OMEGA: Insights from Mafia 2.0 Applications

We reviewed over 300 applications for MegaMafia 2.0 (our second accelerator cohort) and found the answers to be rich with builder insights. Lets explore them.

The questions in the application were made to be provocative—forcing applicants to give opinionated takes on which technical constraints matter most, which industry beliefs are bullshit, and what has held crypto back broadly. With 200-word limits, people had to cut straight to the point.

Lets explore some of them.

1. Screw ideas; Founders matter.

MegaMafia 1.0 worked — not because the initial ideas were perfect, but because the founders were exceptional. Nearly every team pivoted at some point, yet the cohort consistently delivered zero-to-one applications.

Cornerstone qualities that we admire include

• Deep Belief in Crypto's World Domination
• Unbounded Creativity
• Willingness to Pivot Until PMF

Therefore, for the second cohort, our application questions are designed to be highly opinionated, allowing builders to express their creative thinking, honest critique, and unique insight about the industry and entrepreneurship.

POPULAR QUESTIONS

1. The Quiet Part Out Loud

• "Have you come across any projects that, while ethically murky, revealed something interesting about incentive systems and user behaviors? If so, what were some notable takeaways? (Not endorsing, just analyzing.)"
• "What's a common belief in crypto that you think is bullshit?"

2. Building Products That Matter

• "What do app-level builders often get wrong?"

3. The Road to Adoption

• "What signals tell you a community is authentically engaged?"

4. People and Projects

• "What popular protocol is going to zero by the end of this cycle?"
• "What's the clearest indicator that a founder or project is ngmi?"
• "What crypto apps did you use last week? Will you use them a year from now?"

Dataset Overview

• Applications Received: 300+
• Response Limit: 200 words per question
• Period: April–June 2025

A breakdown of the verticals for which the applications belong to

2. The Psychology of Aspiring Founders

2.1 USERS FIRST, CRYPTO SECOND

Keyword analysis reveals that aspiring founders care more about users than they do about crypto. "User(s)" appeared 552 times—more frequently than "Crypto" (475 mentions), "MegaETH" (202 mentions), or any other term including technical concepts like "Latency" (158 mentions) or "Contract Size" (131 mentions).

Many of these builders spoke about ambitious user-first visions for onchain Social Media Platforms, Games (e.g. RPGs, Mass Trivia), and Micro-Payment solutions.

The distribution of word appearance throughout all applications

This user-centricity wasn't merely semantic. Founders consistently framed technical capabilities in terms of user benefits (snappy UX) rather than raw performance metrics (latency or execution speeds).

Similarly, despite DeFi's continued market dominance and strong representation in our applicant pool (32.8%), consumer applications led at 35.2%.

2.2 EVERYONE IS ANXIOUS

Anxious about adoption

• When given multiple open-ended questions to choose from, 43% of the applicants answered the same question about adoption bottlenecks.
• Behind the concern, builders point toward crypto’s over-financialized value proposition, convoluted UX, and steep learning curves as reasons for the lack of mainstream adoption.

Anxious about too much infra-talk

• Applicants understood that users don't want a spec sheet; they want useful features that solve real problems or deliver delightful experiences.
• They recognized that the past 5 years of incremental infra improvements haven’t resulted in significant-enough breakthroughs, and that the era of simply forking existing primitives to new chains is over.

Anxious about over-financialization

• There's an urgency in their responses: they understand that if crypto continues to rely on speculation as its core value proposition and maintains an insular culture, it will never achieve escape velocity.
• There was a deeply self-conscious attitude, a collective reckoning with fundamental questions of identity and purpose: who are we building for, and what are we really trying to accomplish?

Below are a collection of responses highlighting the above...

What's the biggest bottleneck to real adoption of crypto-native apps?

"The biggest bottleneck is product ergonomics, a mix of poor UX and fuzzy value messaging. In crypto, key value propositions are mostly based on how dApps are built ('fully on-chain,' 'MPC-secure') or what chain they're built on. Instead of why the user should care ('2-tap global payout,' 'earn 25% on idle cash/savings')."

