Author: Nancy, PANews
MegaETH's ecosystem has lost another key player.
On January 14, Noise, an early incubated project of MegaETH, announced the completion of a $7.1 million seed funding round led by Paradigm. However, the focus of this funding round was not the amount, but Noise's unexpected decision to shift to Base instead of remaining with MegaETH. This defection of a core project adds more uncertainty to the development of MegaETH's ecosystem.
Betting on the Attention Economy, Completes Paradigm-Led Seed Funding Round
After just half a year, the New York-based startup team Noise has once again caught the eye of capital.
On January 14, Noise officially announced the completion of a $7.1 million seed funding round. This round was led by renowned venture capital firm Paradigm, with participation from Figment Capital, Anagram, GSR, JPEG Trading, and KaitoAI, among other institutions. Several angel investors, including Jordi Hays, Dan Romero, and Kain Warwick, also took part.
The funds will be primarily used to accelerate the construction of trading infrastructure and advance the mainnet launch process. Prior to this, Noise had completed a pre-seed funding round in July 2025 with participation from Figment Capital and Anagram.
According to official introductions, Noise is a trend trading platform focused on relevance, aiming to capture the people and things currently capturing the internet's attention. Here, users can go long or short on contracts related to trends, brands, and ideas, much like trading stocks. Trading activity generates prices—not just numbers, but an objective standard for measuring cultural relevance.
This pricing mechanism stems from two signals: data and trading. Noise aggregates activity data from X (formerly Twitter) to calculate a transparent attention index for each trend, thereby measuring the heat of social interactions across the network in real-time. When users invest real money to establish positions, they are essentially voting with their capital, optimizing the quality of information driving the prices. Ultimately, Noise forms a market that combines objective data performance with the subjective beliefs of traders.
For users, Noise provides a new tool for quantifying trends. For example, a toy brand manager could use it to hedge the attention risk associated with marketing expenditures; a fashion brand could discover emerging talent by observing who is rising on the leaderboard; investors could express their firm beliefs about which AI lab is gaining the most cultural momentum. In essence, Noise offers users a new type of daily news, turning previously vague popularity into clear, tradable assets.
Over the past year, the explosion of prediction markets has proven that binary questions can support massive economic activity. However, in terms of market positioning, platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi offer "yes or no" options for specific dates, while Noise focuses on the real-time evolution of relevance, providing answers to "how hot is it now" and "where is this heat heading," making it a complementary and alternative solution to prediction markets.
Noise's model has been preliminarily validated during the testnet phase. In the Beta version launched last May, 1,300 users across 14 markets not only contributed trading volume but also demonstrated remarkable stickiness. Three months later, the active retention rate for first-month users remained at 62%, with an average single-use duration of 17 minutes, indirectly proving the real demand for attention trading.
Ecosystem Projects Successively Break Away, MegaETH Faces Retention Challenges
Compared to the support from the investment lineup and the amount raised, the news of Noise's decision to break away seems to have drawn more market attention.
According to the plan, Noise will launch its mainnet on Base in the coming months, opening to the public for the first time and supporting real-money trading. However, this strategic shift has sparked considerable controversy within the community.
As is well known, Noise was once one of the star projects incubated by MegaETH's accelerator, Megamafia. But upon "graduation," Noise chose to abandon MegaETH and instead, with funding, join the Base ecosystem.
This move was seen by many as a betrayal and faces the risk of a cold start on a new chain. MegaETH官方 even unfollowed the founder of Noise's account on the day the funding news was announced. However, some voices argue that the attention economy赛道 is inherently a流量 business. Compared to the technically robust but still early-stage MegaETH ecosystem, Base, with its vast user base and liquidity, might better support Noise's launch and development.
In fact, this is not the first time MegaETH has experienced a core project going independent.
As early as June 2025, DEX GTE announced it had secured a $15 million Series A funding round exclusively led by Paradigm, bringing its total funding to over $25 million. This news was interpreted by the community as a major positive for the rise of the MegaETH ecosystem. However, just two months later, the plot took a sharp turn. GTE announced a "breakup," leaving behind the意味深长的 statement "GTE has grown up and is now leaving Mega Mafia," followed by an announcement of plans to launch an independent mainnet. It is worth noting that the project's testnet had once attracted over a million users in just a few months.
Another stablecoin project, Cap, also received capital recognition, completing a $11 million funding round from institutions like Franklin Templeton and Triton Capital. Although it did not completely break away, it adopted a dual-chain strategy of "prioritizing Ethereum, with MegaETH playing a supporting role," which was seen as lacking sufficient confidence in the original ecosystem's liquidity.
Losing key players one after another undoubtedly poses a severe ecological retention challenge for MegaETH, which is still in its early stages. But from another perspective, this also showcases MegaETH's incubation capabilities from the side.
