Is MegaETH the AWS of Crypto Infrastructure? | Namik and Shuyao

Even though we have a lot of block space, these are not quality block space, and MegaETH is the most differentiated block space that people will ever see.

For us, ETH alignment means bringing that power of ETH to as many people as possible, and MegaETH does that because we understand the role of a Layer 2, and we're not trying to become a Layer 1. We're not trying to decentralize a sequencer and bring consensus back into this. Where in actuality, what we need to take is take the power of Ethereum and scale it out.

Hey everyone, we all know blockchain is changing the world, but who's actually driving it? I'm excited to invite you to the 6th edition of Meridian, a Web3 conference hosted by the Stellar Development Foundation in London from October 15th through 17th. Get early bird tickets at meridian.stellar.org with code BLOCKWORKSPOD. Special thanks to Stellar for sponsoring us. Now let's get into today's episode. Hey everyone, excited to share with you that Cronos zkEVM has launched its Pioneer Program, offering early adopters a chance to earn not only loyalty points but also potentially win part of a $30,000 ZK CRO giveaway. If you're interested in being an early adopter, visit zkEVM.cronos.org/bridge. Big thanks to Cronos for sponsoring today's episode. Hey everyone, the Polygon Community Grants program was launched with 1 billion tokens, all for Polygon builders. Really excited to share that on today's episode of Empire. Season 1 of the Polygon Community Grants program is now live. It features $35 million in MATIC to support the next generation of Polygon projects. Join the aggregated future today by applying at polygon. Technology/grants. Big thanks to Polygon for sponsoring Empire. Hey everyone, Jason Yanowitz here. Before we dive into today's episode, I wanted to tell you about your wallet's new best friend, Harpy. Harpy guards your digital assets 24/7, blocking sketchy transactions before they even happen. But that's not the best part— it's totally free. Secure your wallet for free at harpy.io/empire. Link in the description. Now let's get into today's episode. Alright everyone, welcome back to Empire. We got the MegaETH folks, the most hyped project in crypto that nobody knows anything about. So we wanted to have them on the pod. Santi's an investor, I'm not. Connected me to Brother Bing and Namik in New York, met them in person, had an awesome conversation, said I don't think anyone knows this about MegaETH, so would love to have them on. So Brother Bing, Namik, welcome to the pod.

Pleasure.

Welcome, guys.

So this is the most ridiculous thing— they all have MegaETH hats and I don't.

So you can tell who's in the inner circle.

Yeah, what do you guys call it? MegaETH cabal, right?

The hat cabal.

The hat cabal. So, okay, maybe let's start with the basics, which is, um, I don't— uh, Shuya, can you just walk us through the story of MegaETH? And like, starting maybe actually way back pre-MegaETH, like with your days at ConsenSys and then talking to Vitalik and like, just tell us the whole backstory of MegaETH. Let's start there.

So like most of people, I got into crypto in 2017. I used to live in Africa, so the idea of crypto was really obvious. I think having an alternative financial rail is extremely important for society. Then I moved from Nigeria in Africa to Middle East and then joined ConsenSys during 2017 thinking, you know what, Ethereum is going to take over the world tomorrow. And during my days at ConsenSys, I worked on a lot of very interesting ideas, like for example, putting the traffic lights on the blockchain, which obviously is not very feasible or realistic. But during the process, I witnessed ConsenSys grew from, you know, having 50 different ideas, putting everything on the blockchain to really, you know, ConsenSys 2.0 with our marquee products such as MetaMask, Infura, Truffle, Quorum, as well as Linea, which was our Layer 2 answers to zkEVM. So during my days at ConsenSys, I was leading business development for all of our products. And one thing I noticed is quite obvious was we often get tickets for MetaMask. Something goes wrong, right? Most times just people get phished, but other times it's like transaction does not go through. So you get a ticket and you're like, let me investigate. And you're like, okay, is there something wrong with MetaMask? And you go a layer deeper, you're like, okay, maybe there's something wrong with the RPC. Then you go to Infura, you're like, okay, you know what, Infura is performing pretty well. And then the problem goes to the base layer. And the base layer always has problem and the base layer has not scale even with the current layer 2. So a lot of people ask, there are so many blockchains and so many Layer 2s. Why are you doing another MegaETH? My answer has always been, even though we have a lot of block space, these are not quality block space. And MegaETH is the most differentiated block space that people will ever see. So that's how we started MegaETH.

Okay, I got to ask about that one. When you say all the other block spaces are not quality, but we are quality. It's a nice marketing line, I would say. But like, I mean, yeah, you got to say more about that.

Yeah, I was just saying, you know, a lot of ways you have to look at what is possible on what kind of block space, right? The Ethereum roadmap so far has been very much around like, let's get a bunch of these different rollups and let's scale horizontally and have like 10,000 rollups. Really, really cool. But then you ask yourself, what can actually exist on those rollups? So yeah, you can have like a lot of rollups and by having a lot of rollups, you kind of have a lot of capacity, right? But what's the actual capability of the application? It can sit on any of these different chains. What are the kinds of applications that can actually sit on these chains? I think a great one is like autonomous worlds and fully on-chain games, right? Everyone thinks it's really cool, but a fully on-chain game has to be fully on-chain and there is no block space that can facilitate a truly fully on-chain game. That isn't a horrible and janky UX. What's the result? There are no really fully on-chain games out there today. Hmm.

Okay, so maybe, Shuya, you want to keep going with the story and like, yeah, just take us up to present day, I guess.

Yeah. So, you know, when I met my co-founder, uh, we are, you know, 3 co-founders. Elon went to Stanford, studied low-latency data center compute, PhD. Lay one-time IT study, high-throughput network, which is practically blockchain, for 6 years. So they came up with the idea of MegaETH. When I met them, I was like, you know, what is a fucking scammy name like MegaETH, right? Like, it just sounds like another 2017 ICO scam. But when I really look at the tech, I was like, you know, this is just the most differentiated block space. And then, uh, yeah, I was hanging out with Vitalik. I was like asking him around, you know, checking out the white paper, and it turned out that the The idea of MegaETH was actually already written in a blog post he wrote in 2021 called Endgame. So what he wrote in the blog post was, um, the endgame of a blockchain network is a relatively centralized block production environment and extremely decentralized block validating network. And that's exactly what MegaETH is. That's the end of my story.

