🔪 Ethereum-killer killer

It’s true. ICOs really are back. Sorta. 

This new era of the initial coin offering needs a qualifier. In the name, even.

The KYC ICO.

💍 One node to rule them all

It’s the identity checks that really differentiates regulated crowdfunding gateways like Echo, Sonar and Legion from just plain ol’ Ethereum (arguably the greatest crowdfunding platform of all time — no KYC there!).

We love to bring up Ethereum’s ICO mania arc. Gemini’s Cryptopedia cites one mind-boggling stat: 2,000 unique token sales occurred on Ethereum between 2017 and 2018 (averaging 83 per month). Altogether those ICOs raised more than $10 billion.

But what about all those ICOs gives the fuzziest feeling? After all, they were largely chaotic, with scams and sketchy celebrity endorsements aplenty. 

Still, I bet that when you think of the frothiest moments from the bull markets you’ve lived through, it’s chaos that comes to mind: huge numbers, big green candles, fresh all-time highs and monster raises.

Then, a massive correction over multiple weeks or even months, with widespread liquidations (and maybe a few bankruptcies). At its bleakest, a new coin launches to enormous pent-up interest and the rally is back on.

Looking at the stats for MegaETH’s public sale, it seems MEGA is meant to be that coin for the current scenario. 

More than $737 million has been committed so far, with still one full day to go, which is 14.5x the project’s initial target of just under $50 million. 

That’s supposed to convert to a FDV at launch of $14.5 billion, which would be about the same as AVAX or XLM.

The size of the MEGA raise is not to be understated. Based on its current commitments, the MEGA sale would already rank third on the list of crowdfunded projects of all time, ahead of Filecoin and Tezos but still a ways below EOS (and overall, it’s nearly on par with the amount that Star Citizen’s developer claims to have raised).

And that’s without the participation of anyone who didn’t pass identity verification on Sonar, or anyone from China or the United Kingdom, and only accredited investors in the US. Polymarket has the odds of MegaETH clearing $1.4 billion in commitments at 28%.

Of course, to Echo and Sonar’s credit, they really do want to capture the spirit of the Ethereum ICO craze, with its commitment to self-hosted public sales. So, while compliance doesn’t exactly square with the anarchy that was Ethereum’s token sale heyday, it’s a sober fact of crypto life in 2025.

MEGA still represents something much more than that. It’s the last of the gimmick projects for this cycle, after Berachain and World Liberty Financial, whereby centralization is a primary feature, not a bug.

An EVM with a single sequencer, operated by one massively powerful machine at a time, untethered from the usual constraints of distributed computing. 

MegaETH, the Ethereum-killer killer with max TPS and a central point of potential failure.

Sounds like chaos to me.

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