have just, you know, used OP stack and, you know, do another chain and hoping the token will rip when the market is good. So I think TLDR, we don't really care about liquidity fermentation. The only way to solve the liquidity PVP game is to have not new applications. I'm going to add something, which I think Ethereum alignment is a bunch of bullshit. Like, I think that, like, and this is the reason why most of the L2s suck right now, right? Like, I think most of the L2s that exist in their current forms are just... like worst copies of the ethereum foundation itself right and you can observe this in like their you can literally observe this in like scrolls website right like they hired the same designers that designed ethereum.org to design their website right and they try and practice the same things and they try and preach the same things and and ultimately you just get like imitation is like yes the most sincere form of flattery but but ultimately it feels horrible for the end user and you can just look at their token price and and feel kind of like that reflection accordingly Ultimately, to me, Ethereum alignment means do you use ETH as currency in your applications? Do users spend ETH to transact on the blockchain? And the answer of MegaEth is yes, they do, right? And so ultimately, if MegaEth is filling these blocks with meaningful economic transactions, MegaEth is the most Ethereum-aligned blockchain out of all of them. Not because it virtue signals to the Ethereum Foundation, not because it decentralizes its sequencer, but because it uses ETH as its currency to pay gas. And ultimately, it teaches its users that you use Ethereum on mega Ethereum. And that's the most pure form of alignment that you could possibly get, right? That's much bigger than, do I participate in retracted public good funding? Do I participate in interoperability standards? The user does not care about that, right? The user cares about, does the token go up, right? And the token will only go up if the user thinks, I should buy Ethereum so I can do things on mega Ethereum, because the user is not doing things on Ethereum anymore, right? And- We can observe this. It's like kind of a joke, right? Like the president of the United States launches a non-transferable like token on Ethereum because he's not able to run what he wants to run on the L1 and L2s that exist right now, right? But he's able to launch a token that is able to be bought by anybody around the world that pumps up to $70 billion on a blockchain called Solana, right? I think this is a fundamental like mistake that most of the Ethereum people have made by focusing on Ethereum alignment. They've ultimately sacrificed the user, right? And at the end of the day, like Ethereum, they preach over and over again. Oh, economic security. Ethereum is the most like decentralized layer one. That does not matter if all the liquidity leaves the chain, right? If all the users leave the chain and all the capital leaves the chain, the L2s are being secured by nothing, right? And so it's almost at this weird crossroad right now where for the past three years during the bear market and subsequent start of the bull, You got away with saying I'm Ethereum aligned by, you know, pretending to decentralize your sequencer, which nobody has done, by the way, and also marketing your website and your chain like the Ethereum Foundation. But really, ultimately, you never focused on being truly Ethereum aligned, which was using ETH as currency for applications that are only possible in the layer two, that draw new users in, that keep new users onto a chain that ultimately either settles data to Ethereum or uses Ethereum as money. Sorry, I know that was long, but I'm very passionate about this. Now, you're preaching to the choir. I myself am tired of the abundance of virtue signaling. At this point, I just want to win. I want Ethereum to win. And I am convinced that focusing on building the best applications, the best user experience, will lead to that many more users, that much more capital, that much more... more in terms of like economic activity that depends on ETH, the asset. And I think that there's a lot of, you know, continued building that should, there's a lot of building that should continue onwards in the way that they're going about it. Like there are great teams out there that are, you know, trying to build it quote unquote the right way, but. I am taken aback by like the success of, let's say, Hyperliquid. Like they really just focused on being like the best place to trade. They built up a community that's really passionate about trading. And then they've sort of like reverse engineered, like, what do we need now in order to go beyond like the world's best product for traders to something more, you know, with Hyperliquid EVM. So two or three years ago, if you would have. told me what you just said and so i would have you know kind of like discarded it and said like hey like At the end of the day, it's decentralization security over all else. But we're at a point where we clearly need more pragmatic approaches to building. So again, that energy, that mega ETH that you're bringing Enzo through GTE, I totally get it. And I am, frankly, exhausted from this bull market signaling that the market is tired of that approach as well. Can I give you an example of like... like this virtue signaling that I see and I like observe all the time in the other L2s. There's this video that the base founder or whatever, like the bald guy put out. And he's like, he's going around on the street, right? And he's like, basically starts the video and he goes, I'm going to give somebody $50 on base. I'm going to bring them on chain. And it's like, like, it's kind of embarrassing. Like he goes up to like 15 people and he's like, hey, can I bring you on chain today? Right? They're like, no. Can I bring you on chain today? No. Excuse me, ma'am. Do you have a second to come on? No. Right. Then he flips the script and he's like, hey, do you want $50? The next person he asks is, yes, I want $50. Right. Like the average person on the street, the average user, the average person that will ever interact with like a blockchain based application. They do not care about the word on chain. They do not care about the word Ethereum alignment. They don't care at all. They want $50. $50 is $50 for them. Right. And what I think. was viewed as like oh i yeah like we just onboarded somebody to like the most ethereum aligned like l2 like that's like the most popular right now base like come on like it's not that hard to just say do you want 50 to somebody and it's on base but like it's almost like ironic like this ethereum alignment virtue signaling right that exists within every l2 even the most dominant ones right now you go out and you try it on the street people will literally look at you like you're crazy They will say, what are you talking about? Right. And that represents the nascency of our industry. That represents why people look at this industry as a joke. Right. Because instead of focusing on the core user needs, they focus on this weird game that exists only on Twitter. And they say, oh, I think I'm going to force everybody else to adopt my mindset rather than trying to adopt the mindset of the user. When people start to build applications and chains that are able to flip that perspective and keep the user in mind, Ethereum alignment will matter. Nothing will matter besides whether or not the user is happy. And that's when we'll get really true, like, wide-scale adoption. Yeah, there's two aspects that I always remember as, like, my earliest thoughts in the space. One, this is before, like, DeFi was DeFi. One was, how can I make money, like, from all that's going on in this space? And, you know, I basically would look at, like, market caps of, like, Bitcoin and Ether and other, like, major market caps and think like, is the thing I'm about to invest into, like, could it potentially reach those? Then later on with DeFi, it was how can I make my money like work harder for me? Like, how can I use DeFi to make my portfolio as like productive as possible on chain, which sometimes obviously leads to just buying tokens and speculating or trading on those tokens. And so, you know, I'm not like. taking an approach here of like pure nihilism and saying like, you know, nothing else matters. Like just, you know, fixate on like how people can get rich, you know, off of crypto. But understand it's a key driver for basically everyone at the end of the day. Even if you have these like really like noble ambitions of, you know, making a difference for people who would have, let's say, better access on chain to. creating wealth like most obvious is just stable coins like giving anyone the ability to like earn stable coins it is high impact for a lot of folks in the world but like you can't uh also like discard all of the steps that it takes for someone to your point enzo to to come on chain like they just don't get it like a lot of folks don't get it they they need it to be presented in a way that is easy to digest and And aligns with like. some of their like basic instincts. That all said, I think this is a great place for us to start to wrap up. So I want to remind our listeners that they can learn more about MegaEath by going to MegaEath.com. They can learn about GTE by going to GTE.xyz. Follow MegaEath underscore labs on X or Twitter. Follow Hot Pot underscore Dow, which is Bing's account. Follow Lay at YangL1996. All that's in our show notes. And then for GTE, it's GTE underscore XYZ. Guys, thank you so much for coming on. Great conversation. It was fun to be able to riff on a lot of more philosophical topics that I think drive the mindset of what you're trying to bring to the space here with MegaEth and GTE. I would love to end, though, on the big question of when will MegaEth mainnet launch, or what can you tell us? Thank you. I'll give the signature answer soon. But we're working pretty hard. We would love to have you all back in the future. And we'll definitely have to cover GTE once it's launched as well. So look for that in something like Yields of the Week, which you can find at the-edge.xyz. Thank you for having us. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. If you're a talented founder or developer, please consider reaching out to our team at 4thRevolution.Capital. And to stay up to date with future episodes, plus get expert tips, strategies, and exclusive content, subscribe to our free newsletter at the-edge.xyz.