Can we double-click on that? Because I think that's— if there's one takeaway of this entire conversation, is that because I remember the first time that I had a conversation with you guys, that was— and I told you, you delivered like a couple of key insights, which I always look for in teams. This was the first one. And I was like, I perked up when I heard it because just to lay the context and I'll shut up. Yeah, most people would not lead with that. If you talk to an L2, they wouldn't lead with that, right? There's, there's And to me, it's just not a full appreciation of where it matters, of what you need to have decentralized and what ultimately are the functions of blockchain, blockchains, and what is the most important thing. Because mind you, like we've been in an environment where a lot of the L2s are not really L2s. You know, they don't have fraud proofs. And instead of focusing on building a fraud proof, they're thinking about doing things that don't matter as much, like decentralizing the sequencer. I'm like, well, focus on goddamn fraud proofs and then decentralize the sequencer. So that's been, from my vantage point as an investor, pretty frustrating. And then I hear you guys say that, what you just said, and I was like, okay, this is quite differentiated at a time where there's like infra fatigue, which I disagree with. So I'll stop talking, but I'd love for you to double-click on what you just said.

Yeah, so there's an ugly truth in crypto, right, which is performance does not go well with decentralization. And you can see this on the L1 landscape too, right? Most nodes are homogeneous, meaning that these nodes do all the tasks of a blockchain. And you have to think what really matters to you. So, you know, for Ethereum, what really matters is decentralization. Validation needs to be as simple as possible for as many people as possible. And as a result, you know, no one wants, no one's gonna pretend that Ethereum is an environment that's performant, but clearly there is need for performant block space. And that's kind of where Solana came in with more beefy nodes that allows them to do additional optimizations. And before you know it, you have a more performant execution environment. But our thesis is that even Solana is not truly performant when we're comparing to Web2 quality. Web2 performance, no blockchain is truly performant. And for MegaETH, you know, there is some really, really interesting designs that you can do once you take the inherent, like, security guarantees of a Layer 2, right? So Layer 2s are able to inherit the security and decentralization of Ethereum in two ways. One is the escape hatch, which is very powerful, right? Your ETH is always safe. It can always go back to L1. No one indexes on how powerful that is. And the second is what you said. The past few years of L2 land have been focusing on proofs, fraud proofs. So given these two things, Megha Eve's thesis is, hey, you know, we're Layer 2, let's do what a Layer 2 is supposed to do, which is hyperscale and make an execution environment that's extremely performant. So what we say is, well, let's look back at those nodes. Let's see how all of these L1s had to pick and choose where they want to sit on this trade-off curve of like performance versus decentralization. What if we could have each of these tasks, right? So the tasks are like broadly block production and block validation. What if we could have hyper-specialized, both in terms of hardware as well as software, configurations for these tasks? So what we say is, okay, the dream state for sequencing and execution is not decentralized. It's actually very beefy and very performant so that you can stream transactions on-chain instantly. So what does that look like? And we go back to first principles and we basically build the MegaEv Sequencer. It is not decentralized, it's bare metal, and it's very, very powerful. We are able to do optimizations like in-memory compute, JIT compiling, parallelization, because we've decided to create a very beefy sequencer. So that's like sequencing, that's block production. But the beauty is because we have chosen to specialize all of our nodes, we can do that for validation as well, right? The nodes that do block validation can be extremely light because our approver network, each of the approver nodes do a subset of the sequencer's transactions in a model similar to stateless validation. And then we use Eigen for DA. And as a result, we're able to have an architecture where hardware is the only limit. And we mean that in its truest form. So 100K TPS and 1 millisecond block times.

Is this like an abandonment of the, of the ETH values? And you're basically just saying screw the ETH values, like, let's just build the most high-performance blockchain because people are sick about like this whole decentralization theater. Like, let's just maximize for performance here.

Yeah, I would say that Chiao and I are some of the most ETH-aligned people you can imagine, but it's actual ETH alignment, right? I grew up in countries where the value of the US dollar, the value of the native currency devalued 80% in the span of 3 months. Right. And when we look at this question of like, what is ETH alignment? It's leveraging the power and decentralization of Ethereum to bring the world on chain. That's not possible as an L1, right? I mean, I promise you, the new L1 that's going to launch is not going to be more decentralized than Ethereum. For us, ETH alignment means bringing that power of ETH to as many people as possible. And MegaETH does that because we understand the role of a Layer 2, and we're not trying to become a Layer 1. We're not trying to decentralize the sequencer and bring consensus back into this, where in actuality, What you need to take is take the power of Ethereum and scale it out. So I think like ETH alignment is much more about apps, users, experiences, bringing stuff that no one could have done before in Web2, meaning peer-to-peer networks, crypto economics to the people.

I think the other thing would be, I think a lot of people confuse ETH alignment with Ethereum Foundation alignment. I think there's a lot of just people maneuvering that we have fucking zero interest in. Our vision and square focus is on adoption. Things we're doing, for example, I had a great time at ZooZaloo last year, and we're bringing a mega zoo format into Thailand where we bring application builders, right? Only application builders who can leverage Ethereum technology to build things for real people. That to me is alignment.

Yeah. I wanna spend a little bit more time on, on this concept of like, um, ma— like massively centralized block production and decentralized validation. Um, cuz I think it's, it's quite important. And so, you know, we've had folks from Arbitrum, Optimism, Blast, uh, pretty much Solana, Monad, Bera, all these different kind of execution environments and, and L2s. So, The obvious question is like, why haven't people tried this before? You have hundreds of L2s. Like, what, like, why do you think that is?

Yeah, we, I actually thought quite a lot about it because it's so obvious, right? The architecture is there. I think there are two reasons. The first one is, you know, Ethereum development largely depends on you know, where the EF points their fingers at. The EF has been focusing quite a lot on consensus and not so much on performance. So I think that's one aspect. The second one is actually on capability. The thing we're doing to optimize the sequencer is really hard, and we're the only team that can do it because Elon studied like how database works and we rewrote the entire state tree, and Lei studies consensus, so we actually understand the blockchain. So you need a team that actually knows both in order to produce what we're doing. And that's why people say, oh, you know, we can just do a MegaETH clone. And there are a bunch of them out there. It's like MegaETH parallelized layer 2, but you know what, parallelization is such a tiny part of our tech stack. There's so much going in that's on optimizing the sequencer that no one has the capability to do it. So I think these are the two combined reasons.

Namik, you're nodding. Anything? You want to add to that point?

Yeah, I mean, just music to my ears, right? Yeah, I think there's like two aspects of this. I think fundamentally consensus is difficult, right? Like there are a lot of really smart people in the L2 world and they've worked on these problems and this is what they've been focusing on. And it allows us to, you know, be able to leverage the power of fraud-proof and build what we're doing. So I think it's a lot of like the right time and the right team. That allows us to build MegaETH now.

I hear hardware specialization and I think about a lot of the criticism that Solana has faced around higher hardware requirements and costs. And you know, it, it was, I think now people have come to understand the nuance. Could you double-click on that? Like on the specs, on, not to get too technical, but just at a high level, like the hardware itself, the cost, like the, you know, would love to understand that a little bit more.

