Shuyao Kong on Why MegaETH Is the Only Option for Onchain Finance

**Robbie Klages** (0:00)
I am live here with Shuyao Kong of MegaETH. Shuyao, welcome to the show, welcome to the towers. Great to see you again here in New York, your favorite city in the world or no?

**Shuyao Kong** (0:10)
Absolutely, nothing competes with New York.

**Robbie Klages** (0:12)
Nice, well, it's good to have you.

**Shuyao Kong** (0:13)
But I've been as I've mentioned, yeah.

**Robbie Klages** (0:15)
Yes, yes, with the AI Doomers.

**Shuyao Kong** (0:18)
Exactly.

**Robbie Klages** (0:19)
Exactly. Well, good to have you. It's been a while. It's been maybe six, eight months since you've been on the show. And obviously, you guys have launched the Mainnet, you guys have gotten products out there, apps out there. So yeah, catch me up. Well, what's been the last six months like? And then let's talk about what happened after Mainnet.

**Shuyao Kong** (0:37)
Yeah, absolutely. So I think the biggest news is the Mainnet went live after working on it for three years, believe it or not. Blockchains are actually indeed really difficult to build. And then setting up the infrastructure around the chain has also been very painful.
But luckily, I think I'm just really relieved that the chain is live. It's really, really freaking fast, as we promised. Nothing has broken, and every promise we've given to the community and investor about technology has come to fruition. So I'm just really happy about it.
There are things that concern me as well. As most people know, we launched the chain, and we started the KPI-based TGE, and most of our efforts are focusing on having a very healthy, sustainable chain economics via the apps, via the stablecoin USDM.
So the focus for the entire team is to make sure that the apps are going live. They're going live with good quality. They're going live with good adoption. I think yesterday, the Bricks team came on the show. Yeah. So we have been working tirelessly and in secret of a lot of new primitive. I think Bricks represent one of them. Working with them to make sure that they are going live with us has been our focus.

**Robbie Klages** (2:13)
Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. So curious then, like it's been about two months, what are, I know you kind of touched on a bit, but maybe a bit more concretely, what are some of the things that you've been most positive about post Mainnet? And then, as you said, some of the kind of things that you guys are trying to work on, improve, is it just shipping apps, talking about the pros and cons here, and let's get into some of the nuance.

**Shuyao Kong** (2:35)
Yeah. The positive is, you know, we continue to welcome more new builders. Okay. It's amazing, guys. People say like, oh, you know, everybody pivoted to AI. It's not true.
Last night, so every time I'm in town, sometimes when I'm not in town, we have this Mega Mafia hangout. We go to one of our builders' rooftop, and, you know, we grab industry pizza, grab a beer, and just chat and talk about life, talk about work. And yesterday, we had a really good turnout. We have new builders coming in. The dream team, for example, they're building an option protocol, but it's extremely retail-friendly. If you use the app, you don't really need to understand option in order to trade. So I'm continuously impressed by the type of builders we're able to attract. I think partly it's because the chain is indeed really performant. I think partly because I think Mega has demonstrated that we walk the talk. We say we're community-focused. We've done a bunch of investment rounds that are targeting retail communities. We said the chain is fast, and chain turned out to be really fast. We did the stress test last year, which is 40k TPS continues blasting the chain, and it works beautifully.
I think lastly is I believe that we're a chain with a bit of more aesthetics and attitude, trying to stay out of the typical crypto UI UX. So yeah, I've been very positive, surprised, had a great time hangout with the builders. I think they teach me more than I teach them.
Because they are expert in their area, and they come to you, and they trust their entire product on your platform. They want you to understand their unique value proposition, their growth market. So I'm now forced to dive really deep into different sectors, really fun.
And the things that I would say a bit challenging, and indeed, I lose sleep over this, is apps is our biggest focus, but every app has their own challenge. And there's very little that I can go and fix it for them. So the Bricks guy, give another example. They were supposed to launch with us a month ago. However, they have to go through a lot of paperwork in Turkey with the central banks, etc. And it requires humongous amount of interpersonal relationship, and this type of things take time. So I think my job is to make sure that everything is settled for them, and whenever they're ready, we're ready there for them. So it's a bit of a coordination that has been taking a lot of time.