I’ve always compared chains to settling the American West.

For those who didn’t grow up on tales of cowboys and transcontinental railroads, America’s frontier was one of the first public incentives programs. Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, which gave 160 acres (~65 hectares) to anyone who built a house and farmed the land for five years.
This isn’t dissimilar to the incentives when a new chain opens up for “settlement” - although rarely do you have to literally farm the chain for five years to get your stake in the chain.
Of course, the reason why chains offer incentives is the same reason why the United States offered incentives. All that open frontier is worthless without settlers to engage in trade, production, and improvement.
Imperial Russia, in a somewhat less liberal fashion, recognized this, too. Peter the Great, who made major progress in integrating Siberia into the Russian Empire, knew that people were the root source of most value, particularly in that unindustrialized time. The nobility were taxed by the number of “souls” on their estates.
Fast forward to today, and we’re at a different frontier - the technological one. It’s possible to imagine that MegaETH’s settlers will be a mix of humans and AI agents (which my colleague BREAD_ is so fond of).
What makes a frontier durable, however, isn’t the free land and possibly transient first-wave settlers. It’s the infrastructure that allowed for productive activity - railroads, banks, courthouses, roads, markets. This is where many blockchains go wrong. They invite a wave of initial settlers who end up being land speculators instead of actual homesteaders looking to build their own fortune by the sweat of their brow.
Nations, blockchains, regional markets should all be judged on the basis of their *productive capacity*. Historically that meant “souls” but in modernity is a mix of humans and capital. At present, blockchains are mostly good at producing financial services, entertainment, and the spot on the Venn diagram where the two overlap.
To lean into the frontier analogy once more, it is ultimately up to the settlers to make something valuable out of the wide open, virgin frontier. Utah, a state in the American West, has a GDP of $315b, but is largely a desert with a big, undrinkable salt lake. Settlers turned a wasteland into a productive economy.
Luckily, MegaETH isn’t a desert and isn’t stuck with a large, non-potable body of water as its defining feature. It already has some railroad tracks laid and more under construction.
Today is exciting for many people, because it marks the beginning of our version of homesteading. But it’s just the start of a long period where everyone will need to roll up their sleeves to build front ends, protocols, sustainable services, and increase the connections between the MegaETH economy and Ethereum, other L2s, the banking system, commodities markets, savers, borrowers, and people with real, unmet needs.
You can explore the MegaETH ecosystem at the link below. Be sure to check frequently to see what new apps the builders are bringing online:
(Pictured below is the very first homestead, located in Nebraska, claimed under the Homestead Act of 1862)