Yeah, I will just— it's all in our— we have a research tab of the MegaETH website. We have a basic breakdown of what those costs will be like and the difference between our nodes and everyone else's. So I'll walk you through that. But I do want to touch on one thing before that, Santi. I know you're a big Sol bull. I think there's a big difference between hardware—

I'm wearing a MegaETH hat, sir.

Yeah, mega bullish, man. There are big differences between like you know, that trade-off on the L1 versus that trade-off on the L2, right? When you're increasing the hardware requirements on the layer 1 to run a node, that's like, it makes sense because you get more performance, but you are, you know, basically decreasing the validator set, right? The amount of people who can participate. On MegaETH, that's not exactly a concern because we're not even pretending to have like a, like a multi, like a, you know, a decentralized sequencer architecture. For us, we're saying, let's, let's take the valuable part of having really, really powerful and beefy hardware and have one sequencer run that at any point in time. And let's make sure that the validation hardware is as low as possible. But sure, let me walk you guys through some of the, the numbers on our end, right? So the average Ethereum node is a 2-core CPU, 4 to 8 memory, 4 to 8 gigabytes memory. 25 megabytes per second on network. Uh, Solana, it's 12 cores, 256 GB, and 1 to 10 GBS, right? Our sequencer alone will be 100 cores, 1 to 4 memories of terabyte, 10 gigabyte, 10 GBS for network, uh, 1 to 4 memories of, uh, 1 to 4 TB in memory. My bad. That's going to be pretty expensive to run, right? Around $10 an hour. While our approver nodes are going to be extremely light, much lighter than an Ethereum or Solana node. Right. And that's going to be running— the cost of running those will be $0.004 an hour. So very, very cheap for validation, relatively expensive for production. But that's the cost that we incur.

Got it. Because you're running it. So it's subsidized or you're paying that in some way.

Yes. And the plan will be in the future to have a rotational sequencer architecture, right? Where the MegaETH team will not be the only people who run the sequencer till the end of our days. But the second you have— and we're pro a rotation of who is running the sequencer. What is important to us is that there's only one sequencer that's running at any given time. That's how you make sure to maintain that level of performance. We're not trying to sell some kind of magic antidote Right? Like our performance comes from the fact that we have one sequencer running.

Yeah. Yeah. When you, um, I know it might be farther ahead in the future, but what would a world where you're rotating look like? Um, you're presumably selecting initially the, the other parties that can do the production, or would it be permissionless in some way, shape, or form?

It's pretty early, so I don't want to be talking, you know, on stuff I'm not really sure about, to be frank. But I mean, I think big picture, you can think of it as a block-based thing, right? So like block 1 to 100 is sequencer A, block 100 to 200 is sequencer B. And there's lots of different models in which you can enable the most performant sequencer to be the one that's participating, right? This isn't like a It's, it's a, it's a fair meritocracy in the end of the day. If Megahive is not able to create the most performant sequencer and someone is coming with like a more performant sequencer, that sequencer should be the one that's running the network. So a mixture of rotational architectures plus a game where like the most performant sequencer is able to run the network.

Uh, for people that might not be super well-versed, I don't want to lose them. Could you spend, uh, very quick one-on-one on like sequencing itself and maybe contrast that with like something like Arbitrum, right? They're running the sequencing themselves. But what about their— the way that they're doing it is suboptimal relative to how you're doing it. It's just the hardware itself.

Sure. So there are two aspects of this. The first one is like, okay, so the Arbitrum sequencer is there's obviously— so what you're saying is correct. There's only one sequencer that's running on Arbitrum. The difference is they haven't optimized the sequencer. There's a couple of reasons why they do this, right? One is because maybe they want to decentralize the sequencer in the future. The second is to make sure their prover architecture is able to match the sequencer, right? Usually if you have one, if you have sequencing that's extremely performant and you don't have an architecture that's optimized on the validation side to match that sequencer, the thing breaks apart. So what we do is we basically say, hey, let's create this extremely performant block production via sequencing and then work backwards. How can we make sure that we have every single other part of the stack not become the bottleneck itself? If you make just the sequencer performant, the bottleneck goes somewhere else. That's why we use like EigenDA, right? And a lot of people will use EigenDA in the future, but then their sequencer will become the bottleneck because their sequencer doesn't run at a similar enough interval, at a quick enough interval to us, which results in priority fee markets kicking in. So the answer is optimizations. No one's decided to take this extreme.

I think the answer is extreme node specialization. No one does it more than we do.

And maybe on that point itself, thinking about just You referenced like people trying to copy MegaETH and it's fairly common, you know, in this open source chaotic world. What went into that specialization? You know, you have other folks in the team that are highly technical as well. Like, how long did it take you guys to develop this? When was the key insights around this? Was this sort of like brainchild of MIT coming out of MIT, or I'm just kind of curious, like, how this all came together.

Yeah, I was— my urge to say it's a brainchild of Stanford, MIT, and Harvard. And then you can't get more pedigree than the Mega East team. Name another one. I mean, it took quite a long time, right? The idea started about a year and a half ago when Elon graduated from his PhD program and got really fascinated with the blockchain space. And, you know, for, like, outsiders, for crypto-native researchers, we love the little problem that makes us feel so good. So when Elon came in, he's like, yo, this is not that hard, no specialization, like do things with the sequencer, which is something he studied, right, for 6 years at Stanford. So he did the architecture, and then Lei joined, was like, okay, I can do even more with the EigenDA. So that's why I combined them together. It took us a year and a half to be where we are. A lot of our engineering work is actually in And not only in designing, but coding the sequencer. That takes a lot of time. And most of our engineers have experiences in open-source software, in designing really large network, you know, from Filecoin, for example. And fun fact, our engineers aren't just your nerdy crypto— well, nerdy research engineers. They actually really believe in crypto. So something we do when we're hiring folks is like, are you really here for the next 5 years? Do you believe that crypto is going to take over the world? And that's something we see from our engineer as well. That's why I tend to think that we have a very powerful team because our mission is extremely aligned with the wider crypto industry. And then to answer your other question about what other people would be doing, I mean, other people could— if you have a centralized sequencer, right, you can claim a lot what we're claiming. Cheat on your code. You can dial up a few things, but for you to achieve 100,000 TPS and some millisecond latency, you can't just simply dial a few things, right? Like change something on OP stack and parameter would give you maybe, I don't know, like 1 second block time, but millisecond is a very heavy lift.

Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah.

What's, what's the downside of doing this?

Doing what?

Well, if you look at all of the L1s and all of the L2s, there is a trade-off in, in, in every single one of them. Um, and so I'm just curious how you guys think about the trade-off of, of MegaETH. There's got to be some trade-off or downside by making one thing really good. There's— you're, you're hurting something else.