So I think the role of MegaEth in the greater Ethereum or even just... The crypto industry was this highly opinionated infrastructure, allowed projects like GTE and Enzo and all the mega mafia projects to really reimagine what can be built on chain. Welcome to the Edge podcast.

I'm DeFi Dad here with Nomadic from 4RC. Today's show spotlights the high performance EVM compatible blockchain MegaEth. In this episode, we discuss how MegaEth brings Web2 comparable real-time performance to crypto, including high transaction throughput up to 100,000 transactions per second, abundant compute capacity, and millisecond-level response times.

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How are you doing? We're doing fantastic. Thank you for having us.

We are long-term fans of you guys. And we are fans of you. We're going to talk about, you know, today, like, what do you guys mean by what's the first real-time blockchain?

If MegaEth is successful, how does this ultimately benefit Ethereum L1 and ETH, the asset? And also love to think about how will you compete with other chains like Solana? Because at this point, the competition is not just L2s. We've learned this cycle with how DeFi has grown on Solana and other chains that MegaEth will have to compete with every other L1 that exists.

So that all said, let's talk about. the background of your team. Love to just dig into why you started building MegaEth.

So maybe tell us a little bit more about you and the team. Absolutely. I'll start talking about MegaEth and then Anzal can share a bit about GTE's story as well.

It's funny you said that MegaEth started from this cycle. We actually started building and thinking about the MegaEth architecture back in 2023. So one of our other co-founder, Elon, graduated from Stanford. He studied low latency data center compute. Dude is not into crypto at all, but somehow stumbled upon it and was like, hey, these people are struggling with building performant blockchain.

But the answer is so simple. You just need to measure where the bottlenecks are and solve it. And it turned out the bottleneck was actually the execution environment. And specifically, it was the Michael Patricia track. So Elon started this researching back in early 2023. Then he found out Lei, who's on this pod, Lei studied distributed network at MIT for six years.

So he basically spent six years of his life studying blockchain consensus and obviously realized that consensus is redundant, which we can go deeper into later. And then I joined the project earlier last year to lead the business. Before we expand on the vision of MegaEek.

Enzo, you're building GTE, which is a totally separate project that I believe is built on MegaEth. So maybe tell us a bit more about you and GTE. Yeah. GTE stands for Global Token Exchange. Essentially, we think about it like there's the London Stock Exchange, which defined an empire's sort of kind of economy, the New York Stock Exchange, which is the same.

And And we have the global token exchange now, which represents fundamentally the upgrading of kind of the systems that we transact and the assets that we trade with around the world. My background is very different from a lot of people in the space that are maybe coming from a more financial services background or quantitative trading background. I grew up in Silicon Valley, studied distributed systems, learned kind of like build outs from the hardware level.

watched the internet get built in my backyard and ultimately became really obsessed with this idea of decentralization. That led me to doing a bunch of various different things within the industry from investing to building infrastructure and products. And ultimately, I realized that the holy grail is on-chain price discovery. If you're able to have an exchange that has price discovery that's happening entirely on-chain, you're able to build really interesting financial products on top of that.

And so... for us, when we set out to build GT, the global token exchange, we looked at every blockchain's architecture. And then we realized that the only sort of architecture that could make what GT is possible is a chain like Meggie, which takes consensus out of the critical path. We can dive more in depth into what that means. But essentially, we've been working on GT with Meggie for the past year and excited to kind of roll this out as people start to realize like, it's not just another exchange on an L2, but a fundamentally different approach to not just a crypto exchange, but an exchange in general.

Yeah, thanks, Enzo. I actually didn't know what GTE meant, but that's a great name. Okay, I want to kind of step back a bit and maybe kick it back over to the MegaEase team.

Let's just talk about the current state of L2s in the landscape today. I think Enzo was starting to get to maybe some of the bottlenecks or issues that you perceive are present, but would just love to hear it from you. Why?

I guess, why build MegaEth and why do you consider it so special? Yeah, I'll take the question on the technical side. So, yeah, I think the current L2 ecosystem is quite interesting.

And I think it's kind of actually fulfilling the, I think, the initial vision of why I think Ethereum went to a kind of L2-centric roadmap, which is to kind of stimulate exploration. I mean, there are very different projects sitting on. both ends of the of the spectrum of trade-off between decentralization and performance, right? And so I think what we are missing and I think the key gap that Mediate is fitting in this L2-centric ecosystem is a chain that is just single-mindedly focused on performance.

And to kind of demonstrate that, what we believe in is just to kind of tune every single knob in our system for performance and maybe Example is that we use a single centralized sequencer for predictive blocks. And this is, I think, something that is very contrarian in this ecosystem because most of the L2s are kind of looking at a roadmap towards decentralized sequencing or decentralized block production through the reintroduction of the consensus algorithm. And Enzo mentioned it a little bit in his...

question on why GTE is only possible on mega-eats, and I can try to kind of expand on that. The thing is that if you kind of have a consensus algorithm sitting on the critical path of producing blocks, like almost every single L1 does, then you kind of reintroduce this latency, which stem from the communication between the previous block producer to the next block producers. Imagine that I have a sequencer sitting in Tokyo and another sequencer sitting in London. And suppose that after the Tokyo sequencer produces the block, next slot is for the London sequencer.

