Ethereum layer-2 network MegaETH saw its initial coin offering (ICO) sell out within minutes, attracting more than $450 million in commitments, roughly $400 million above its initial raise cap of just under $50 million.
The auction for the MEGA token opened on Monday, allocating 5% of the total 10 billion token supply. Participants could bid between $2,650 and $186,282, with the option of a one-year lock-up period that offers a 10% discount.
Due to the heavy oversubscription, MegaETH said a special allocation mechanism will determine final distributions when the countdown ends in two days. The system will consider factors such as past engagement in the MegaETH and Ethereum ecosystems and whether bidders chose the lock-up option.
According to its white paper, the MEGA token is scheduled to launch in January 2026. It will trade on select centralized and decentralized exchanges operating on MegaETH, functioning as a standard ERC-20 token while powering the network’s sequencer rotation and proximity markets, two new infrastructure features at the heart of the project’s design.
Analysts Raise Concerns About Excessive Selling Trading as MegaETH Token Sale Exceeds Five Times its Limit
X reports revealed the MegaETH Token Sale went to five times its fundraising limit within two hours after the $METH token sale was oversubscribed in minutes, with 819 addresses submitting bids in the maximum amount of 0.5 ETH, according to blockchain analytics company Arkham.
Brian Q, an analyst at the onchain analytics site Santiment, noted that aggressive and synchronized buying can be a red flag, but it may also reflect excitement from investors over the scope of the goals measured with the testing of the $METH road map.
MegaETH’s development team, MegaLabs has received multimillion-dollar funding and has a partner in Ethereum co-founders Vitalik Buterin and Joe Lubin as part of their support. MegaETH recently launched their testnet in March 2023 and has committed to providing up to 100,000 transactions per second with latency lower than a millisecond on their anticipated mainnet.