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.

Onchain Finance vs DeFi Rebecca on why we need to start making this distinction "Hyperliquid is more like onchain finance versus DeFi. I think we have to start making that distinction in a meaningful way" "Onchain finance has the onchain part, a lot of the non-custodial aspects we'd expect, but you have closed source code, a narrow set of permissions. That's different from the hallmarks of what we've long talked about as DeFi" "Are you just a coder doing a GitHub commit or are you creating a much larger onchain transparent market? Everyone's going to hate on me on Twitter. They already do. It's fine"

CLOBs are not going to take us to the RWA promised land. Today Hyperliquid owns the liquidity for a handful of RWA macro names. But outside the top 10 traded assets (which are ~90% of volume) liquidity falls off a cliff. When there's enough retail demand, order books can work. But "perps on everything" is a different problem, and TradFi solved it decades ago. The answer isn't every venue rebuilding its own order book. That's not what Robinhood does, it's not what Schwab does, and it's not what DeFi should be doing either. Building your own book for every asset means bootstrapping demand ticker by ticker, renting liquidity with subsidies, and ending up with thin markets that blow out 200x the moment news hits. It's like sucking the ocean of TradFi liquidity through a straw. Variational skips all of it via the RFQ model. RFQ is how institutions like Dragonfly actually trade. In RFQ, dealers quote just-in-time and hedge on the primary venue as orders come in. This lets Variational mainline TradFi liquidity directly and mirror it on-chain. Margin in smart contracts, settlement in stablecoins, liquidity aggregated from the people who already trade on the biggest underlying markets, like the CME and NYSE. It makes it permissionless to access the same depth and spreads the big boys get. With the cold start problem gone, new markets can ship at the speed of software. By next year I expect RWA perps to be the biggest contract class on-chain, bigger than BTC and ETH perps combined. That's how crypto truly becomes the market for everything. I believe the platform that wins that won't look like a traditional exchange. Proud to lead Variational's $50M Series A. Watch this space.

The MegaETH Global Stress Test 11B transactions in 7 days. On Jan 22nd, we’re opening mainnet to users for several latency-sensitive apps while the chain is under intense sustained load. Ultra-low fees. Real-time transactions. Public Mainnet in the days that follow.

Deployment detected for @wcm_inc World Markets unifies 3 CLOBs (perps, spot and lending) under ATLAS—their proprietary risk engine—creating an exchange with higher leverage, safer liquidations and user access to the leveraged basis trade. All onchain. Better than CEX.