So the block must at least travel to the London sequencer before it can keep producing blocks. And this can only happen at most at a speed of light time. And that's usually 100 plus milliseconds in the world. And not to mention usually with consensus algorithms that can...

You actually need multiple round trips around the world. So you are looking at maybe 700 even plus milliseconds. I mean, in terms of block interval.

And this is all gone when you have a centralized sequencer, which just keeps pumping out blocks because then you don't have to really communicate to anyone or you don't have to kind of wait for anyone to send you the previous block because you are the person who produced the previous blocks. And yeah, so you are looking now at 10 millisecond or even lower block time. And so...

Basically, we see that the current L2 ecosystem lacks such a project that just pushes for performance without really worrying about the other aspects of the system. And of course, being a layer two, we can always kind of piggyback, we always enjoy the security guarantees and decentralization guarantees from the Ethereum mainnet. Yeah, so I would say this is kind of how we do things a bit differently from other projects in the ecosystem. I can add a bit and I can talk a bit about personal experiences, right?

So prior to joining MegaEth, I was leading global business development at ConsenSys, the mother company of MetaMask. And, you know, I was super early into Solana because as a big company, right, we and our team, we had to have a strong pulse of what's going on. So I wanted the first Solana breakpoint.

I even wanted the Avalanche Summit in Spain. And it was extremely interesting to see how performance can bring so much excitement from application builders. And we were missing that in the Ethereum roadmap at all.

And back in 2022, ConsenSys also rolled out its own rollout, which is called Linear at DKEVM. And obviously, I, along with my team, was in charge of the business development part of it. And I remember I was so excited. I was like, oh my God, finally, I have my own ecosystem.

I can build upon it. I started to tell everyone like, yo, quit your job. You have this perfect fancy zero knowledge rollout that can, you know, be so secure.

It's so sexy. Come build with us. But what happened was that, you know, people came to build on Levy and realized that that thing is not performant.

Like if you want to build a pub, Dex, you can't build on it. If you want to build a game. The only thing you can put on chain was an NFT. And that was such a big wake-up call.

And that was why when I read the Mega East white paper, it was called Mega Rollup white paper, and it was like a million TPS, which now Fire Dancer claim that they are one million TPS. But actually Mega East had one million TPS before Fire Dancer. And I thought it was a joke.

I was like, why would anyone name their protocol Mega Rollup? But there's a story behind that. So when I read the white paper, I was like, wow, this is going to bring that new application to the Ethereum ecosystem.

But more importantly, I think it's going to bring more optimism and excitement from builders. And if you remember 2022 or 23, there was not so much excitement, right? Everyone was just busy building another rollup, another new infrastructure.

No one was focusing on applications. So I think the role of MegaEth in the greater Ethereum, or even just the crypto industry, was this highly opinionated infrastructure allowed projects like GTE and Enzo and all the MegaMafia projects to really reimagine what can be built on chain. That is our contribution to the system. It's not just like, hooray, another EVM blockchain, let's pump it to a billion dollars. Yeah, even when I was just starting to hear about MegaEth, I was like, what the heck is this like i like this name but it was like is this for real like this is kind of a silly name but i like it and i think it was kind of like you kind of said it like there's elements of ethereum that sometimes gets a bit stuffy or i think it can be perceived as hey this is kind of like lacking fun or like you know just um i don't i don't know the word but it's just like it was kind of it's just like a refreshing vibe i think that was like introduced and there was a a long time where i was like i don't know what mega youth is but it's everywhere so i know of the name but i don't know even really what's going on so this is this is why it's been great to like kind of dissect that and just curious like now that we have you like why did you call it like like and then i guess to take it even to a further point um i would just like to get into a bit more of that underlying connection and connectivity to ethereum l1 if you can of course um you I think it's kind of a random name.

I think our other co-founder Elon came up with the name, as Shriyam mentioned, was Mega Rollup, which I think is slightly worse than MegaEth as a name. But I think what's interesting is that actually we picked Mega, but I think it's only after almost half a year since we came up with the name that we realized that MegaEth can make Ethereum great again. I think it's actually one of our investors who brought it up.

And retrospectively, it's an interesting pick. So I, okay, they did not give the right answer. Wipe that out.

Sorry. No one has ever actually asked us this question. So Mega is actually 10 to the 6th.

That's just the performance inspiration that we inherit. Mega also stands for Make Ethereum Great Again. But also, I think Mega is just a name that is quite empowering.

And I think Ethereum always takes pride in being gentle, right? It's kind, but it's gentle. But MegaEast is unapologetic. And I think, you know, I'm going to bring up Anzal's co-founder.

I think the fun or the Bronze Age mentality that MegaEast bring in has actually attracted builders from Solana. So I don't know, Anzal, if you want to chat a bit about your co-founder. Yeah, basically, right? Like there's two schools of thought in crypto, right?

There's like the decentralization purists. which are people that are really into censorship resistance, missionless composability. And we can think of that as like the Bitcoin maxis and the Ethereum maxis.

And there's this second school of thought, which is decentralization at the forefront, but really performance at the top of mind. And that's what we see in like these next generation blockchains that have come out in the past. Solana, SWE, DOS, etc. My co-founders come from that world, right? Where They, yes, care about decentralization, but what they really care about is pushing the limits of decentralization to the max.

And fundamentally, what attracted them to GTE and ultimately to build on MegEth was that what they said, MegEth is unapologetically performant. Not only are you inheriting Ethereum's decentralization and security, you're also inheriting the ability to push the limits to places no other chain has gone before. So when I chatted with my co-founders initially, But starting this company, it wasn't a question of, oh, we're decentralizing the sequencer. It's going to be very censorship resistant, very good for like the L1 blockchain, but rather it was, we're going to make this as fast as possible.

We're going to write as low level code as possible. We're going to make this the best possible product, not just in DeFi, but in all of crypto. And I think ultimately, MegEath is able to thread both of those kind of schools of thought into one sort of thriving ecosystem. And that's why you see such a, like a plethora of applications that are really fundamentally different than anything that's been tried before, both on an L1 and an L2.

