Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
mETH Protocol: State of Q1 2026
Recorded: Feb. 24, 2026 Duration: 0:32:31Space Recording
Full Transcription
MGM, we're now live. Thank you for everyone who's had to attend this live stream today.
So this is the first live stream we are making in the whole entire Q1 and also the first time in
2026. So this live stream will essentially just go through, you know, what we wrapped up in the
last year and how we kind of shifted from, I would say, on-chain growth to something more
strong within the institutional side. So, you know know last year we had the metamorphosis campaigns we were mainly
building up throughout mental network hyper EVM and exploring like new on-chain
ecosystems. But you know in Q4 we made a strategic shift in priorities to launch
this buffer pool upgrade which we'll go to in detail later. So today we have the
whole call team with us, well more than
half of it actually, in the call with us today. Very special feature from Edmund himself,
the CEO, our growth lead, Jonathan, and also Jess, our ecosystem lead. So I'll let them
introduce themselves first. I'll start off with Edmund.
Hi everyone, I'm Edmund. So I'm currently the role lead for Emit.
I think a lot of you are familiar with me, but nice to meet everyone.
Okay, I'll go next. Hi guys, I'm John, growth leader at Emit Protocol.
Less familiar with me, but I hope you've seen me over the past year also.
Hi everyone, my name is John,. Nice to be on the livestream again and kick off the first
ever livestream in 2026 with everyone.
Awesome. Thanks, guys. So I'm Jo, so known as Facetrax. I help with the marketing side
of things at Ami Protocol. But you probably will have seen us around Twitter a
lot more in the past few months. Jess, John have been posting a lot more and as everyone knows,
Defy Maestro, you guys will be familiar with him already, especially throughout his time at
Mentor primarily. So this call will start off mainly going through what we've done in 2025.
Initially, I mentioned a lot of the time that we spent in the first part of the first,
last year was mainly on chain.
Before we begin then, could we also get an introduction
to what EMIF protocol is from Edmund himself?
Okay, yeah, I think I'll just keep it pretty simple.
So EMIF protocol is a liquid staking protocol,
and we also have a liquid restaking tokens as well.
So we cover both categories that people
want to do with their ETH.
So they can use it to be a liquid version of ETH staking
as well as using the ETH staking token
to stake it again for the restaking token which is CMIF.
So what was like the main goal in 2025 as an ETH liquid staking protocol? You know like
I think MIF was one of the top few and is still one of the top few today.
What were the main achievements for the team in 2025?
Yeah I think for 2025 we had like I like two very straightforward goals that we really
wanted to hammer down on. The first one was to actually improve the access for
retail users and the second one was actually set up MEF for institutional
adoption. So I think we had this dumbbell approach whereby we wanted to
continue growing the retail side while making sure that MBEF is ready for institutions to be adopted and we
did that by integrating with various different custodians for for institutions
to be able to have a choice to use the custodians that they are comfortable
with and we also integrated with Kraken, the exchange, so that Western users can have better access to MEIF.
And we increased our integrations with Bybit.
We had improved integrations on Bybit Earn,
as well as have their Bybit OTC counter site.
And we also pushed out several upgrades and pushed up the mif or rather cm if to
different ecosystems like hyper evm and as but not least we also push out our um
upgrade in q4 uh so far and it has been uh doing pretty well uh for uh in terms of our stats and
numbers you see we see that there is a lot of demand
and actual people who find it useful,
which is something that we're happy to see.
So I think it's quite evident
and I'm sharing my screen now.
You guys will see our new website.
So I think when we first started,
it was mainly on chain
and now with all the larger like financial institutions coming in, Amipro core really prioritized the onboarding pathways. So this
meant, you know, as you mentioned, more custodians, more sex partners and much more higher, I
would say, leverage kind of onboarding. So, you know, the latest upgrade that we had was
the Q4 buffer pool, as you mentioned, And, you know, we upgraded our website to kind of revamp that shift as well.
So something a bit more clean, if you guys remember the old website.
So before we go into the, my, like, you know, the nitty-gritty, you know,
could you explain what exactly the buffer pool is?
So from the, our understanding is just, you know,
users can redeem their MEF to EVE tokens within
24 hours provided that there's capacity within the pool. So how does this structure work?
