Berlin Takeover
An attempt at building anti-fragile community
I’m writing these words in a cafe in Berlin. For the past month, the MegaETH team has gathered a group of young, hungry, and cracked builders in Berlin, a city with never-ending street art, techno music, wild parks, and the click-clack of the railways.
My Nightmare
As a blockchain founder, my biggest nightmare is being undifferentiated from other fast/cheap blockchains.
“It’s so easy to spin up a blockchain these days. Why would anyone care about MegaETH?” is the most common question I receive, especially from nontechnical minds.
I can give my usual answer of how MegaETH creates a new category of ultra-high-performance blockchain by achieving a record-breaking 100,000 transactions per second and sub-millisecond latency, which means transactions are streamed at lightning speed rather than batched.
Or I can cleverly use our investors’ tagline such as: “the scaling endgame” or “the real Solana.”
But these taglines are just words. And words alone are weak.
An ecosystem, just like a city, must have people who are willing to build the railroad, park, school, and most importantly, a hot pot restaurant.
There’s no sweet dream until we identify these builders and mega-cook with them.
Carbon Community
Dare I say, most crypto communities may look bustling but are, in fact, fragile. The seeming prosperity comes from the industrialization of memes, either via humans or human’s best friends, bots. Protocols can easily gather hundreds of thousands of followers on crypto Twitter and Discord by hinting at an airdrop.
These communities are inherently fragile because they are one-time. They form quickly when the narrative hits, and crumble even faster. Even the zombie rebound feels futile.
Avoid one-time communities at all costs.
But what does it take to build a real antifragile community?
Having grown Hotpot DAO from 10 people to hundreds, my intuition is that in-person connection remains the strongest bond. The time people spend with each other, laughing, joking, teasing, and grinding, defines the core of an ecosystem.
They decide what can be built in a new city.
I asked myself: why not double down on in-person experiences and create a month-long program where builders can cowork and colive? We immediately started looking for accommodation, rented a little hotel in the hipster part of Berlin, and a convenient wework with free coffee and cute dogs occasionally roaming around.
Berlin Takeover
Enter the 10x builder program.
The value proposition is simple: let’s max cook together in May in a city with vibes. Let’s work from Sunday to Friday, have dinner every night, visit the farmers' market on the weekend, and try out the night scene (pro tip: clothes shopping is essential to not get rejected).
Identifying these talented devs was the hardest part.
We tapped into our existing network, persuaded strangers (one I met at my Hotpot DAO event), and sometimes just straight-up cold DMed anon devs on Twitter, with actually-funny memes.
Some builders are seasoned founders with successful exits. Some are ex-Google and Amazon engineers who, for the first time, believe MegaETH provides the right environment to build at internet scale. Some are degen thinkers who really understand the crypto game and want to bring liquidity onchain.
Upon short notice, they all packed their lives and moved to Berlin with us.
Now that one month has passed. MegaMafia has properly taken off. All 10x builders have already identified novel use cases, tried out our devnet, and fleshed out a pitch deck. Some have received term sheets.
What warms my heart the most is that how much the builders love to help each other —from debugging, polishing pitch decks, and brainstorming incentive design. We are really innit together. We are the MegaMafia
What’s Next?
I’m already planning the next Mega Mafia takeover. The strategy is to help each builder grow their product, raise funds, and plan out go-to-market strategies until we are together next time.
For now, I think I’ll perhaps get a good night's sleep first.