I think you all make a really good point that there's been this focus on decentralization and security. And although I understand that, sometimes it's just like a wet blanket on the space, you know, like we just We can't like, you know, speculate on and get excited for like high performance type applications because the network's just never been able to support those. And so there's been a refreshing energy, I think, to what you all bring to the space. And I do think like you've clearly taken notes from the likes of Solana and other blockchains that are like known for having like high throughput chains.

I do want to go back, though, then to that high performance. Maybe before we like rattle off like the, you know, impressive like stats that go with that, can you just for a moment talk about like, what are you conceding, though, by focusing on the high performance? Like, there's got to be some drawback here, right? Like, what are we as users or what is someone like Enzo as a builder having to consider when they...

They come to build on mega ETH being high performance. Like what's the drawback there? Yeah.

So I think to understand kind of the trade-off we're making, I just want to highlight that, I mean, the key architectural design that we took was a centralized sequencer. So with a centralized sequencer, of course, you gain the very low block time, you gain the very high TPS, and also you can focus on, you can focus your organizations. onto this centralized sequence, which kind of tailors hardware, tailors software for your for your performance needs.

On the other hand, the drawback of course is that we are centralized sequencer and usually for people in our industry, we do not like centralization by default. So I think that's kind of the trade-off that we're making and I think it's, I would say it's kind of an uphill battle for us narratively. But on the other hand, we are an Ethereum layer 2 and as other layer 2s, as with other layer 2s, yes, if say the sequencer is doing some shenanigans, of course it may be doing, it would be up to the Ethereum layer 1 to catch these issues.

For example, if the sequencer, if the centralized sequencer starts censoring your shenanigans, then yes, probably at the moment you cannot really write to the sequencer, but On the other hand, you can still go back to the Ethereum layer one and write your transactions there. And the protocol will enforce the centralized sequence, bring these transactions back to the layer two. Otherwise, the sequence will face stashing.

So I would say this kind of design is more nuanced for people to kind of fully understand and also fully kind of trust. So I think this is kind of a conscious trade-off that we're taking, right? It's basically, as I mentioned.

For every knob that we untune, we go for performance, and then we worry about the implications a bit later. But we do worry about them, and we use the Ethereum layer 1 to solve them. But it will be kind of a longer story to tell, right? And similarly, I would say for execution correctness, yes, the sequencer can decide to incorrectly execute the transaction. But again, these kind of actions are always accountable.

And the sequence will be forced to correct itself and also lose its stake the moment the layer one detects it. So I would say that's kind of the uniqueness about the design, but also it's something that is true for almost every single layer too. So to answer your question more straightforwardly, I would say we're kind of in the same ballpark in terms of trade-offs with almost every other layer too. Only that we're a bit more centralized.

The kind of logic here is that if you're already making this kind of trade-off, if you're already using this layer 2 architecture, why don't you kind of exploit the architecture further and just push it to the extreme? The way I've been thinking about it, I think Megadeth is almost more decentralized than a layer 1 that no one uses. It's just like four validators in the founder's basement.

Guys, something else I want to talk to you guys about. We sometimes LARP. is technical, but we're not.

So having you on, this is like a great opportunity to ask some of these technical questions that I'm just kind of like curious how you're thinking about this stuff that's kind of facing our industry. But we kind of like alluded to this blob congestion that's happening. And from my vantage point, it looks like potentially base OP arbitrum could have some tough decisions ahead when, you know, DA congestion happens and they have to decide whether they're going to, I guess, put the extra cost.

when Ethereum L1 is congested onto their own customers, users, or... I don't know what they're going to do, and I don't know if Ethyl-1 is scaling fast enough right now. So this is less of a mega-Eth maybe question, but just kind of curious how you're viewing the state of what's happening with these Ethyl-I and L2s, call them, and what's going to happen in your opinion. And I mean, I feel like you don't have this maybe decision because I believe you're going with Eigen-DA. But yeah, that's kind of like a...

a mixed bag of questions, but whoever wants to jump at that one. I'll just add one thing. If either of you are able to just quickly explain, what is this issue with blobs?

How does it affect us as users? If I'm someone who uses DeFi on base, because I think this sets us up, of course, for an advantage, let's call it, of mega ETH. And then let's talk about that. bad advantage for megaeth yeah so um this blob issue is really because that to to build a to build a secure layer 2 be it a a zk rollout or a zkl2 or um an optimistic l2 you need to write um you need to make sure that the content of your layer 2 blobs of the layer 2 blocks are available for for anyone to read and i'll just i'll just quickly describe why you this is the case, right?

So imagine that you're building, imagine that you're using an optimistic layer 2. And the key of an optimistic layer 2 is that if the sequencer dares to do something scammy, others can kind of replay these blocks and verify the blocks for themselves. And they can then go to the theorem layer 1 and complain that, hey, this layer 2 sequencer's doing something wrong and here's the proof right however remember that for for anyone to kind of participate in this kind of the challenge game they must have access to the blocks so that they can replay it right so making sure that this blocks is accessible is the key behind like this data availability stuff and ethereum native blobs is one way to provide data availability because if you write your blobs to the ethereum blockchain that we know that ethereum blockchain is publicly accessible so Arguably anyone can read it and it's also the story behind every kind of alt DA provider. The case is basically that they will host a decentralized network and you instead of writing our data to Ethereum you write to their networks and they will also try their best to make sure that the data remains accessible for those potential challenges. So this is why it's important and it's also why it's kind of a problem that can never be sidestepped I would say by any layer too. And I think you mentioned this question of Ethereum blob being congested.

Yeah, I actually spent quite some time on the DA problem and trying to scale DA for Ethereum. But turns out that it's actually a very hard problem because it's almost like you're trying to build a cloud storage out of tens of thousands of servers loosely connected without any kind of fixed topologies. across the world. So, I mean, intuitive is a pretty hard problem.

And I would say that's also why Ethereum is facing congestion potentially in terms of flop. And the kind of implication for DeFi users or for any user of a layer 2 is really that the transactions will become more expensive. It's a very simple demand and supply issue.

Imagine that the highway can only accept, say, 10,000 cars per hour. And if you just want to go on the highway and there are already a ton of cars in front of you, then what can you do, right? Either the highway, I mean, either the state starts charging fees, charging a tire toll, like the congestion relief pricing for New York, right? And hoping to drive away some of the cars and kind of match the demand with the supplies, kind of accent the demand, right?

