Shuyao Kong@hotpot_dao
After spending the last two years building the MegaMafia, we’ve decided to sunset the program.
While it was a success in many ways, we believe that the program was built on assumptions that no longer hold.
Here are some reflections, and what’s coming up next.
> We had real conviction in Mafia founders, and have gone above and beyond in standing by their side to bring their products to market. Some examples include: restructuring the GTE leadership team during critical moments just one month after their initial pre-seed raise, offering to buy out Noise's investors when they tried to push out the CEO, and played a crucial role as they pivoted from their initial prediction market idea, and merging the Tenten and HitOne team after seeing the synergy between the two.
> Across both cohorts which in total included 20 teams, we lent our reputation and networks to founders so they could go on to raise over $80m in funding in pre-seeds, seeds, and series As. We kept the MegaETH’s raise to a minimum so investors can get more skin in the game with the Apps directly, rather than the protocol.
> For teams that had difficulty in raising when the market turned bearish, we extended resources, engineering bandwidth, and actual capital (e.g. six figures in audit for Avon) so they could make it to Mainnet. We did it solely to help founders see their vision through.
> We set the product vision for 5 teams and supported their initial builds before eventually facilitating their fundraises from leading tier-1 and tier-2 funds.
> We spent significant cash (in the millions) bootstrapping teams’ DeFi requirements, through market-making support, direct lending, and other liquidity related needs.
> We hosted 5 large-scale in-person events (New York, Brussels, Bangkok, Singapore, and Seoul) so MegaMafia projects could meet investors and community members from around the world.
In many ways, the MegaMafia was the best incubator of this cycle. But very little of that value has trickled to Mega. In fact, most of those applications are no longer being built with us. At the time, we intentionally took no equity, governance rights, nor economic value because we wanted people to be genuinely bought into the Mega vision and the power of our technology. While we will continue to support existing MegaMafia projects, there will no longer be MegaMafia 3.0.
What’s next?
Our ecosystem goal going forward is to support teams building OMEGA applications, apps that are only possible on MegaETH, using our wallet infrastructure and stablecoin.
More importantly, we're redirecting the energy we were lending to third-party builders into our own first-party applications: consumer-grade apps, built directly by us, for the people we're trying to serve. Where MegaMafia was indirect, betting on other teams to build value we'd eventually capture, first-party apps let us build direct relationships with end users ourselves, with all the upside and accountability that comes with owning the outcome.
We're aiming for faster feedback loops, with insane focus on accruing value directly to the protocol.