What's the biggest bottleneck to real adoption of crypto-native apps?

"The core challenge is that non-crypto users generally have lower risk tolerance, higher expectations for user experience, and entirely different sources of opinions. Our thesis is that the 'early adopters' with the highest risk appetite have already entered the crypto space over the past 14 years."

What's the biggest bottleneck to real adoption of crypto-native apps?

"Speculation as purpose. I think that as long as crypto doesn't go beyond pure speculation (crypto economics as bootstrapping mechanism doesn't count), there won't be any real adoption of crypto-native apps…There needs to be more innovation on use cases solving real pain points rather than incremental improvements of existing primitives."

What's the biggest bottleneck to real adoption of crypto-native apps?

""Mass adoption will come once people understand the tech." This is pure cope. Users don't care about your ZK proofs, MEV resistance, or gasless meta-transactions… The obsession with "educating the masses" is often just an excuse for bad UX. Adoption happens when crypto becomes invisible…like HTTPS or cloud infra.""

2.2.1 DETECTING BULLSHIT: From NGMI to WAGMI

The most revealing responses came from questions that invited criticism.

When asked "What do app-level builders often get wrong?" and “What’s the clearest indicator that a founder or project is ngmi?” applicants delivered brutal honesty; with ~78.9% of applicants choosing to answer critique-type questions.

Tellingly, these builders continued to address elements of adoption bottlenecks in these critiques, underscoring the prevalence of how adoption anxiety is a top-line concern.

More examples...

What's the clearest indicator that a founder or project is ngmi?

"When investors or cofounders stop talking to users every day and sharing how they use the product, growth stalls. A great founder listens to user feedback and market signals, then acts quickly and plans for scale. That's what turns a temporary 'cool' app into a lasting, viable product or else ngmi."

What's the clearest indicator that a founder or project is ngmi?

"When they design for hype before truth. You can spot it early - they chase buzzword integration with no clear user narrative. They don't touch their own product. They optimize for virality over insight, engagement over durability. And they measure success by how fast they grow a Discord, not how fast they solve a hard problem."

What's a common belief in crypto that you think is bullshit?

""WAGMI culture is cancerous. What started as a hopeful, unifying message has turned into a blanket excuse to support anything—even if it's low effort, bad faith, or outright scams. It creates this pressure to cheer everything on, to pretend like every project is going to make it, even when the people behind it have no real plan, no integrity, and no care for the community.""

What's a common belief in crypto that you think is bullshit?

"…The idea that you need to know exactly how everything works. Most of us have no clue how banks, the internet, or even stablecoins work, and we use them daily. My sister doesn't really understand why USDC is centralized or why it costs $1, but she knows that 1 USDC = 1 USD, and that's enough for her as an end user…We shouldn't force users to understand the technicalities."

2.3 TECHNICAL QUESTIONS: What Does It Mean to Build on a Performant Blockchain?

Contract Size: Building Integrated Visions

63.3% of applicants chose to address our 512kb contract limit, making it the overwhelming favorite. This indicates that most builders see computational constraints, not speed constraints, as the primary unlock to their vision.

Responses show that builders want unified, comprehensive smart contracts that handle complete workflows, or previously impossible workflows, internally, rather than being forced into fragmented, multi-contract architectures.

Therefore, the 512kb limit represents freedom from constraints that force "patchwork protocols" and reliance on multiple dependencies.

QUESTION

Contract Size: Mega's contract size limit is 512kb (~24x that of Ethereum). What are the implications of this elevated upper bound on your app and/or idea?

RESPONSES

"Previously, complex agent behaviors—such as nuanced incentive models, advanced social coordination rules, and integrated reputation systems—were severely restricted or offloaded offchain. MegaETH's expanded capacity lets us embed complete agent intelligence, governance logic, and verifiability standards entirely within smart contracts…"

"***** is building the first decentralized bank… Ethereum was too small to hold that vision. Mega's 512kb contract size finally lets us build a composable financial engine — where risk scoring, repayment logic, vault strategies, DAO enforcement, and legal fallback live in one place."