On the other hand, you can try to... expand on it just kind of expand the highway but as i mentioned it's a very hard problem so um my prediction my prediction is that it's not even a producer i think a fact is that given a certain amount of bandwidth available on ethereum natively for those layer tools that do use ethereum native blob there's only a certain amount of like transactions per second that can go through this very narrow channel and uh basically it's Then once we reach that capacity, yeah, the fee would start to go up and that would just drive away the moms. So the end result of all of your efforts, I want to call out, is 100,000 transactions per second.

At least that's what you quote on the website. That's one of, I think, the reasons we as users and builders get excited. This is probably more of a question for Enzo. As a builder, Enzo, what will look or feel different about DeFi on MegaE? Is there more in terms of applications?

that become available because of the infrastructure of MegaEth. So I'm of the fundamental belief that there have been like three major paradigm shifts for DeFi, but also smart contract-based applications. The first is Ethereum, right?

Enabled Uniswap, Aave, Compound, etc. Expressing the idea of like blocks of code that can be executed permissionlessly without having to have anyone maintain them or run them. The second sort of paradigm shift was Solana.

right introduce more centralization into the validators and you're able to get really strong defy based applications think pump fun jupiter drift etc and and that is like a really apparent kind of differentiation this cycle where new users they think of defy right now they think of slotta right they think of they think of moonshot they think of jupiter they don't think of uniswap ave or compound anymore i'm of the fundamental belief that the The next major paradigm shift has been Megi, in which we introduced this concept of a real-time blockchain, which enables real-time based applications. And you can notice kind of like in applications on both Ethereum and Solana, there's still a notion of transaction processing time, right? You submit a transaction and you have to confirm the transaction. You have to wait for the transaction to settle or to execute.

And this is because we have global consensus happening around the world. On a chain like Megi, that whole notion is removed. There is no global consensus. There is no transaction settlement time besides the time it takes for your machine to reach the sequencer and back, which is faster than you can blink your eye.

And so when you have that fundamental paradigm shift, the type of applications you're able to build are radically different than the applications that exist in its current form. You have a decentralized exchange. Does it have to look like Uniswap?

Or could it be fundamentally different? Could it be designed like a centralized exchange? You have a social media application. Do you have to introduce the notion of a transaction signing and even the notion of latency?

Or could you have the like feel as good as the like on Instagram or a like on Twitter, right? These are all questions that we've set out to answer. And I think as we start to roll out not only GT, but the other applications in MegEth, you'll start to see what real-time applications really feel like, in which the user will ultimately be the happy customer.

Because as we've seen, right, The more centralization you have both in just Web2 and also in crypto, the happier the user is, right? And so if you have max centralization for mega-yield-based applications, you're able to have max user delight, in which ultimately that's what we think is really, really important. One thing I would like to add is that fundamentally, I believe that users are after benefits that they can actually enjoy, not decentralization, but guaranteed. correctness of execution guaranteeing censorship freedom, right?

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And thanks to Mantle for supporting us at the Edge podcast and Edge newsletter. Guys, kind of on this point, I would love to get an idea of your ecosystem building philosophy. I've heard of this mega mafia team.

I know little to nothing about it. Yeah, maybe just tell us how you're approaching this because we've talked to a ton of L1 teams, L2 teams. This cold start problem of building a base, a community, an ecosystem is like nearly impossible in my mind. Like you can even throw all the money in the world at it.

That does not guarantee success. We've seen a ton of failures that have been well-funded. So yeah, what's like your philosophy and approach to- to building this part of the mega ETH kind of piece of the puzzle. Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first principle and also absolutely my nightmare is as a user, I go on experience the chain and I don't know what to do.

I don't know where to swap tokens. I don't know what NFTs to buy. I don't know what consumer apps use. That is a nightmare I need to avoid. So day one, the goal was, okay, Mega ETH is a civilization.

When people come to this civilization first, they need some basic building blocks. So DeFi could be what is must be the largest sector. And for example, GT is building that building block.

then there have to be something that people are doing for fun. So having things to do on Mega Ease day one has been the first principle. So with that new start, we were thinking like, oh God, how do we find people to build this really important first set of application? And having built a linear consensus for over a year, I think it's a nightmare if you present a lot of options and most of the options are very mid-curve. applications to users, they will run.

They will run to your competitor. They will run back to Solana. So then we came up with this program, which is called Mega Mafia. We like to cabal things at Mega East. And the goal of Mega Mafia is to gather really world-class founders, right?

Founders who are hungry. Founders who believe in crypto's world domination and really to co-build and iterate together. How do we do it? I am a fan of in-person co-building, co-living. So the first cohort of Mega Mafia actually happened in Berlin last year around May.

So I rented a hotel, rented a WeWork space and got some people, whether through referral, friends of friends, flew them to Berlin and be like, guys, I'm going to lock you down for a month. In this month, you need to iterate on what you want to do. And the goal of these apps is they have to be fully on-chain.

They have to be only possible on MegaEth, which is what we call Omega. And they have to be fun. So after a month, Enzo was in that cohort.

I think we got five or six teams out of it. Immediately, these five, six teams raised money. Ventures were flooding into MegaEth because I guess no one got the MegaEth equity and everyone was going after the ecosystem.

But more importantly, these apps are actually not new. And then the second iteration of the Mega Mafia happened in Chiang Mai, where we basically, again, rented a hotel and we call it Mega Zoo, and invited more builders to iterate. And this time the focus was more on applications that provide emotional values, right?

The consumer apps, the gaming, the DPN, to really build out this ecosystem that's not only efficient, but really fun. So in summary, Mega Mafia are basically the first set of applications that really showcase the power of mega ETH. But more importantly, the mega mafia is here to bring delightful experience to end users. Everyone is f***ing tired of another EVM blockchain. And no one really cares what your chain is, but people would love to trade on GTE.

That was our thesis. I'd like to add something, which is, I don't think anybody has ever asked an app on mega ETH what they thought about that perspective. And like, I would like to add this.

I think the analogy of MegEth as a civilization is quite prescient, meaning when we think about these networks, it extrapolates down to like really a state. And when I mean a state, I think of like a real world state, right? Like a country. A network is defined by the amount of kind of belief that people have both in the network and the applications on top of it. And if we extrapolate that out to the state or civilization analogy, the reason why I chose to build on MegEth and so many other people, is because ultimately the civilization had resources that were net new, right?

And that's really important to think about. When you're looking to settle down to a new country, when you're looking to move to a new state, when you're looking to do things in the real world, you think about what can this land, what can this state bring me? What sort of opportunity is possible here, right?

And I want to double click both on like the principles, but also in like the technology perspective of like the ecosystem and how exactly... and why exactly people are attracted to building on Megi. Because it represents opportunity. It represents an opportunity to do things that are very fundamentally different than on any other blockchain. Not possible on Bitcoin, not possible on Ethereum, not possible on Solana, only possible on Megi.