So yeah, I mean, I think that we are— our downside is we're going to the extreme of this architecture. Right. Meaning it's very difficult to— like, if the decentralizing the sequencer, meaning having the performance breakdown that you would have from one chain decentralizing their sequencer to Meggy, if they're centralizing their sequencer, are very, very different. Right. Our ability to have this level of execution, if we were to choose to go the other way, would, would go away. Right. So I think a lot of people, when they ask, why do you have a centralized sequencer? What are the downsides of it? The main one is like, we cannot— like, our performance will be much, much worse if we decide to bring consensus back into this, right, in a comparable manner. And I think the second one is like, there's a lot of questions around how do you create more censorship-resistant sequencer architectures? And that's where we're working with the rotational sequencer.

What if you guys are successful? I feel like a lot of the, like, crypto infrastructure in the industry is not actually set up to support something that— I mean, like, something that actually goes this fast. Like, like, literally the RPCs, um, the indexers, like, I think a lot of them max out at like, uh, what, 10,000 maybe? Um, like, like, if you guys are successful, the things in the industry won't be able to support you guys, like the RPCs and the indexers. So how— yeah, I guess are you going to have to build all of that in-house or how do you think about that?

Yeah, it's unfortunate. We will have to build all of this in-house or find people to build this for us. Yeah, it's interesting, right? Because this level of performance is not something that like we can go find like Solana teams and convince them to, you know, do a couple optimizations or change X or Y and plug right in. Solana is not fast enough to match MECHAETH.

Yeah.

So we need to find, incubate, and work with teams to build a new wave of infrastructure.

I mean, even though— one more question, something before you jump in, is like even the DA layer, I think you guys are using EigenDA.

Yes.

Like even EigenDA is not spec'd to support— I was looking at that. I did a quick review of like their docs right before this call, so I might be totally wrong, but like even EigenDA's doesn't seem like their spec to support what you guys are trying to build on MegaETH. So, I mean, that's like, that's not an RPC or an indexer. Like, that's like a core thing of your tech stack. How do you think about that?

Yeah, so the current spec you're seeing, probably outdated. We work quite closely with Eigen team. They actually have engineers who are dedicated to make sure that they have capacity for us. So yeah, we're going to see significant improvement. But on the other side, right, I think it's the middleware, like the first example I mentioned, from the wallet to RPC to data indexer and all of that. I think simple things like block explorer, I fucking hate looking at block explorer. It's not good. So we're really thinking about how to make block explorer super user-friendly and make sure people just see how fast it is. So I think all of these are part of MegaETH ecosystem, right? We're not just building a chain, we're building everything supporting tools around the chain.

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I think this turns into like a second chapter of this conversation, which is we focused on performance. And I tend to think that that, that's sort of like, can be a very tiring conversation because everyone claims to have, you know, the best, highest TPS. And there's all these, like, there's no standards, right? And people confuse latency with throughput and all this stuff. But the more important thing is like, we're talking in an environment, mind you, where Ethereum L1 fees are at a record low. So what does that tell you, right? It's just, have we built useful applications because we probably have an excess supply of block space because, I mean, just by virtue of the fees, right? And so while it is important to like build, to optimize, to build for a future where you can envision billions of users on chain and whatnot, there's already been a fair amount of traction. And I've had the benefit and privilege of seeing it firsthand when I went to Berlin and saw some of the projects that are building on Mega. Um, so I'd like to focus like this, this part of the conversation on how you envision winning that BD game. What type of applications? How do we get like millions and millions of users on chain? Um, because my thesis is like, it's sort of pointless to have a discussion around like performance when we don't have users or killer applications. It's like, it doesn't fucking matter. You know, uh, it's like you have a Ferrari, but no one can, no one can drive it. So, you know, or it doesn't have gas, you know, it's like, it's pointless. Right. So, so talk to us about that. Like, how do you win that game and how do you build a thriving ecosystem of killer apps?

So it's all about latency. Everyone hates latency in life. Like, I hate latency. If it takes my phone a couple seconds to load a webpage, I get mad. Right? And like, what's going on here? And I think that's like the excuse I keep telling myself for why we haven't won as an industry yet, right? We haven't been able to get users in crypto yet because infrastructure's not there. But as Vitalik has called us in the past, right, endearingly, MegaETH is an AWS server with blockchain scaffolding. That's the level of performance we're talking about. So now it's up to us to build Web2 performance applications with the power of peer-to-peer networks and crypto economics. And there's a couple of ways to go about this. We can say that the builders will come. Oh yeah, the tech is good. The builders, they'll come. Yeah, let's create a blog post. Or we go and we find these builders and we're like, yo, it's time, let's build something insane. And we picked the latter, right? So we have a very, very targeted go-to-market strategy. In which we find the smartest people that we know. We basically spend a lot of time with them, convincing them to build on Meggy. For context, Shriya is literally in SF right now for one team that we're very bullish on. And then we do everything in our power to make them win. That goes from building an application that will not become like the 50th lending market on some execution environment, but a billion-dollar business that is enabling a new kind of user behavior that Web2 could not facilitate. It's the ultimate dream, right? Like, I'm sure all four of us got into crypto because we had some wacky idea of what a blockchain would enable and make the world a better place. I remember mine was pretty lame. I was into, like, bringing legal contracts on chain, right? I know it's kind of, it's kind of out there, but, you know, all of these ideas, you quickly become disenfranchised, and now you're like, I guess the future of this industry or the future of France is in the 6th meme coin launchpad, but this time we can short them as well, or it's on a bonding curve. It's like a staking mechanism, right? Like, that's not the future of crypto. So what we do is we find these teams and we work with them to build really interesting ideas, ranging from wild game shows where, you know, like the individual's data is not so valuable as to traditionally be logged on a blockchain, but in aggregate, when there's many of them, it now becomes immensely valuable for different kinds of verification mechanisms. Or we're talking about like decentralized VPN networks where you're able to enable like a peer-to-peer network to compete with Web2 with zero latency trade-offs. We find these teams, we work with them closely, and we make sure that they are able to bring in net new users. We're not in the business of trying to vampire attack some user from chain A or chain B. We're in the business of vampire attacking Facebook, Web2, Meta, all of these guys.

Do you need like the basic DeFi things though? And like, can you make the basics better? Because like, take a club, right? Like a club on ETH or something like that. Like it just, it's not going to be as good, like high latency. It's not going to be as good as a like a Binance or Coinbase, right? High latency, expensive gas, low throughput. Like, if I'm understanding your guys' vision, like, yes, compete with the Facebooks and Googles and all that kind of stuff and get the apps. But like, I mean, can't you make a club that's better than any other club that's ever existed? Yeah. I mean, isn't that a win? Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, we're not even mentioning like low-hanging fruit. W's across the board there, right? But yeah, we have— I'm just joking. I'm just joking. I think that fundamentally a club is a— we are— all of our DeFi apps are really, really interesting. We already have them. We have world star teams. For example, our club is xIMC, xJump, xCoinbase, xAlchemy. And you know, what they're doing is say the fundamental thesis of L1 has just has too much jitter and not a low enough latency to be competitive with Binance, right? Versus MegaETH, where you're literally at parity with Binance. Real-time DEX. That's CLOBs. Lending markets also very exciting, right? What's the biggest issue of lending markets? I mean, primarily the— it's like either the end user is going to get screwed by an unfair liquidation margin or the protocol is going to be screwed and have bad debt. But if MegaETH, where you have 1 millisecond block times with a co-located price oracle, meaning that you're pushing price feeds at the same frequency and speed as Binance, you no longer have these issues and you have just more efficient markets. So yeah, DeFi also game changer across the board.