Latency: When Blockchain Becomes Invisible

28.1% of applicants tackled our sub-10ms block times, consistently linking low latency to psychological breakthroughs rather than a technical improvement.

They recognize that a large part of adoption hinges on perception and that users abandon applications when feedback loops feel slow, regardless of underlying cryptographic guarantees. This psychological threshold represents the difference between crypto feeling like a tech demo and a consumer product.

QUESTION

Latency: Mega achieves sub-10ms block times. What’s the clearest unlock this brings for your vertical? What becomes possible now that wasn’t before? Be specific.

"MegaETH is the only blockchain that can match the scale and latency that can give ***** the ux it requires. ***** has to look and feel like a web2 app, because consumer-grade apps need to behave like that. They need to be responsive, and without any perceivable cost for user action… It is completely unacceptable to have the user wait seconds for something as simple as a like to be finalised. And at scale, this would be wasting millions of hours."

"Imagine a global Venmo built natively onchain — real-time crypto payments where users simply type natural language prompts like 'Send 20 USDC to the pizza guy,' and it just works. For years, latency made this dream unusable. Nobody wants a 15s delay to split dinner… With MegaETH's sub-10ms block times, we can deliver chat-like transaction finality and UX that rivals web2…"

Throughput: The Abundance Design Philosophy

Only 8.6% selected our 100k TPS question, but their responses showed an understanding that high throughput fosters abundant design, which in turn enables new user experiences.

This sentiment represents a bet on the future of onchain activity.

The applicants' visions reveal two distinct dimensions of this bet: interaction density and viability at scale.

QUESTION

Throughput: Most builders focus on latency, but some are OMEGA because of our 100k TPS. Why does your project need a wider gate?

RESPONSES

Interaction Density:

"Throughput is more than TPS. It’s the capacity to let thousands move as one without waiting or slowing down. We’ve designed Web3 like a line at the bank.. one transaction at a time, cautious and disconnected. That’s not how humans act when they want to create, collaborate, or compete in real time. Throughput lets us break from that old paradigm. It lets us design products where the crowd is the interface...”

Viability at Scale:

“High gas limit is what makes the whole idea of fully on-chain triple store possible in the first place. The only viable solution outside of Mega is to have off-chain data storage with mechanisms to post Merkle Roots created out of data…Storing rich semantic data directly on-chain is what unlocks real-time, fully composable knowledge across contracts. But to do it at scale with hundreds of dApps writing facts, credentials, classifications, and updates every block, requires massive throughput and high per-tx gas capacity.”

3. Closing thoughts: The Post-Infrastructure Generation

We found evidence of a fundamental shift: post-infrastructure crypto builders who expect the necessary technical infrastructure to exist or will be developed soon. This represents an evolution from previous generations who had to choose between building infrastructure or compromising on application vision.

Applicants articulated sophisticated applications—composable DeFi engines, real-time multiplayer experiences, onchain AI agents, and responsive UX—as expectations and not distant possibilities.

The data reflects this shift.

Consumer applications dominated as the largest representation of any vertical, while "user(s)" appeared most frequently across responses compared to infrastructure terms.

The post-infrastructure generations are the most practical generation. Everything is deeply rooted in “user benefits”; everything is measured by “adoption metrics.”

They wrote about "fully composable knowledge across contracts" instead of "1.7 gigagas/s limit" and "global Venmo" instead of "sub-10ms block times." They understand that reaching mainstream users requires rethinking value propositions, risk models, and communication strategies, not just faster infrastructure.

This represents crypto's most mature builder generation: technically sophisticated but aware of adoption shortcomings, critical of industry insularity while remaining committed to its potential.

Needless to say, we are more optimistic about crypto’s world domination than ever. Our goal is to identify passionate builders and build alongside them, in Copenhagen, Tokyo, New York, and beyond.