This is like really, I think, what it means to me, an Omega type of application. And fundamentally, when, you know, I got reached out by Megi, that's what they talked about, right? It wasn't a question of grants or handouts or...

It wasn't even, hey, we'll guarantee your fundraising, right? It was, we have like a chain that will enable you to build better applications that for people that see these sort of applications, both in your technical architecture and also the way you're able to talk about them, they will invest in you. They will believe in you and they will ultimately want to use your product, right?

That's why you've seen MegaEth have more funding in its ecosystem than the entire chain has raised itself. Because you're able to build. applications that are net new. It's a question of what constitutes the greatest countries in the world. It's the opportunity that its constituents are able to pursue independently of state sponsorship.

And I feel like that's the same sort of relationship that you have with MegEth and its applications. Speaking of fundraising, MegEth raised, I believe, $10 million in three minutes on Echo. And I believe that's the biggest cost. fundraise that's taken place on Echo. So congrats on that.

What can you tell us about that? What can you tell us about the experience of raising on Echo? And why did you choose to raise money on Echo? I'm sure you could have raised it from VCs, angels, all the usual paths that other teams have taken. Yeah, absolutely.

We were approached by VCs actually almost every other week, and I've been saying no. The reason was, I think most VCs are extremely mid-curved. Very few VC had independent thinking.

So they were going after mega-EC probably because of this parallel EVM, similar to other layer 1 chain. That's just not true, right? And then when I think about who do I want to have skin in the game in my ecosystem? Again, if we're building a mega-civilization, I need to give the people skin in the game. It's not a few VCs, right?

It's just basic principle. And that's how Ethereum started as well. So we were talking to Kobe back in July, thinking about using Echo. And then things progressed a lot later last year, because what we realized was that this high FDV, low float ecosystem is not going to work out.

And luckily, we have not been raising quite a lot from VC. So the idea of doubling down. letting people in early became extremely attractive. And we believe that was the right thing to do.

The process was pretty pleasant, to be honest, but also stressful. We broke Echo. By the way, GTE also raised from Echo. I think we were the largest.

They are the second largest. They also broke Echo. So I think the interest from retails was extremely palpable.

And the reason is quite simple, right? You got both MegaEats and GTE at very low valuation. You know the team is cooking really hard.

You know that there's like no large VC who have big bags and is going to dump on you later on. It was a pretty sweet deal. Enzo, I want to ask you a question.

Just watching the rise and success of Hyperliquid, you're building the global token exchange. I see a ton of similarities. Not that I know, you know, a lot of behind the scenes of how GT is going to operate, but it seems like kind of two teams converging on a similar goal. How do you view them?

Do you view them as a competitor? Where do you see... differences or similarities? Yeah, it's a good question.

I think Hyperliquid has done a lot of things really well. I think in particular, the insight they had of having four validators co-located in a single area to create a superior product, UIUX over DYDX and Drift and the rest of the other end of on-chain order books was a really good insight. So I'll take the opposite approach. Most people point out that Hyperliquid is not decentralized. I'm going to say that that GT will be even more centralized than hyperliquid.

And so if people like hyperliquid with four validators, they may like GT with one, essentially, is the stance that we like to take. That's kind of coffee pasta, but it's really not, right? It's like, look, they have four validators, but you still have global consensus within the critical path. So hyperliquid's block time is about 200 milliseconds. And for the EVM, it's going to be one second.

And then I think they have like larger blocks that are going to be like one minute. Maggie's block times I've seen it with my own eyes are 5 to 10 milliseconds. Coincidentally, that's the exact same time it takes to process orders on Binance or Coinbase. So when we think about the notion that we talked about at the very beginning of on-chain price discovery, is it really possible on a chain like Hyperliquid?

I would argue no. And you can look at it when you look at the sort of perpetuals offering that they have over their base spot asset, in which it's not as high leverage as you have on the major assets. And the reason for that is because price discovery is happening for those assets on centralized exchanges.

On GTE, but perhaps you have the same exact environment as Binance. So assets that live exclusively on GTE and on Magi will be able to have much more interesting financial products derived from the base spot prices that are happening entirely on the chain. So we actually see great products can be built when you have more centralization.

And GTE is pretty unapologetically saying, it will... we will be the world's fastest decentralized exchange. Not really fast, not kind of fast, but the world's fastest.

And we're always going to be the world's fastest unless somebody is able to invent like a black hole, but even then we would be there too. Right. And that is kind of the stance that I want to position Ginty is within the industry is like, all right, like you like this, like let's turn this off to 10. What a great answer. I just like pictured people trading in a black hole there too. Amazing.

okay so like taking the binance example then let's just riff on that a bit more enzo um What else will people be able to do on GTE that they can't do on Binance? Like, give me the why would I even go to GTE if they're same same? You know what I mean? Like, what are the features and benefits that GTE can go to that Binance will be either slow to get to or can't? Yeah, it's a great question.

So the way I think about it is essentially GTE has all the steps for the hero's journey of a token, right? Like, as we see right now, like... Trading on-chain is happening in the so-called trenches, right?

People that are just grinding the trenches, going from token to token. I saw yesterday somebody had launched 18,000 Pumped.Fund tokens, right? Those are the proper trenches. And as we think about smart contracts, smart contracts enable price discovery for longer tail assets, right?

And so-called all of these tokens that are being launched right now, even the United States president's token, that token is being launched on-chain. Because- Smart contracts enable price discovery for an asset that may not have sophisticated market quoters. We'll also have that.

We'll have a launchpad for launching tokens. We'll have an AMM for price discovery of those tokens. And then we'll have really robust order books. As a token grows bigger, as more sophisticated market makers, think the best market makers in the world, think the top 10 of Binance and Coinbase and OKEx are starting to quote markets that exist only on GT and subsequently Maggie, you're able to see.

the entirety of a token's life cycle happen on one exchange in one venue. This is only possible because everything is on chain. Binance has their order book, which is off chain, but they have BNB as well. So you as a user have to think about the fragmentation between different trading venues.

You have to learn what MetaMask is. You have to learn what BNB is. You have to learn what PancakeSwap is. And then you have to hope that Binance listing team is feeling really good to list that on Binance, right? You're not able to really stay in one place.

And then you have to wait. And we observed the same dynamic in Solana right now. You want the very bottom of the trenches? Go to Pump Fun.

