MegaETH’s pre-deposit campaign faced technical issues, leading to chaos.
On November 25th, the launch of the pre-deposit campaign for the L2 project MegaETH was marred by technical issues. Instead of the planned $250 million, the project attracted $500 million due to a loss of control over the smart contract management.
The cause was not a code hack but human error and incorrect handling of the multisig.
The MegaETH team planned to gather liquidity before the mainnet launch in December. The conditions seemed simple: start at 9:00 am (ET), a $250 million cap, a first-come, first-served basis, and KYC via the Sonar platform.
Problems began immediately after the start:
It took the team 23 minutes to fix the error. They needed to gather signatures in the multisig wallet to update the parameters. During this time, thousands of users unsuccessfully attempted to send funds.
Once the bridge was operational, the $250 million cap was filled in 156 seconds.
Due to the lack of an official announcement about the fix, spots were taken by bots and users continuously refreshing the page.
Following a wave of criticism, the team decided to increase the cap to $1 billion and reopen fund acceptance at 11:00. This required changing the contract parameters again via the Safe multisig wallet.
The wallet management scheme required four out of six possible signatures, and developers gathered them in advance to simply send the transaction to the blockchain precisely at 11:00. This was the main mistake.
In Safe wallets, once the required number of signatures is collected, anyone can execute the transaction. This is a documented feature of the protocol, ensuring decentralization.
A user under the pseudonym chud.eth noticed the fully signed transaction in the mempool and executed it himself 34 minutes ahead of the team’s schedule.
The unexpected opening of deposits triggered a new influx of funds. The team watched as the balance rapidly increased beyond their control:
The developers admitted defeat and abandoned plans to raise the cap to $1 billion.
MegaETH acknowledged their fault, calling the incident “unacceptable.” The developers emphasized that the smart contracts worked perfectly, there were no vulnerabilities, and user funds were safe. The failure was due to human error and a lack of understanding of the documentation of the tools used.
Despite the issues, less than 5% of users took advantage of the offered withdrawal option. The MegaETH mainnet launch is still scheduled for December, with the token release planned for early 2026.
