MegaETH's $250M Goal Shattered: Accidental $500M Raise Follows User-Triggered Contract Exploit

MegaETH's Pre-Sale Blunder: How a $250 Million Goal Doubled to $500 Million Due to a Single User's Action

In a stunning turn of events that left the crypto community bewildered, the much-anticipated pre-deposit campaign for L2 project MegaETH experienced a catastrophic failure. Instead of the targeted $250 million, the project inadvertently collected a staggering $500 million, all without the team's direct control. This chaotic scenario was the direct result of operational missteps and poorly configured tools.

Technical Glitches and User Frustration

MegaETH had meticulously laid out the terms for its deposit launch: a precise start time of 9:00 AM ET, a hard cap of $250 million, a first-come, first-served (FCFS) basis, and mandatory KYC verification via the Sonar platform. However, the infrastructure buckled under the strain. Mere minutes after the launch, Sonar's servers crashed, overwhelmed by an influx of requests that far exceeded their capacity. It's worth noting that the team had not conducted adequate load testing for a collection of this magnitude, a critical oversight.

Adding to the chaos, users encountered an additional hurdle before the servers even faltered. The 'SaleUUID' parameter within the smart contract was misconfigured, failing to align with Sonar's settings. This prevented deposits from being processed successfully, leaving eager participants in a frustrating loop of failed transactions. The team scrambled to rectify this, a process that took a grueling 23 minutes. During this agonizing period, while users were locked out, the team was busy gathering the necessary signatures on their multi-signature wallet to update the contract parameters. Once the bridge was finally restored, the $250 million limit was depleted in an astonishing 156 seconds.

Bots and a Botched Reset

The lack of an official announcement confirming the restoration of service created an environment ripe for exploitation. Consequently, many of the coveted spots were snapped up by bots and users employing aggressive page-refresh tactics. Facing widespread criticism, MegaETH's team made a hasty decision to raise the collection cap to $1 billion and re-open deposits at 11:00 AM. Their plan involved pre-signing the transaction on their Safe multi-sig wallet, intending to simply send it at the designated time.

This strategy, however, backfired spectacularly. The inherent logic of the Safe protocol allows anyone to execute a fully signed transaction from the mempool. A user, operating under the pseudonym chud.eth, spotted this pre-signed transaction and, with remarkable foresight, initiated it themselves. This happened a full 34 minutes before the scheduled time for the revised deposit window. This unexpected activation unleashed another torrent of liquidity into the project's coffers.

Uncontrolled Overflow and a Humble Admission

The MegaETH team watched in real-time as the balance surged uncontrollably, powerless to intervene. Their attempt to cap the collection at $400 million proved futile, as the transaction had already been initiated too late. It wasn't until the total reached a colossal $500 million that control was finally regained. Following this second, equally dramatic, oversubscription, MegaETH abandoned its ambition to reach the $1 billion mark.

In a display of transparency, the team publicly owned up to their errors, attributing the entire fiasco to poor process organization and a lack of familiarity with the documentation for their chosen tools. Remarkably, less than 5% of participants opted to withdraw their unexpectedly deposited funds. Despite these tumultuous events, MegaETH's mainnet launch remains slated for December, with its native token expected to debut in early 2026. This incident follows a previous successful fundraising round in October, where the project already garnered $470 million within its first 24 hours, exceeding its token sale limit by nearly tenfold.