MegaETH loses another major figure! Noise shifts to Base after securing funding from Paradigm

Author: Nancy, PANews

MegaETH ecosystem loses another key player.

On January 14th, MegaETH early incubation project Noise announced the completion of a $7.1 million seed round led by Paradigm. However, the focus of this funding round is not on the amount, but on Noise unexpectedly choosing to switch to Base instead of continuing to stay within MegaETH. This defection of a core project adds more uncertainty to MegaETH’s ecosystem development.

Focus on the attention economy, completing a seed round led by Paradigm

Just half a year later, a startup team from New York, Noise, has attracted further capital.

On January 14th, Noise officially announced the completion of a $7.1 million seed round. The round was led by renowned venture capital firm Paradigm, with participation from Figment Capital, Anagram, GSR, JPEG Trading, KaitoAI, and other institutions, as well as angel investors including Jordi Hays, Dan Romero, and Kain Warwick.

The funds will mainly be used to accelerate trading infrastructure development and promote the mainnet launch. Prior to this, Noise had completed a pre-seed funding round in July 2025, with participation from Figment Capital and Anagram.

According to official sources, Noise is a trend trading platform focused on relevance, aiming to capture current internet figures and topics of interest. Here, users can trade contracts related to trends, brands, and ideas, going long or short, similar to stock trading. These trading activities generate prices, which are not just numbers but serve as objective measures of cultural relevance.

This price mechanism is based on two signals: data and trading. Noise aggregates activity data from X (formerly Twitter) to calculate a transparent attention index for each trend, allowing real-time measurement 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 hedge attention risks from marketing spend; fashion brands can identify emerging talent by observing who rises on the leaderboard; investors can express strong convictions about which AI labs are gaining the most cultural momentum. Essentially, Noise provides a new kind of daily news, turning vague popularity into clear tradable assets.

Over the past year, the explosive growth of prediction markets has demonstrated that binary questions can support significant economic activity. However, in terms of market positioning, Polymarket and Kalshi offer “yes or no” options for specific dates, while Noise focuses on the real-time evolution of relevance, providing insights into “how hot is it now” and “where is this heat heading,” making it a complementary or alternative prediction market.

Noise’s model has been preliminarily validated on the testnet stage. Since launching its 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 in the first month remained at 62%, with an average session length of 17 minutes, indirectly confirming the genuine demand for attention trading.

Ecosystem projects have successively spun off, MegaETH faces retention challenges

Compared to the backing of investment teams and amounts, the news that Noise plans to spin off into a separate entity seems to attract more market attention.

According to the plan, 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 join the Base ecosystem with funding.

This move has been seen by many as a betrayal, risking a fresh start on a new chain. On the same day as the funding announcement, MegaETH’s official account unfollowed Noise’s founder. However, some argue that the attention economy is fundamentally a traffic business, and compared to MegaETH’s early-stage, technically hardcore ecosystem, relying on the large user base and liquidity of Base might better support Noise’s launch and growth.

In fact, this is not the first time MegaETH has seen core projects go solo.

As early as June 2025, DEX GTE announced it had raised $15 million in Series A funding led exclusively by Paradigm, bringing its total funding to over $25 million. This was seen as a positive sign for MegaETH’s ecosystem rise. However, just two months later, the story took a sharp turn: GTE announced a “breakup,” leaving a cryptic message: “GTE has grown up, and now it’s leaving Mega Mafia,” and then announced plans to launch an independent mainnet. Notably, the project’s testnet once attracted over one million users within a few months.

Another stablecoin project, Cap, also received capital backing, completing $11 million in funding from Franklin Templeton, Triton Capital, and others. While not fully spun off, it adopted a dual-chain strategy, prioritizing Ethereum and MegaETH as auxiliary chains, which was seen as a sign of lack of confidence in native 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.