megaETH is in disguise IC0, why is the community so controversial?

Original | Odaily Planet Daily

Author｜Golem

MegaETH, a real-time blockchain focused on improving Ethereum performance, announced today that it will launch a new NFT series: The Fluffle. The total amount of the NFT series is 10,000, the whitelist price is 1ETH, and it is an untradeable and transferred SBT (soul-binded token). The benefits enjoyed by NFT holders include the future 5% of token allocation, and TGE can unlock it on the same day. 50%, the remaining will be unlocked linearly within 6 months. The details of the whitelisting rules have not been announced yet, but users can currently check whether they are eligible for whitelisting on the official website .

megaETH is one of the popular Ethereum expansion solutions in this round. It completed a $20 million seed round financing on June 27, 2024, and received financial support from institutions and celebrities such as Dragonfly, Robot Ventures, Folius Ventures and Vitalik Buterin; 2024 In December 2019, it conducted a community round of financing on the Echo platform, and completed the financing target of US$10 million in 3 minutes, with a valuation of more than US$200 million.

However, the NFT release event launched by megaETH this time has caused heated controversy in the community. On the one hand, some players believe that the odds of this fundraising are very high and actively receive whitelists off the court. On the other hand, some players questioned that megaETH's move was a disguised ICO and harvesting the community in advance before the bull market ended. So who makes more sense? Odaily Planet Daily will sort out the views of both parties in this article for readers' reference and will not be used as any investment advice.

Zhengfang: The valuation is reasonable and worth participating in

There is no doubt that the highlight of megaETH's The Fluffle series NFT this time is the future 5% of the token airdrop allocation, so the community generally regards it as a "backdrawal of coins" activity. The successful release project party has obtained 10,000 ETH. The stage is approximately US$27 million (if ETH is not falling), and the token FDV is calculated based on a 5% airdrop ratio of US$540 million.

If the previous $30 million financing was added, the total financing amount of megaETH reached US$57 million. Based on the general token valuation 20 times the financing amount, megaETH's FDV is only US$1.14 billion.

But whether it is the $540 million FDV calculated based on NFT pricing or the $1.14 billion FDV estimated based on financing, community players supporting megaETH believe that the valuation is still within a reasonable range and has at least 10 times the potential income. After all, compared with the FDVs of the previous popular Ethereum expansion plan TEG, such as ZKsync (US$4.2 billion), Starknet (US$19.5 billion) and Blast (US$2.7 billion), megaETH's current FDV is indeed not high, and it is still lower than Starknet currently has a circulating market value of US$660 million.

ABCDE Venture BMAN posted a message to support megaETH : "They could have raised more funds, but they rejected the VC's $1 billion offer and chose to use a retro ICO method to give tokens to more communities. I believe this is for liquidity Funding is an attractive opportunity, and it is also the most asymmetric opportunity recently. As an investor, I am glad Ethereum has returned to the simple, retro ICO era."

Enzoblue, a team member of the NFT project CyberKongz, made a bold statement , and if anyone doesn't want a whitelist, he can DM it.

Some community players have also seen through the reason why megaETH "sells coins through backdoors". On the one hand, using SBT can avoid NFT's speculation in the secondary market; on the other hand, it clearly defines NFT as "collectibles", that is, it reasonably avoids legal risks, and then uses private equity prices that are almost the same as VCs in the form of NFTs. Give to the community. MegaETH Lianchuangcai Brother also said bluntly when facing the doubts of the community; "We cannot directly ICO to the community, we can only lower the valuation to the community through NFT in this way, and whether we buy or not depends on ourselves. The valuation of the project in mind.”

Opposing side: The main net has not moved, harvest it in advance

Of course, in this currency circle where true and false doping and innocence rely entirely on eloquence, if you want to understand the real ideas of the project party, you cannot just look at what he says. Therefore, some community players have questioned megaETH, believing that in the current market environment, the valuation of US$540 million is still too high. The project party sells coins before it goes online to the main network, just to take advantage of the sufficient liquidity in the bull market to harvest in advance.

During this cycle, the market is generally filled with the phenomenon of project parties issuing coins/listing coins means the end point. A large number of projects even directly stop operating after issuing coins and making profits. Every day, they only hope that the tokens will be unlocked as soon as possible. With the lessons of the past, megaETH's disguised ICO took place before the main network was launched. The real product has not yet been implemented. After the funds are obtained, will there be motivation to continue to develop later? Is the product worthy of its current valuation? These issues are inevitably worrying. After all, in the end, in the current situation of imperfect supervision, the highest constraint rule for Web3 project parties is their own moral level. Is Build or money preferred?

Chinese-speaking KOL Fengmi published a long article questioning megaETH's NFT release event, saying that MegaETH does not really care about the community experience, and if it is really concerned, it should be distributed through fair mechanisms (such as game contributions, activity rewards, and even NFT staking). Tokens, and the project party seems to oppose the "meaningless airdrop points system", but in fact it just found an excuse to rationalize itself to sell coins directly.

KOL Feng Wuxiang also posted a message to worry about the subsequent airdrop ratio of MegaETH. After all, since ancient times, the Emperor of Henry can't beat the krypton gold giants. At the same time, he said that compared to Monad, he is still engaged in ecological construction and attaching importance to ecological activities, MegaETH obtained funds through ICO. There is no longer even the need for CEX to provide liquidity exit, such a new paradigm may not be a good thing for the industry.