Then you get to Radium. And then you get to Jupiter. And then you may get to Eye for Liquid, or you may get to Drift, right?

But that's four different UIs that I just talked about. That feels like shit, to be honest with you. It doesn't feel great, right? And when people think about GTE, they're just going to think, oh, I can play whatever sort of game I want to play at whatever time I want to play.

Because there are multiple sort of games happening in one sort of venue, one sort of environment. And this is only possible on an exchange that's built on a chain like Baguio. It would not be possible anywhere else.

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Binance, we touched on how MegaEth might compare with HyperLiquid. And I feel like we started to talk a bit about Solana. I think it's worth double-clicking on that. So, yeah, how are we as users or as builders supposed to compare what will be MegaEth with Solana? I think the goal or the philosophy, at least there's kind of some similarity in the philosophy here, which is kind of a push for performance.

But I would say MegaEth is doing it far more extremely than Solana does, because as we know, Solana is still a layer one, and they have to worry about their own consensus. They have to worry about their own decentralization, and to produce a block to actually have some sort of confirmation on it, they still have to run to a consensus algorithm. On the other hand, MegaEth, again, as I mentioned, we use a single centralized sequencer at any given point in time, and... no consensus is involved in the critical path of producing blocks. And for finality, we have to delegate, we delegate it to Ethereum so that we basically have the freedom to be far more extreme in our push for performance when we design the system because we only have to worry about block production and we only have to run the block production on one single server and you can run it as fast as you want.

But also there is, I think, on the technology side, apart from block production, you also need to use a pretty robust peer-to-peer network to disperse those blocks to to send those new blocks and those new state updates to your users. I think on that front, we're kind of also similar. But again, MegaEth is going to be just far more extreme in the chase for performance than Solana does.

And I'd like to add something here, which is, I think a chain should not be defined by its technology. I think a chain should be defined by the applications that exist on the chain. and the yields that these applications bring, right?

And yield can come in many different ways, and applications can come in many different forms, right? But ultimately, the yields and applications are made by users, transacting back and forth with each other, protocols interacting with users, etc. When we think about MagEth in comparison to not only Solana, but every other blockchain in existence, I want you to evaluate MagEth.

based off the applications that exist on MegEth. Not just the fact that, you know, Lay and the MegEth team or FRAC, MIT, Harvard, Stanford researchers that it's, you know, it's one to 10 millisecond block times, right? Like I could sell you Solana and I could say, oh, it's 400 millisecond block times. Like Anatoly went to Qualcomm, he's a genius, but you don't care about that if you're the user.

You want to log on and you want to participate in DeFi. You want to buy the token you want to buy and you want to make sure it works. I think fundamentally when people use MagEth, it will work. And that's the most important thing. And it will work to a scale that has been never seen before.

And I think the yields that you'll be able to experience as a user and the opportunity will be a reflection of that. In which the opportunities that will be possible on MagEth strictly for the user will be very different from the opportunities possible on any other blockchain. Not just on a layer one or not just on a layer two.

Any blockchain like that has existed before and any blockchain that will exist in the future with this sort of architecture and these sort of applications that are possible. So one of the talking points we hear with a lot of ETH L2s is are they ETH aligned? And then there's also a lot of talk about the issue of fragmentation across these L2s. So how are you as MegaEth thinking about addressing these concerns for users and for builders? Yeah, absolutely.

I often say that we're the most unaligned Ethereum ecosystem. We are actually really far away from the center of the EF technical roadmap. We're extremely opinionated. But I would say that we're aligned in terms of bringing that new applications, bringing young builders, and really trying to do our best to do something with ETH as an asset.

because they are multi-dimensional with the alignment philosophy. That's one thing. And the second part is, with the fragmentation, I think it's just not layer two fragmentation at this point.

We have entered into a new era where everything is freaking PVPing everyone else. Liquidity is truly moving to places. So I think in this era, we have to be differentiated or penalized in order to win.

It's not just a layer two. So now question is, you know, you're just another EVM chain, like, you know, people, liquidity will come, liquidity will go. So how do you make sure that liquidity stay with you? That is the trillion dollar question.

And that goes back to our principle of having net new applications that are only possible on MegaEth. Once you come to mega civilization, you can't leave. Because why would you leave? It's fast, it's quick, it's efficient, it's full of fun applications.

You know, we have things that's just going to gamify your entire trading experiences. We're bringing the metaverse back with the new manifestation of fully on-chain games. We have a decentralized VPN, but everyone and their mother uses VPN in crypto. Why do you use a Web2 VPN when you can have a Web3 native one that's as fast, but also actually protect your data? We have things that's just going to, you know, record the entire world and, you know, create a fully on-chain museum.

It's like wacky ideas. But our philosophy is if we don't experiment on these new applications, We could have just, you know, used OP stack and, you know, do another chain and hoping the token will rip when the market is good. So I think TLDR, we don't really care about liquidity fermentation.

The only way to solve the liquidity PVP game is to have not new applications. I'm going to add something, which I think Ethereum alignment is a bunch of bullshit. Like, I think that, like, and this is the reason why most of the L2s suck right now, right? Like, I think most of the L2s that exist in their current forms are just...

like worst copies of the ethereum foundation itself right and you can observe this in like their you can literally observe this in like scrolls website right like they hired the same designers that designed ethereum.org to design their website right and they try and practice the same things and they try and preach the same things and and ultimately you just get like imitation is like yes the most sincere form of flattery but but ultimately it feels horrible for the end user and you can just look at their token price and and feel kind of like that reflection accordingly Ultimately, to me, Ethereum alignment means do you use ETH as currency in your applications? Do users spend ETH to transact on the blockchain? And the answer of MegaEth is yes, they do, right? And so ultimately, if MegaEth is filling these blocks with meaningful economic transactions, MegaEth is the most Ethereum-aligned blockchain out of all of them.

Not because it virtue signals to the Ethereum Foundation, not because it decentralizes its sequencer, but because it uses ETH as its currency to pay gas. And ultimately, it teaches its users that you use Ethereum on mega Ethereum. And that's the most pure form of alignment that you could possibly get, right?

That's much bigger than, do I participate in retracted public good funding? Do I participate in interoperability standards? The user does not care about that, right? The user cares about, does the token go up, right? And the token will only go up if the user thinks, I should buy Ethereum so I can do things on mega Ethereum, because the user is not doing things on Ethereum anymore, right?

And- We can observe this. It's like kind of a joke, right? Like the president of the United States launches a non-transferable like token on Ethereum because he's not able to run what he wants to run on the L1 and L2s that exist right now, right?

