Author: Nancy, PANews

MegaETH’s ecosystem loses another key player.

On January 14, Noise, an early-stage incubation project of MegaETH, announced the completion of a $7.1 million seed round led by Paradigm. However, the focus of this financing is not the amount, but rather Noise’s unexpected decision to switch to Base instead of continuing to stay on MegaETH. This defection of a core project has added more uncertainty to MegaETH’s ecosystem development.

Betting on the attention economy, completing Paradigm-led seed round financing

Just half a year later, the New York-based startup team Noise has attracted capital attention once again.

On January 14, Noise officially announced the completion of a $7.1 million seed round. This round was led by prominent venture capital firm Paradigm, with follow-on investment from Figment Capital, Anagram, GSR, JPEG Trading, and KaitoAI, as well as participation from multiple angel investors including Jordi Hays, Dan Romero, and Kain Warwick.

The funds will primarily be used to accelerate trading infrastructure development and advance the mainnet launch. Prior to this, Noise completed a pre-seed financing involving Figment Capital and Anagram in July 2025.

According to official introduction, Noise is a trend trading platform focused on relevance, aimed at capturing the people and things the internet is currently paying attention to. Here, users can go long or short on contracts about trends, brands, and ideas, just like trading stocks. Trading activity generates prices that serve not just as numbers, but as objective standards 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, measuring network-wide social interaction hotness in real time. When users commit real capital to establish positions, they are essentially voting with their money, which optimizes the information quality driving prices. Ultimately, Noise forms a market that combines objective data performance with subjective trader beliefs.

For users, Noise provides a new tool for quantifying trends. For example, toy brand managers can use it to hedge attention risks from marketing spending; fashion brands can discover emerging talent by observing who’s rising in rankings; investors can express firm beliefs about which AI labs are gaining the most cultural momentum. Essentially, Noise provides users with a new type of daily news, converting previously vague trending data into clear tradable assets.

Over the past year, the explosion of prediction markets has proven that binary questions can support massive economic activity. In market positioning, however, Polymarket and Kalshi provide “yes or no” options for specific dates, while Noise focuses on the real-time evolution of thing relevance, offering “how hot is it now” and “where is this heat heading,” making it a complement and alternative 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 of first-month users remained at 62%, with average session duration reaching 17 minutes, which also confirms the real demand for attention trading from another angle.

Ecosystem projects leaving one after another, MegaETH facing retention challenges

Compared to the backing of investment lineup and funding amounts, Noise’s decision to go independent seems to attract more market attention.

According to plans, Noise will launch its mainnet on Base over the coming months, opening to the public for the first time and supporting real capital trading. However, this strategic shift has sparked considerable controversy in the community.

As is well known, Noise was one of the star projects heavily incubated by Megamafia, MegaETH’s accelerator. But at graduation, Noise chose to abandon MegaETH and instead go to Base ecosystem with its capital.

This move is seen by many as a backstab and faces the risk of cold-starting on a new chain. MegaETH’s official even unfollowed Noise’s founder’s account on the day the financing news was announced. However, some argue that the attention economy track is essentially a traffic business, and compared to MegaETH which is technically hardcore but has an early-stage ecosystem, Base with its massive user base and liquidity might better support Noise’s launch and development.

In fact, this is not the first time MegaETH has experienced core projects going solo.

As early as June 2025, DEX GTE announced securing a $15 million Series A financing exclusively led by Paradigm, bringing cumulative financing to over $25 million, which was interpreted by the community as a major positive for MegaETH ecosystem rise. However, just two months later, the plot took a dramatic turn, with GTE announcing a “breakup” and leaving a cryptic message “GTE has grown up, now it’s time to leave Megamafia,” subsequently announcing plans to launch an independent mainnet. Note that the project’s testnet once attracted over one million users within months.

Stablecoin project Cap also received capital recognition, completing $11 million financing from institutions like Franklin Templeton and Triton Capital. While it hasn’t completely separated, it also adopted a “Ethereum-first, MegaETH as support” dual-chain parallel strategy, which is seen as lacking sufficient confidence in native ecosystem liquidity.

Losing generals one after another undoubtedly brings serious ecosystem retention challenges to MegaETH, which is still in its early stages. But from another angle, this also shows MegaETH’s muscles from afar, proving its incubation capability.