Ethereum Layer 2 network and ‘real-time’ blockchain MegaETH’s long-awaited MEGA token began trading on Thursday, with simultaneous spot listings across 13 major centralized exchanges and on-chain access via the network’s decentralized exchanges.

MEGA briefly traded above $0.22 in early price discovery before selling off, falling to roughly $0.15 by mid-morning U.S. East Coast time, according to CoinGecko data. MEGA’s market cap stands near $170 million, and its fully diluted valuation is around $1.5 billion, well below the $6 billion peak its pre-market perpetuals on Hyperliquid notched last October.

Around 1.13 billion tokens, or 11.3% of MEGA’s 10 billion fixed supply, are in circulation at launch.

How Early Backers Fared

The token generation event (TGE) marks the first liquidity event for participants in MegaETH’s three community-led raises, all of which are in profit at current prices, though each has a different vesting schedule that limits how much can be sold today.

Echo round buyers, who paid $0.02 per token in MegaETH’s $10 million December 2024 raise, are sitting on roughly 8.5x paper gains. Only 20% of their allocation unlocks at TGE, followed by a one-year cliff and a three-year vesting period.

Fluffle NFT minters paid 1 ETH (about $2,700 at the time) to mint a soulbound NFT in February 2025, with the first 5,000-NFT installment raising $13.29 million. Each Fluffle entitles its holder to a share of the 2.5% supply allocation, or roughly 50,000 MEGA per NFT, currently worth about $8,500. Half unlocks at TGE, with the rest vesting linearly over six months.

Sonar ICO participants, who bid more than $1 billion for $50 million worth of tokens at a $0.0999 clearing price last October, are up roughly 70%. ICO buyers chose between a full unlock at TGE or a one-year lock at a discount.

The TGE caps a seven-day countdown that began April 23, when 10 Mega Mafia-incubated applications cleared MegaETH’s first key performance indicator of 100,000 transactions each across a 30-day window. MegaETH had tied the TGE to one of three on-chain milestones rather than a fixed calendar date when it unveiled its tokenomics ahead of mainnet.

The other two KPIs, a $500 million USDM circulating supply and three apps generating $50,000 in daily fees for 30 consecutive days, remain unmet. USDM circulation currently sits at roughly $62.9 million, or about 13% of the target, according to MegaETH’s public Road to TGE dashboard.

What MEGA Does

MEGA functions as the bidding currency for MegaETH’s proximity markets, the system that lets market makers and applications pay to colocate near the sequencer for sub-millisecond latency. The MegaETH Foundation has committed to using yield from USDM, the chain’s native stablecoin built in partnership with Ethena, to fund ongoing MEGA buybacks.

MegaETH’s mainnet went live in February with major DeFi protocols, including Aave, deployed at launch. The Ethereum Layer 2 network, which markets itself as a ‘real-time’ blockchain capable of more than 100,000 transactions per second with sub-10 millisecond block times, currently hosts about $355 million in DeFi deposits, with Aave accounting for the bulk of total value locked, per DefiLlama data.

Backers include Ethereum co-founders Vitalik Buterin and Joe Lubin, as well as Dragonfly Capital. The project has raised more than $100 million across the 2024 Echo round, the Fluffles soulbound NFT mint, the Sonar ICO, and prior venture funding.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.