Last week I came across an explainer video from a MegaETH cofounder that caught my eye, in a format we don’t see often in our corner of X. On top of that, it was about a complicated topic: The Straggler Problem.
What’s MegaETH?
MegaETH is the first ‘Real-Time Blockchain’, capable of executing upwards of 100,000 transactions per second. When you compare that with Ethereum’s ~12 transactions per second, that’s a big deal.
On top of that, the team recently announced a $20 million seed round a couple weeks ago including some notable names (*ahem* VITALIK ahem).
If you want to learn more, check out their whitepaper.
Back to the video
Why was this video about The Straggler Problem so intriguing?
Co-founder involvement
Brother Bing (CBO), posted the video while Lei Yang (CTO) is the star of the video.
Interestingly, Lei doesn’t repost the video on X to give the content an additional boost, a simple engagement that could be regarded as a layup. This lack of engagement shows a different way for cofounders to interact with each other’s content beyond the standard liking, reposting, or replying. In a way, one co-founder is reposting another co-founder’s content indirectly.
Additionally, Brother Bing/Shuyao qualifies the content and his co-founder, balancing the informality of the video itself:
The video incorporates social video best practices
Seconds into the video, you notice that it incorporates several best practices for making engaging video content. It’s unpolished, incorporates memes and fun sound effects, and leverages simple visuals to explain complex concepts effectively. It’s entertaining in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the goal of educating and informing.
This content is still relatively uncommon, and if we do see this style of content it’s from content creators, not the teams themselves (not to mention the co-founders).
It’s effective
Don’t take my word for it. There are qualitative and quantitative metrics that indicate that this style of content is engaging and effective with the goal of explaining a complex topic in a simple manner.
Qualitative: The reception to this type of content is practically unanimous in positive sentiment for the content and its engaging style.
Quantitative: The absolute and relative number of bookmarks for the post is high, indicating that this is informative content that people want to come back to reference at some point in the future.
It’s repeatable
A couple days later, Brother Bing comes out with another post and video in a similar style, this time about parallelization. Overall engagement is lower, possibly due to the upcoming July 4th holiday in the US.
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How did MegaETH figure this out?
I don’t know the exact backstory, but this post reveals more than we think.
This was Brother Bing’s first attempt at sharing MegaETH explainer videos on X, which were initially uploaded onto YouTube on June 26th. I’m not sure why the videos were first posted on YT, possibly because it was easier to embed them onto MegaETH’s About page (scroll to the bottom).
Unsurprisingly, posting a video natively on X would be more effective than posting a YouTube link. The content autoplays, you don’t need an additional click to access the content, there are more ways to interact and engage (reposting, quote posting), and MegaETH + the co-founders have a larger existing target audience.
I hope MegaETH and other teams, particularly founders or team members who aren’t camera shy, produce more of this type of fun and engaging educational content (note the vertical orientation of the video as well). There are few to no sacred cows when it comes to creating differentiated content, bootstrapping a new ecosystem, and attracting users and developers.
Other interesting things
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