Um, can you talk a little bit about, um, the decision for a builder in the current, um, landscape? You know, they could decide to build on another L2, they could go to Solana, you mentioned Solana. I want to focus there because that's where we're seeing a lot of activity. You know, it's, it's gotten a lot of attention. Um, and so I'm curious, like, what is going through the mind of a builder that is deciding, hey, I can't get this in Solana, but I can't get it in MegaETH. And, and I, and I guess as a— so let's just start there.

What do you mean by I can't get this on Solana? I can't—

yeah, you know, right now, for instance, like I know Solana, like, no, you said it and I agree with it. No blockchain is perfect in its current instantiation. And like, you know, so, but you're seeing a lot of builders move to Solana and build there. Um, and so I am curious what is going through the mind of someone that says I'd rather build on MegaETH. Um, and, and I, I guess this was going to be my follow-up, so I'll just bring it up now because it really goes to the heart of the fragmented L2 ecosystem. You know, people talk about the network effects of Ethereum, which I sort of would challenge because it's, it's very fragmented. Like if you're an Arbitrum, going to Base, um, is difficult, right? And so that presents UX and just is more difficult for a user to understand than going to an integrated chain like Solana. You don't have to leave. You, you load up your funds there in Fantom and you're, doing whatever it is that you're doing there. Whereas in Ethereum, it's, it's challenging, right? You have to flip through the different networks. That might get abstracted away and that's okay. You know, I know OP's working really in their cluster and whatnot, but it's, it's fra— it's, it's more fragmented. It's, it's, it's just presents issues for the user is what I care about. And really is the focus on the user. So how, how do you think about, um, you guys building as an L2, and I know sometimes you would probably challenge that, but like, how, what does that user experience—

expand?

Correct. I know that. And then, so, uh, do you understand? Do you see where I'm trying to get at? Like, it's really, it's really on this focus of the user experience and how do you, how do you become the, the best, the easiest place for people to interact And do you not care about all the other L2s? Do you not care about the other networks? You just, you know.

So I think there's two questions there, right? I think you first started by saying, how will a builder, like, why on earth would a builder on Sol build on Nagi instead? And then the second point, which I think is very important, is around like the fragmentation and the just like the noise, the amount of noise on L2. And I think, Jason, that's the answer to your question before about trade-offs. What's one of the trade-offs of our design? That noise. But I'm going to start the first part, which is like, why would someone— why would a builder on Sol build on Meggyve? Simply because there's a lot of stuff that's not possible on Solana. I keep hearing only possible on Sol. Well, I'm going to say not possible on Sol, right? Snap, like that mega, like that VPN architecture I mentioned, right? That's a case in which, fundamentally speaking, there's too much latency amongst all of those different, like, if there's latency for a block is so high, right? You can no longer work with hopping between different nodes in a network as a way of encryption. And boom, that application can no longer exist. On Solana, you're seeing a lot of really, really interesting deep-end products not be fully on-chain or not even stream data or funding on-chain in an instantaneous manner because there's fundamental constraints of Solana. I think the best example would be a game show, right? Let's say there is a worldwide game show, and I'm not saying too much because I have a really cool team building this on MegaETH, but this game show, which has a Web2 level of success, has hundreds of thousands of users. They're playing this game and every single—

this is like a Trivia HQ kind of game.

Yeah, imagine like an HQ trivia. Ah, okay, he's just, uh, he just spoiled it to everybody. But yeah, so imagine an HQ trivia, right? This HQ trivia has, let's say, hundreds of thousands of users, which is accurate because that's HQ trivia, up to 2.4 million. Uh, if you want to be able to verify the winners of this HQ trivia game, Well, you need to be streaming their answers on chain. Well, every 4 seconds, right, one of the trivia questions is answered. If you have 100,000 people playing this game, that's 25,000 transactions per second. That's a level of scale that fundamentally no chain, no L1, Solana just cannot handle, right? Meggyve can. So I would say that's why people build stuff on Meggyve, because the design space is no longer constrained by the blockchain. I don't want people in 5 years to be like, yeah, or like in 6 years to be like, yeah, you know, mega ETH, that's— this app is a mega ETH app. We should just abstract away the blockchain completely because normies do not care about what a stack looks like. They just want to have brilliant, beautiful web, uh, just web, web3 experiences. I do hate the term web3. Anyways, uh, Shu, my touch on fragmentation.

I want to add something, you know, Santi, you saw how mega mafia works. I never think I'm selling blockchain to them. I don't think I'm selling block space. I think I'm selling a dream to every one of them. I often look at them in the eyes and I ask, what do you want to do for the next 3 years of your life? I don't know. You want to do a Pumped Up Fund, I don't know, V2? You want to launch a shitcoin and make some money? Or you want to do a billion-dollar protocol. And the only way to do a billion-dollar protocol is in an environment that does not exist and build something that's truly zero to one. That is how we persuade and inspire the mega mafia builders. And a lot of people are scared by that vision, right? And I'm sorry that you don't get into the mafia. The mafia is a cabal, is a premium cabal. So I think that's how we do ecosystem building that is so different from everyone else. I have a very contrarian take, which I'm very proud to say. I think most of the application builders are mid because they like to copy others. And there's very much lack of independent thinking and contrarian thinking. We love to welcome builders who have a very strong view on certain use case and experiment the hell out of it. They could fail, but at least where they're iterating. So that's how I think about our ecosystem is different from others. And then in terms of the fragmentation, as I mentioned, everything is about quality over quantity. It's fragmented because quality is low. We believe in a future where if MegaETH is successful, we become a global state machine, borrowing Solana's tagline, where all the dApps are co-living and co-building and there's no noisy neighbor issue. We also believe that there is so much capital efficiency and coordination you can explore when you are building on one single state machine. Now, the fact you're saying, oh, you know, layer 2s are fragmented, Solana is not, I would dare to challenge that. I've been seeing so many pitch decks on scaling Solana. I do feel like Solana might face the same issue as Ethereum faced in the last cycle, right? Like, what is the correct scaling solution? I don't think we have the perfect blockchain right now, but I do think that MegaETH solves fragmentation by providing a much more powerful single state machine for every application to co-build and co-live on.