Yep. Okay. So for the buffer pool itself, what we have done is we have placed a portion
of our TVL into EVE on Aave.
So this means that that portion that we place on Aave
is earning yield, but it is also accessible for maybe
really like a 24-hour period.
So this 24-hour period is to ensure
that the safety of the protocol is adhered to.
We have some parameters in place to ensure
that there are no bad actors that are doing the withdrawals
to ensure that all the transactions are coming through smoothly.
And this allows us to get a good balance in terms of having RVA yield as well as the
ETH staking yield.
So I think historically, if you were to look at the rates between the both of them, they
have been pretty close.
There are times where the RVA yield is slightly higher. There are times where the RV yield is slightly higher.
There are times where the e-staking yield is higher.
But overall, we see that RV yield is between maybe 0.9%
of the yield of our e-staking rates.
And we feel that there's, like in the long term,
both yields will likely converge and compress even closer.
And this allows us to actually optimize the protocol
to be able to solve the unstaking times for LSDs,
or rather unstaking times for ETH using this buffer pool
upgrade.
And it also allows us to allow users
to have the excess of this amount of liquidity without actually giving up the
yield that you can actually get from holding your ETH with us.
Yeah. So was this like a major pain point? So for example, because this was such a large
shift, right? The whole quarter was dedicated to launching this buffer pool itself. So when
you talk to, I guess, the institutions now
that we have onboarded, even people like Bybit and stuff,
did they say that it was something
that was super attractive to them?
Why was it something so important to the team?
Yeah, I think this was a very evident pinpoint that we see.
We spoke to various different institutions
and tried to push EVE as an asset towards them.
And overall, I think we keep getting the same comments
for if staking.
If staking, they will be saying that if staking rate
is around 3%, but every time they want to withdraw,
they are unsure of how long they need to have,
they need to wait for the withdrawal to be done.
So this means that there is hard for them to have a pretty
pretty table, hard for them to predict the time they have
to access their if assets.
So by having this buffer pool, you know that you can have
access to your if within 24 hours.
And you know that the asset is put to good use on a very trusted protocol that
has been around in the space for a long time rave and basically you are not giving up much
you know that's in recent times the yield that you get from um having this design is actually
higher than what you can get from purely like eaves taking so you get the best of both holes and it is something that is very attractive to institutions we we see
that a lot of enquiries coming in after the update and even that with the
with the collaboration with Bybit we see that it helps to solve a lot of the
pain points for exchanges because the exchanges themselves, they know how long they need to
have access so that the inventory is easily managed.
And they also know that they can monitor the inventory.
So let's say they can check on-chain what is the buffer pool's current capacity, whether
we can meet the user's request.
And I think it's a win-win for all parties.
Amazing. So it's been out for quite some time. So how has the performance of the buffer pool held
out over the last weeks, you know, in terms of redrawers, in terms of deposits, or even like
in terms of the yield itself? I think it has done like amazing. So far everything has worked as
intended. Most of the the results are done within
24 hours and in the recent times we see that the if deposit queues actually have started to
um skyrocket i think the current deposit queue is something like between 40 to 60 days and with this
powerful design we actually are able to sort of apply the same concept to it,
whereby we can actually place a surplus EVE towards Aave.
So in this way, we actually help to address the deposit times
as well.
So I think overall, it has done very well.
EVE has been climbing.
The yield has been good.
The predictability, the ability for users
to actually withdraw and deposit if is consistent.
There is no delays.
So yeah, I'm pretty satisfied with what we have done so far.
It's amazing.
And also, all the data is quite transparent as well.
Every week, any protocol will post a weekly report,
and there's dashboards for users to also track
in terms of the healthiness of the buffer pool itself.
And as Edmund mentioned, there are kind of mechanisms
in place to prevent any sort of, I would say,
massive withdrawal, anything that
completely disrupts the structure and reliability of the Buffer Pool itself.
So looking forward to more, you know, and we can involve more people, you know, this
is something the whole team believes will be a call to getting them to trust in us as
a whole.
