29th November 2025 – (Hong Kong) MegaETH, an Ethereum Layer-2 project, will return all funds raised via its USDm Pre-Deposit Bridge after operational failures disrupted the rollout of its native stablecoin. The team acknowledged missteps and said refunds will commence following a smart contract audit, with a new USDC-USDm bridge slated to open ahead of its Frontier mainnet beta.
In a statement posted on X on Thursday, MegaETH conceded that execution fell short of expectations, noting the original aim was to preload sufficient collateral to ensure a 1:1 USDm conversion at mainnet. Pre-deposits opened on Tuesday with a US$250 million cap but were hampered by repeated issues, including an outage at a third-party bridge provider that left the service unavailable for about an hour.
After the platform resumed, the US$250 million ceiling was met within minutes. The team moved to raise the cap to US$1 billion, a decision that quickly became problematic. During the cap increase, a multisignature transaction governing contract parameters was misconfigured: rather than requiring three of four approvals, it was set to demand all four. That mistake enabled an external party to execute the queued transaction roughly 34 minutes before the bridge was officially scheduled to reopen, prompting deposits to restart early and surge past US$400 million.
Attempts to stabilise the situation saw the cap cut to US$400 million and later lifted to US$500 million, before the planned expansion to US$1 billion was abandoned altogether. MegaETH has since confirmed all participant funds will be refunded. The refund contract is undergoing security review, with reimbursements to begin shortly after completion.
Looking ahead, the project intends to reintroduce its USDC-USDm conversion bridge prior to the Frontier mainnet phase, aiming to establish stable liquidity before broader deployment.
Positioning itself alongside Base, Polygon and Arbitrum, MegaETH markets an L2 capable of up to 100,000 transactions per second with sub-millisecond latency and fees under US$0.01, compared with Ethereum’s typical throughput of around 30 TPS. The network will operate a proof-of-stake model with performance-based rewards. MEGA token holders are expected to participate in governance via a decentralised autonomous organisation, with the DAO and full staking framework targeted for launch 12 to 18 months after mainnet goes live.