And oftentimes we've teased that this idea that an L2 eventually abandons Ethereum L1. What would you say to that? Or what is your view there? Like at what point does it, A, economically or just from a business development or from a sovereignty, however, there's multiple kind of parameters by which you can think about this. I'm not saying I agree or disagree. I just think that like dYdX may decide to just launch their own chain. And I'm curious if you, you know, in a world where you have all these breakthrough apps, you have all this traction, does it at some point make sense to abandon Ethereum and just live as an independent like chain.

So this is what I love the most about MegaETH. This can also be seen as a trade-off, right, Jason Yanowitz? Another trade-off of the MegaETH architecture. We can't abandon Ethereum because we are fundamentally leveraging Ethereum to make these extreme design decisions and specialize our nodes to the extreme, right? We can't just— like, our core value proposition, right, is like centralizing block production and getting this level of performance. You can do something kind of like that on the L1, but then you're very, very centralized and the L1 cannot be centralized. That's why we're building on Ethereum. People ask me, why don't you build MegaETH on Solana? Why don't you build MegaETH on like, you know, some other L1? Well, the answer is because MegaETH needs to exist on the most decentralized Layer 1 so they can create the most performant execution environment. And yeah, that's why we'll never abandon Ethereum because then Meggy doesn't work anymore. It's really as simple as that. That's why we're Ethereum-aligned guys. Mega-aligned. Yeah.

If Keoni from Monad were here, what do you think you would say to that? Because obviously he's of a different opinion.

Yeah. I mean, I think that Keoni from Monad, and there will be a debate between Meggy and, you know, Monad on bankless. In the future. So tune in. That'll be quite exciting.

Don't advertise on that podcast on an existing podcast.

You're booted. You're booted. That's it. We were doing so well. We were doing so well.

Yeah.

I mean, I think our team internally thinks Monads super cool, right? Monads has done a lot of really fascinating optimizations onto, yeah, both parallelization, but just across the stack. Right? And it looks cool. It looks great for L1, but we are performance first. And to create the most performant blockchain, you need to be doing what we're doing. At least that's our opinion. And yeah, it's really as simple as that. I think Monat's super cool as an L1. I don't know if Monat's going to be more decentralized than Ethereum. I don't think so. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't think I'm wrong, but maybe.

Probably not at the start.

Yeah. And then, yeah, Ethereum is the most decentralized.

One.

You know, I found it super interesting was, um, there's a bunch of layer 1, right? And then they're like, oh, you know, we're really scalable. But what you're often seeing in the ecosystem was a, you know, another layer 1, another layer 2 for that layer 1. So sometimes I scratch my head, I was like, you know, even before you're launching, you're already thinking about layer 2. What's the point?

Yeah. Uh, yeah. Although, uh, I mean, to be fair, I mean, the L2 conversations in Ethereum started fairly early on. Uh, I mean, I guess you tried different— Yeah, for sure. For sure. Um, just sort of contextualizing what you just said. Um, And so it's interesting, this idea that like, because you don't hear it often, like most people, when I ask this question, don't, don't say it to the level of conviction that you just did, which is we will, to reiterate, and we will never abandon the Ethereum L1 because we require that for settlement on the most secure, um, settlement layer. And insofar as Ethereum L1 remains the most decentralized, i.e., secure sediment layer, then we'll continue to use it. And it's— but in that answer, I never heard anything about liquidity, users, network effects, because most people would just say that, oh, most of liquidity exists in Ethereum. That's where the attention is. But you're just saying purely from a— in order for you guys to achieve that performance, you need to rely on a very stable settlement base called Ethereum L1 that you're posting back to. And that's how you get— and that's a necessary prerequisite to just focus on performance of sequencing and juice that up.

Yeah. So I think like all the other reasons are reasons which would maybe that person who's on Ethereum solely for liquidity, would then potentially leave Ethereum down the road once they get all that liquidity, right? Yeah, yeah, it's sick. There's the liquidity on Ethereum. It makes life easier in some way, shape, or form. But from an architectural reason, we're on Ethereum because Ethereum is the most decentralized blockchain, and that enables us to do what we do really well.

Let's talk about roadmap, mainnet, like rest of the year, like what's coming.

Yeah, so I think the rest of the year are extremely exciting. We are very grateful to be on this podcast, obviously. It's one of our first appearance. We are gearing up a testnet around end of September, early October, mainnet early next year. We are carrying our flagship builders program, which is called Mega Mafia, to the second phase. So the first phase, which happened in Berlin, I don't have my Berlin shirt, where, you know, we rented a hotel, a co-working space. We got a bunch of really cool zero-to-one applications. So we're carrying that forward to Thailand where we're hosting a mega zoo along with our friends from EigenLayer. And the goal is to bring more application builders to the Ethereum world. So if you have some ideas about what to build, If you still have that fire in your heart, if you're listening to this podcast, you're looking for an ecosystem but also fellow builders to challenge yourself, please come to talk to us. We are looking for you to join us in the Thailand trip. Uh, we are also gearing up to make sure our middlewares all work. Uh, our data indexing is indexing pretty nicely for now. Uh, our RPC providers as well. We're looking at how to provide a much better wallet experiences. Because Mega is so fast, if our wallet is not fast, what's the fucking point? So making sure that those are in the right place. And then lastly, we are thinking about how to go to market with the Mega Mafia. So remember, we're taking a very curated approach with our ecosystem. Rather than welcoming everyone, we are doubling down on team that is truly zero to one. So when we're going live with our testnet, we're working with the Mafia program projects on how to make sure they got liquidity, how to make sure they got users, how to make sure they got eyeballs. So that is a big focus because I don't want people to remember MegaETH, I want people to remember Mega Mafia.

MegaETH is nothing without the Mega Mafia, so come join the Mega family.

Um, for someone listening, um, tell us maybe nondescript, like you don't have to go into too much detail. I know we spend a little bit of time, but like What does that builder look like? Because a lot of the guys, a lot of the teams that I met, um, had been in the space for quite a bit of time. I had the feeling that they had been thinking about specific problems and, and finally kind of decided to pull the trigger. For instance, the Valhalla guys, you know, they've been doing a lot of research on DeFi. They've been doing a lot of research on different observing other protocols and had, I got the feeling they had been very thoughtful around how to build what they were building. And then they pulled the trigger when they perhaps heard the pitch from either one of you guys. The same is true for other teams that I've interacted with. But I'm curious, yeah, what, Are there specific, specific applications that you would like to see that haven't been, that are currently not being built? Uh, are there ideas that you have, kind of like an RFQ, live RFQ?

Yeah, I can go first.