But he's able to launch a token that is able to be bought by anybody around the world that pumps up to $70 billion on a blockchain called Solana, right? I think this is a fundamental like mistake that most of the Ethereum people have made by focusing on Ethereum alignment. They've ultimately sacrificed the user, right? And at the end of the day, like Ethereum, they preach over and over again.

Oh, economic security. Ethereum is the most like decentralized layer one. That does not matter if all the liquidity leaves the chain, right? If all the users leave the chain and all the capital leaves the chain, the L2s are being secured by nothing, right?

And so it's almost at this weird crossroad right now where for the past three years during the bear market and subsequent start of the bull, You got away with saying I'm Ethereum aligned by, you know, pretending to decentralize your sequencer, which nobody has done, by the way, and also marketing your website and your chain like the Ethereum Foundation. But really, ultimately, you never focused on being truly Ethereum aligned, which was using ETH as currency for applications that are only possible in the layer two, that draw new users in, that keep new users onto a chain that ultimately either settles data to Ethereum or uses Ethereum as money. Sorry, I know that was long, but I'm very passionate about this. Now, you're preaching to the choir. I myself am tired of the abundance of virtue signaling.

At this point, I just want to win. I want Ethereum to win. And I am convinced that focusing on building the best applications, the best user experience, will lead to that many more users, that much more capital, that much more...

more in terms of like economic activity that depends on ETH, the asset. And I think that there's a lot of, you know, continued building that should, there's a lot of building that should continue onwards in the way that they're going about it. Like there are great teams out there that are, you know, trying to build it quote unquote the right way, but. I am taken aback by like the success of, let's say, Hyperliquid. Like they really just focused on being like the best place to trade.

They built up a community that's really passionate about trading. And then they've sort of like reverse engineered, like, what do we need now in order to go beyond like the world's best product for traders to something more, you know, with Hyperliquid EVM. So two or three years ago, if you would have.

told me what you just said and so i would have you know kind of like discarded it and said like hey like At the end of the day, it's decentralization security over all else. But we're at a point where we clearly need more pragmatic approaches to building. So again, that energy, that mega ETH that you're bringing Enzo through GTE, I totally get it. And I am, frankly, exhausted from this bull market signaling that the market is tired of that approach as well. Can I give you an example of like...

like this virtue signaling that I see and I like observe all the time in the other L2s. There's this video that the base founder or whatever, like the bald guy put out. And he's like, he's going around on the street, right?

And he's like, basically starts the video and he goes, I'm going to give somebody $50 on base. I'm going to bring them on chain. And it's like, like, it's kind of embarrassing.

Like he goes up to like 15 people and he's like, hey, can I bring you on chain today? Right? They're like, no.

Can I bring you on chain today? No. Excuse me, ma'am. Do you have a second to come on? No.

Right. Then he flips the script and he's like, hey, do you want $50? The next person he asks is, yes, I want $50.

Right. Like the average person on the street, the average user, the average person that will ever interact with like a blockchain based application. They do not care about the word on chain. They do not care about the word Ethereum alignment.

They don't care at all. They want $50. $50 is $50 for them. Right.

And what I think. was viewed as like oh i yeah like we just onboarded somebody to like the most ethereum aligned like l2 like that's like the most popular right now base like come on like it's not that hard to just say do you want 50 to somebody and it's on base but like it's almost like ironic like this ethereum alignment virtue signaling right that exists within every l2 even the most dominant ones right now you go out and you try it on the street people will literally look at you like you're crazy They will say, what are you talking about? Right.

And that represents the nascency of our industry. That represents why people look at this industry as a joke. Right. Because instead of focusing on the core user needs, they focus on this weird game that exists only on Twitter. And they say, oh, I think I'm going to force everybody else to adopt my mindset rather than trying to adopt the mindset of the user.

When people start to build applications and chains that are able to flip that perspective and keep the user in mind, Ethereum alignment will matter. Nothing will matter besides whether or not the user is happy. And that's when we'll get really true, like, wide-scale adoption. Yeah, there's two aspects that I always remember as, like, my earliest thoughts in the space. One, this is before, like, DeFi was DeFi.

One was, how can I make money, like, from all that's going on in this space? And, you know, I basically would look at, like, market caps of, like, Bitcoin and Ether and other, like, major market caps and think like, is the thing I'm about to invest into, like, could it potentially reach those? Then later on with DeFi, it was how can I make my money like work harder for me?

Like, how can I use DeFi to make my portfolio as like productive as possible on chain, which sometimes obviously leads to just buying tokens and speculating or trading on those tokens. And so, you know, I'm not like. taking an approach here of like pure nihilism and saying like, you know, nothing else matters. Like just, you know, fixate on like how people can get rich, you know, off of crypto. But understand it's a key driver for basically everyone at the end of the day.

Even if you have these like really like noble ambitions of, you know, making a difference for people who would have, let's say, better access on chain to. creating wealth like most obvious is just stable coins like giving anyone the ability to like earn stable coins it is high impact for a lot of folks in the world but like you can't uh also like discard all of the steps that it takes for someone to your point enzo to to come on chain like they just don't get it like a lot of folks don't get it they they need it to be presented in a way that is easy to digest and And aligns with like. some of their like basic instincts. That all said, I think this is a great place for us to start to wrap up. So I want to remind our listeners that they can learn more about MegaEath by going to MegaEath.com.

They can learn about GTE by going to GTE.xyz. Follow MegaEath underscore labs on X or Twitter. Follow Hot Pot underscore Dow, which is Bing's account.

Follow Lay at YangL1996. All that's in our show notes. And then for GTE, it's GTE underscore XYZ. Guys, thank you so much for coming on. Great conversation.

It was fun to be able to riff on a lot of more philosophical topics that I think drive the mindset of what you're trying to bring to the space here with MegaEth and GTE. I would love to end, though, on the big question of when will MegaEth mainnet launch, or what can you tell us? Thank you. I'll give the signature answer soon.

But we're working pretty hard. We would love to have you all back in the future. And we'll definitely have to cover GTE once it's launched as well.

So look for that in something like Yields of the Week, which you can find at the-edge.xyz. Thank you for having us. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in.

If you're a talented founder or developer, please consider reaching out to our team at 4thRevolution.Capital. And to stay up to date with future episodes, plus get expert tips, strategies, and exclusive content, subscribe to our free newsletter at the-edge.xyz.

Transcript for:Insights on MegaEth Blockchain Podcast

Transcript for:
Insights on MegaEth Blockchain Podcast