Today’s 0xResearch edition looks at MegaETH, an up and coming performant Ethereum L2 that promises to put all other chains’ speeds to shame.

Solana liquid staking tokens:

Solana’s liquid staking landscape has become more crowded, but new entrants struggle to gain significant market share so as to challenge Jito’s dominance.

Liquid staking tokens (LSTs) now account for 12.8% of all staked SOL — double the share from a year ago. Jito’s lead remains stark: jitoSOL commands 38% of the LST market.

Trailing behind are Binance’s bnSOL (18%) and Marinade’s mSOL (10%), while Jupiter’s jupSOL has steadily gained ground. Overall, Solana boasts 1,232 active validators, a healthy staking ratio of 64.3%, and over $45 billion in staked SOL at current prices.

The ecosystem’s economic model has shifted too — net staking yields sitting at 8.25% are driven mostly by SOL issuance (92%), though Jito tips now contribute 8%. With SIMD-123 set to enable stakers to share in priority fees, liquid staking dynamics may evolve even further.

You’ll find this data and more on the new “staking” tab built by @Psilodelic on Blockworks’ public Solana dashboard.

— Macauley Peterson

No hype. Just product.

Permissionless IV isn’t about what might get built. It’s about what’s already working and what’s next.

We’re bringing together devs, founders, and teams who are:

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📅 June 22–26 | Brooklyn, NY 

A MegaETH primer

MegaETH is an EVM L2 that settles to Ethereum. 

What makes it special? Well…it’s fast.

MegaETH markets itself as the first “real-time” blockchain. It theoretically claims to be able to process about 1.7 gigagas/s (or 1,700 Mgas/s) in transaction speeds on its current testnet.

Let’s put that into context. 

1,700 Mgas/s completely dwarfs the speeds of the major L2s like Optimism (15 Mgas/s) and Arbitrum (128 Mgas/s).

It also eclipses Base’s announced target goal to hit 1000 Mgas/s, or Monad L1’s 300 Mgas/s.

The chain claims to have 10 ms block times, which seems to check out on its three-week-old testnet’s block explorer.

MegaETH’s secret sauce?

MegaETH makes a few crucial trade-offs on the consensus layer that centralizes block production, or what is sometimes referred to by the team as “node specialization.” 

Explained simply, the network uses a single sequencer that is consensus-free. Typically, blockchains have geographically dispersed nodes. The network is more decentralized but it comes at the cost of latency overhead concerning distributed node consensus. MegaETH’s decision to use one sequencer removes the execution redundancy for nodes to execute all transactions, allowing MegaETH to achieve its very low sub-10ms latencies.

Other technical innovations that MegaETH made include replacing Ethereum’s default Hexary Patricia Merkle Tree with a custom state tree, which allows for up to 10x higher write bandwidth at the cost of full EVM-equivalency.

For a technical overview, listen to the 0xResearch podcast episode with MegaETH founders Lei and Namik.

MegaETH ecosystem

Unlike most chains raising billion dollar valuations from VCs, MegaETH has sought to signal community alignment by enabling retail access to its rounds at attractive valuations. 

In December 2024, MegaETH opened its round at a $200m valuation to retail investors on Echo, raising about $10 million in a record two-three minutes. Subsequently, MegaETH also raised 10k ETH in its “Fluffle” soulbound NFT sale, equivalent to about 5% of the MegaETH token supply.

MegaETH had previously raised $20m in June 2024 from VCs in a seed round backed by Dragonfly and which included angel investors such as Ethereum co-founders Vitalik Buterin and Joseph Lubin.

Also of note is how MegaETH’s apps have together seemingly raised more money than the MegaETH protocol itself. This indicates investor belief in the MegaETH application layer, which suggests the blazing fast performance of the MegaETH protocol may be creating uniquely new apps that can’t be built elsewhere.

Such notable apps include the GTE DEX, the TikTok-gamified derivatives exchange Euphoria, and CAP, a stablecoin protocol that leverages EigenLayer restaking to outsource stablecoin yield generation.

DeFi apps like GTE and Euphoria in particular leverage “Bolt,” the “fastest oracle ever,” built by RedStone for high-performance chains like MegaETH. RedStone claims Bolt will be able to push new prices onchain at a speed of ~every 2.4 ms — making it the only oracle fast enough to keep up with MegaETH.

— Donovan Choy

PancakeSwap veCAKE gets sliced in new proposal

PancakeSwap’s new Tokenomics v3 proposal promises “true ownership, simplified governance and sustainable growth.” Central to this shift is the deprecation of veCAKE replaced with direct emissions management and a max one-year lock, aimed at boosting capital efficiency and simplifying participation.

However, critics warn the proposal sets a dangerous precedent. Some question its effect on governance integrity and emissions control. Curve founder Michael Egorov called it a “governance attack at its finest,” arguing that CAKE insiders effectively wipe out governance rights of existing veCAKE holders and could force-unlock their own tokens after the vote. “Upgradability is a bug,” Egorov cautioned on X. “Don’t make your veGovernance upgradable, especially the lock part.”

Others, like forum member Hubert, criticized the motivation behind the change: bribes from Magpie Finance and similar Convex-style forks that siphoned emissions with little benefit to PancakeSwap. The solution wasn’t killing veCAKE, “one of the best veModels” in the market, Hubert argued, but rather capping emissions to depegged mAsset pairs and restructuring incentives around fee generation.

Magpie mAssets are synthetic versions of real assets that users receive when depositing tokens into Magpie. They have a tendency to depeg due to low liquidity or limited redemption mechanisms.

Supporters of v3 counter that veCAKE has failed to curb CAKE sell pressure and now adds inefficiency and opacity. The new model aims to cut emissions by 43% and redirect incentives to high-volume, high-fee pools.

If there's consensus or strong support, a discussion proposal is promoted to a formal vote through PancakeSwap’s own Governance Portal. In its first day, the topic has already accumulated about 150 comments from 50 users.

— Macauley Peterson