Like, like, obviously, like, like prediction markets, for instance. Everyone and their mother wants to build a prediction market now. I was like, okay, well, does that is that really truly differentiated? But I am curious how much I guess, I guess how much guy, how much is this question? How much has it been you guys putting out a proposal saying, here's this new thing that allows you to, to build applications that perhaps have been possible before, because of the speed, the performance, or people just hearing about Mega and saying, Oh shit, I've had this idea, it couldn't have worked anywhere else, and I'm going to come here and you're like, yes.

Yeah. So great question. It really varies. Our builders program is growing bigger. The family is growing stronger. So Valhalla is a fully on-chain Perp DEX, only possible on MegaETH. The team is seasoned crypto builders. We didn't know them. The guy DM'd me on Twitter because during Token2049, the MegaETH swag is a vape. So Mega is a branded vape. So guy was like, yo dude, what are you guys distributing the vape? I was like, yo, come find me. I was hanging out with Jason Yanowitz from Folio Ventures. So he came and we talked. He's like, yeah, your tech is sick. Should we build? And then we start building together. So he came from a background where he knew he wants to build something. He did diligence on our technology, talked to my co-founder Lei, and boom, we're here, right? Other teams are not so straightforward. For example, our social application. The idea is actually, I think that idea came from one of our friends and Namek and the founder took it a step forward. There is a lot of complexity in designing tokenomics and the founder came from Web2. He single-handedly built a Web2 social application that is about reality shifting. So think about us in a crypto universe and we pretend to be Satoshi and there's a fake Instagram timeline there, right? And then the builder came to my Hotpot DAO and wanted to build something for NFT. NFT community. And I told him, dude, don't want to crash your dream, that shit isn't going to work because NFT communities are not real communities sometimes. So he's like, okay, what should I build? And then me and Namek was like, yo, what about this idea with, you know, HQ trivia? So we were more heavily involved. We gave him the idea, we were designing the crypto economics together, but that guy is obsessive. With product development and product iteration, right? He often joke with me like he's a people pleaser. That translates into customer pleasing. So he really enjoys the process, making sure the product actually works with the end user. And we come in as adding the Web3 value. So I think these are the two extreme examples of extremely crypto-native team comes in, know what they want to build, and a Web2 founder who's also very legit doesn't know what to do. And that we came in. And in the middle we have different grades of founders who's somewhat more crypto native, but we kind of tell them like, oh, this idea is good, that idea is not good. Namik, what do you want to add?

I mean, I think we believe in, I think we really believe in like Web2 excellence, right? I think it's something that we're lacking as an industry. That person that Xiao mentioned, ex-Amazon, Google engineer, and his reality shifting app had a million downloads and 100,000 monthly active users, right? This is a kind of caliber of builder that when you're able to tell them that the blockchain no longer has a performance degradation trade-off, you're able to attract. So yeah, I think like our guiding principle for builders are like, how cracked are you, right? Like, do you have the dog in you? Yes. Awesome. Let's start ideating. Exactly. Let's start ideating on ideas. And some of them we might be more involved in, some we might not be involved in. But we think it's actually very important to make sure that people don't feel disillusioned, because that is the main issue I'm seeing of crypto builders right now. They're disillusioned. They think that the only thing they can build now is some sort of like— I mean, for example, during the Trump and You know, Trump had this Twitter Space with Elon. I saw somebody was launching meme coins of like big buzzwords and then just rugging them straight away during that Twitter Space. I said he made like $150,000 or something, and I believe it. Like, that's insane. The fundamental values in the industry are skewing way too much towards gambling because we haven't been able to prove PMF for anything else. With Meggy, if we can build the ideas that people first came into space for. And it's the role of myself and Shriya to help people, you know, think bigger than they may be doing now. So what does the profile look like? Yeah, you can have like this insane Web2 founders, you can have Web2 employees who are crypto curious, you can have seasoned crypto bros, right? Hopefully they're not super bro-y, but like, you know, we can have crypto people. But what I find most interesting is you never know where these founders can come from. They may not have been founder material at first. They may have been an employee in a crypto org. They may have been running a highly profitable MEV trading firm, right? Who knows where they come from? But when that moment clicks and they realize that they can build that dream of theirs, right? That's when me and Shriya come in to make sure that we can ideate this space together. We're very founder first.

Yeah. So mainnet or— go ahead.

Yeah, to answer your question, the use case, you know, everyone wants prediction market. We're very consumer driven because our chain is fast. And to be honest, once you get the right founder, it doesn't matter the idea. So please come talk to us, even if you have no idea, you just want to build something, and then we can give you the ideas. We can idea together.

Yeah, heck, I'm not—

how do you guys think about picking winners? Like, it seems like Monad— Monad is purposefully not kingmaking and not picking winners. So there could be like 5 DEXs that launch on Monad, and I've noticed just watching their marketing, they're purposefully not trying to kingmake. How do you think about kingmaking?

Yeah, I think it's totally fine if you find really good talent, right? We have a, we have a talent issue in crypto. Like, there's a massive skill issue. If you find people who are really, really good, why should they be building the same idea? There's an unlimited amount of ideas. We're founder first, and then we can make a founder. We make sure that that founder succeeds, and we ideate with them on what they can build. I don't understand who wins by having 15 clubs on a chain. As long as the person who's building the club is doing a good job building it.

Yeah, uh, we've been at it for an hour, guys. Um, what, um, and I appreciate the time. Maybe, uh, actually I'm curious about two things, maybe as a, as a breather. One, uh, Brother Bing, please explain. And then HotpotDAO.

Oh, there's no explanation. I love you.

Okay.

So I was, um, so in 2020, there were a bunch of, um, DeFi founders, you know, who are do psyopsing as girls on Twitter. And then I was like, yo, why can't I just psyops as a dude, as a girl? So that was interesting.

Yeah, I don't get too woke in this pod. You know what, you know how I stand on that wokeness thing. But do you, um, do you think that we have a gender issue? Like, you know, founders or just the culture-wise, it's, it's mostly skewed towards males, maybe because, you know, uh, you know, uh, it's more of, to Namik's point, you know, a very gambling type environment. Uh, have you ever felt Or what can we do about it?

Yeah, I think the, the issue is just the same in traditional Web2 tech, to be honest. I don't know if it's— it's probably better than AI, who knows. In fact, sometimes I notice myself going on a call with more women than the men. What I think— I don't think it's a racial issue. I think women should be more vocal where they are, but Again, that's just inspiration, empowerment issue than anything else.

Yeah. Hey man, uh, hotpot dao, what's that all about?

Hotpot dao. Yeah. So I really hate crypto network. Like I hate going into—

you mean conferences?

Conferences. Yeah. I hate going to an event, like deciding what—

yeah, it was like double blow here. We're having them go on, you reference bankless and plug in bankless.

Worthless, and then Brother Bing saying she hates conferences.

This is, this is why I like the team. They're not afraid to speak their mind.

For me on this podcast.

So yeah, you hate networking?

