MegaETH loses another major player! Noise shifts to Base after raising funds from Paradigm

Author: Nancy, PANews

MegaETH ecosystem suffers another major blow.
On January 14, the early incubation project Noise announced the completion of a $7.1 million seed round led by Paradigm. However, the focus of this funding round was not on the amount, but on Noise unexpectedly choosing to switch to Base instead of continuing to stay within MegaETH. The defection of this core project adds more variables to MegaETH's ecosystem development.
Focusing on the attention economy, completing a seed round led by Paradigm
Just half a year later, a New York-based startup team Noise has once again attracted capital interest.
On January 14, Noise officially announced the completion of a $7.1 million seed round. This round was led by renowned venture capital firm Paradigm, with co-investors including Figment Capital, Anagram, GSR, JPEG Trading, and KaitoAI, as well as multiple angel investors such as Jordi Hays, Dan Romero, and Kain Warwick.
The funds will mainly be used to accelerate trading infrastructure construction and promote the mainnet release 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 information, Noise is a trend trading platform focused on relevance, aiming to capture current online figures and topics of interest. Here, users can trade contracts related to trends, brands, and ideas by going long or short, similar to stock trading. Trading activities generate prices, which are not just numbers but serve as objective standards for measuring cultural relevance.
This price mechanism is based on two signals: data and trading. Noise aggregates activity data from X (formerly Twitter) to calculate transparent attention indices for each trend, providing real-time measures of social interaction heat across the web. When users invest real money to establish positions, they are effectively voting with their funds, which optimizes the quality of information driving prices. Ultimately, Noise creates a market that combines objective data performance with subjective trader beliefs.
For users, Noise offers a new tool to quantify trends. For example, toy brand managers can use it to hedge attention risks from marketing expenditures; fashion brands can identify emerging talents by observing who rises on the leaderboard; investors can express strong beliefs about which AI labs are gaining the most cultural momentum. Essentially, Noise provides users with a new type of daily news, transforming vague popularity into clear tradable assets.
Over the past year, the explosive growth of prediction markets has proven that binary questions can support significant 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 insights into “current heat” and “where this heat is heading,” making it a complementary or alternative prediction market.
Noise's model has been preliminarily validated during the testnet phase. Since launching the beta version in May last year, 1,300 users have contributed not only trading volume across 14 markets but also demonstrated remarkable stickiness. Three months later, the active retention rate of initial users remained at 62%, with an average session length of 17 minutes, indirectly confirming the genuine demand for attention trading.
Ecological projects establish new portals one after another, and MegaETH faces retention challenges head-on.
Compared to investment support and funding amounts, the news that Noise decided to establish a separate portal seems to attract more market attention.
According to plans, Noise will launch its mainnet on Base in the coming months, opening to the public for the first time and supporting real fund trading. However, this strategic shift has sparked considerable controversy within the community.
It is well known that Noise was one of the star projects incubated by MegaETH's accelerator Megamafia. But upon “graduation,” Noise chose to abandon MegaETH and instead bring capital to the Base ecosystem.
This move is seen by many as a betrayal and risks restarting on a new chain. On the same day as the funding announcement, MegaETH's official account unfollowed Noise's founder. However, some believe that the attention economy track is fundamentally a traffic business. Compared to the technically hardcore but early-stage MegaETH ecosystem, relying on the large user base and liquidity of Base 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 it had secured a $15 million Series A funding round led exclusively by Paradigm, bringing its total funding to over $25 million. This news was seen as a positive sign for MegaETH's rise. However, just two months later, the situation took a sharp turn. GTE announced a “breakup,” leaving a cryptic message: “GTE has grown up and now needs to leave Mega Mafia,” and then announced plans to launch an independent mainnet. Notably, the testnet of this project once attracted over one million users within 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 not fully separated, it adopted a dual-chain strategy with Ethereum and MegaETH supporting each other, indicating a lack of confidence in native ecosystem liquidity.
Losing major projects one after another undoubtedly presents serious ecosystem retention challenges for the still-in-early-stage MegaETH. But from another perspective, this also demonstrates MegaETH's incubation capability, proving its ability to nurture projects.