Yeah, I hate networking events. You go in trying to make small talk because, oh God, frankly, I just don't remember you. You're, you're one of the 80 bros I've talked to. So the ideal event to get to know people is always food. Then I started Hotpot DAO in 2020 during MCON, which is a DAO conference, and a bunch of us just want a hotpot restaurant and hang out. Then I just thought, why don't we just do this more often? And also because I love hotpot. And then, you know, 4 years later, it has grown to be the only DAO that has product-market fit in the entire crypto space because people actually pay to come to eat. And every time I get like more people want to sponsor than I believe it.

That's true. The last question for me: favorite hot pot restaurant that you've been, you've been at?

So there is a place in Dubai, it's called Nice Square. The beautiful part of it, it has a rooftop so you can eat hot pot while watching the Dubai skyline. It's quite surreal.

Nice. We'll have to go check it out.

I know.

Um, for— well, now that we're in the conferences thing, I know you guys do the circuit, you know, you're going out. And, uh, where are you next? Where can people meet you in person?

Yep, so I'm in, uh, San Francisco for the next 2 weeks. NAMIC is in New York. We will have a small appearance during current Blockchain Week a small appearance during Token2049, and then we'll also be there for Solana Breakpoint.

Yeah, we'll be, we'll be having a bigger appearance there, so that's exciting.

Very good. Well guys, this has been a treat. I mean, obviously I've had the benefit of knowing you guys, and I wanted for both of you to come on and share the story. Thank you for taking the time. As maybe Any parting thoughts or just maybe where is the best way to interact with you guys on socials or Discord or what have you?

Yeah, you know, I think what I really want to send a message is crypto has been here for so many years. We really do have an adoption issue. And now that MegaETH solved the basic layer, the base layer problem, we don't have any excuse not to build anything. And I want people to rekindle the original fire in their heart when they were like, oh my God, there's something about crypto. I can do something here to change the world. And if you still have that fire, come talk to us. We're here to support you in every single stage.

We don't have a lot of time. I honestly think that crypto— Bitcoin's PMF is downside protection, right, for the world. And Ethereum and Solana and the power of the smart contract is meant to show unbounded creativity to make the world much, much better. But we haven't found a lot of PMF yet, right? That initial mission has not been solved. I don't think we have a lot of time to solve it, right? Every single year we have more and more brain drain. Every single time we have like the— we didn't— it's not good for any of us when the article on Bloomberg about crypto is about like Iggy Glacie's meme coin. And not some peer-to-peer network that's like making the world a better place. I don't think we have a lot of time. If you feel the same way and you're ready to build like real-time apps, please do reach out because we've got to make Ethereum great again. I'm not even— should we get rid of that part? I don't want to get hit by a bunch of Trump supporters or even worse, Democrats.

I mean, I'm wearing the hat, sir, so there's nothing— there's no way around it. That's the name of your company. I'll embrace it. Let's, uh, I, I, I, I respect that. And I, you know, it's, it's, uh, you don't hear it often, but, um, this sense of urgency, uh, I think we found, have found product market fit, unfortunately on certain things like stablecoins. Um, and, and, uh, but unfortunately the headlines, and this is what media companies, uh, not Bankless, of course. Uh, sorry, not, uh, Quarks.

Wow. Jan is about to go and, and we'll cut that out.

But, but I think like media, I think like, I think like media companies report obviously the bad, right? You know, the meme coins, all that phenomenon. But I do hear your sense of urgency. And I think I, I always go back to Uber as a prime example of something that was really had to, it was such a, such a killer product. That it overcame all kinds of resistance at the local level, lobby level, taxis, organizations. It was just because the consumer loved it. And, and I think we haven't, we haven't really figured that out for crypto yet, but we'll get there. Like, I would hope that in the next 5 years there's like a particular product that you walk on the streets and people are like using it and they're like, they're loving it. Like, they're— and, and maybe they don't even talk about it from a this is a crypto thing, but they love it and they can't live without it. And, well, you know, brother Bing, I mean, you lived in Africa. I think like stablecoins are pretty killer.

100%. Yeah, we also have an internal thesis where the mega ETH real-time applications bring more emotional value to users than financial value. So every single application on us is like, people, you know, need to love going play HQ trivia and what is on a fully on-chain Minecraft? What does it really mean? And money token is a small part of it, but you got to love interacting with the blockchain.

Yeah, I will note, Santi, I think stablecoins are a massive use case, right? I grew up, I'm Turkish Cypriot, right? Only one country in the world recognizes it.

It's Turkey.

Not great. But I would say stablecoins are also primarily downside protection. Right. Which is saying like, I do not want to be holding the native currency of my own country. I do not trust the sovereign or whoever's in charge of my nation to let me have, uh, my, my, the money in my bank. So I'm going to hold it in USD on my wallet.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I love stablecoins, but I, yeah, that's, that's also what I think.

Yeah.

Your point's a really good one. And this, uh, this is the last comment, which is most people don't think about finance on a daily basis.

Yeah.

Most people don't check their, think about their bank accounts. They don't rave about Bank of America or JP Morgan. It's sort of like they don't like to do it. It's sort of like they'd rather— it's meant to be invisible and in the background. Here in crypto, we have that on the, on the front seat, and it's the first thing that you see. And just, just the nature of the beast, right? Because you hear these crazy stories of, you know, it's— it is a land of opportunity. And, you know, like every major technological revolution has had this initial like very heavy speculative phase, and I'm not worried about it. I do think that we ought to— we will, and we will figure out, and we will, we will, we will build killer consumer applications. A lot of it has just been building the, the foundations to allow that to happen. So I would challenge like this whole idea that like infra is figured out by no way, shape, or form. Like it's very, very hard to build decentralized systems that are performant. We're finally seeing glimpses of that. And anyone that like doesn't agree with that, I don't think properly understands like the complexity that goes behind building that, but it's worth it. It's worth it. And I, and I think we'll probably see a faster development and rate of iteration and adoption for now that we're entering this application phase. And hopefully it happens in a place like Mega. So awesome, guys. Well, thank you again for taking the time. Really appreciate it. And hopefully our listeners found it really useful. Best way to interact with you guys, Discord, Twitter, other than local events?

Discord, my Twitter account, @hotpot_dao. Very well.

Mine is just my first and last name. On Google, I guess on Twitter. Yeah, I'm a very basic guy. So excited.

We'll link that in the show notes, but, uh, awesome guys. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate the conversation.

Thank you guys for having us.

Hey everyone, big thanks for watching today's episode. Wanted to just quickly remind you about the Stellar Development Foundation's 6th Annual Meridian Conference this October 15th through 17th. In London. This is an incredible opportunity to network with the forward thinkers who are defining the future of this space. Head over to meridian.stellar.org and use the code BLOCKWORKSPOD for early bird pricing.