So moving on to just now, like, so we mentioned, you know, Bufferpool, one of the
main partners that we actually work with on this is Bybit. And recently, we held an on-chain
earn campaign with them. So Ameth itself, you know, has heavily kind of embedded ourselves in
being that ETH asset of choice, especially when the narrative, you know, of people starting to
accumulate ETH within their treasury, so,asuries or their balance sheets and stuff.
So could you, before we go into the Buybit campaign, elaborate further,
why would bigger partners choose MEF over existing solutions out there today?
Yeah, so in my opinion, I feel like bigger partners don't just look at the headline API where it shows like a very attractive high APR.
They care a lot more about capital safety, liquidity and also operational reliability.
So for us and ETH, like what Ed has mentioned earlier in his answers, we've been trying to position ourselves as a treasury-grade
asset. That's also why we've been adopting this new buffer pool upgrade with Aave.
And we are trying to address like now there's this new deposit queue as well, addressing all
of these concerns happening within the market, not just as a yield token. So we are trying to focus on conservative validator operations, deep liquidity, and
also predictable exit paths.
So when there are like the DATs or like exchanges that are facing real issues and concerns about,
let's say, putting their ETH in what kind of LST assets would be more
preferable and safer than we would have the best infrastructure out there for support
and also for them to consider.
That's also why we are trying to position ourselves and enhancing our product setup, match up with the institutional...
Perfect. So our recent on-chain earn campaign actually did really well. So I'll just share
the stats really quickly. One moment, hopefully I got the right tab. So over here, we posted a report just a few weeks ago
in collaboration with Bybit.
So this one mainly just showed the kind of amount of EMIF
that we held on the Bybit platform itself across users
and what happened throughout the entire month.
So during the whole time that we had the campaign,
we saw like almost like
100% change in the balances itself from December to January. So I would say that the campaign
did quite successfully. So was this kind of growth expected from the team, like the BD
side? And what was like the kind of rationale behind putting that kind of budget into Bybit?
the rationale behind putting that budget into Bybit?
Yes.
So for us, the model team is that we
want to build on long-term alignment
instead of a short-term incentive chasing protocol.
So that's also why we are trying to integrate into platforms
like Bybit.
And we're in talks with different
centralize on their point and smashing a lot of good incentives for the sake of a short-term
hype. So for our on-chain earn campaign, it just about CPL. It was about onboarding users and trying to let users
to understand that, hey, we have this new ME upgrade,
and then what does it do?
And then have an introduction about ME through them.
Because I do believe for Bybit users,
they're more familiar with CME.
That was the asset that we were pushing quite hard on Bybit.
So having this deposit campaign, it was more of an introductory onboarding process.
Real demand and then trying to validate this kind of demand as well.
So for Bybit, it's a place where many of the M-E-E-S users reside, actually, because for MEs,
you can use it as a collateral on Bybit.
And also from time to time, it's
been giving up very good incentives.
And also, it's been having constant campaigns around it.
So we want to have a natural way to introduce users on .
It allows us to know how Emmys is actually used when it's
closed and also how to
over-test the areas that we need
to enhance for the user journey and experience.
So we want to build up this campaign as an organic way to let users familiarize with us
and also to slowly build even more products on top of that.
Awesome. Are there any more plans in line with Bybit at the moment? slowly build even more products on top of that.
Awesome. Are there any more plans in line with Bybit at the moment? I mean, because the on-chain earn campaign just end,
and we basically have both MEF and CMEF within their
margin collateral deposit options and stuff like that.
So are there anything that we can look forward to
in terms of a user on Bybit?
Yep. So definitely Bybit is a very close strategic partner
for us.
And then the collaboration with them is ongoing.
So other than the on-chain earn campaign
that users can actually see, we are also
helping out Bybit earn the team itself
on the overall ETH Flexii earn back end as well using ME where it
would help them and also enhance them on the liquidity smoothing side. So even though maybe
on the front, it seems like we are just running like a on chain earn campaign for two months. But on the back end, we are trying to push
not just Bybit, but also many of the other centralized exchanges or institutional partner
introducing MEth as a very solid liquidity infra and trying to slowly grow step by step
for MEth from there, not just like a heavy TVL incentive game.
Yeah.
Awesome.
I think the other one that was quite impressive as well
was the one on mental network.
So I think, you know, Bybit, all these platforms
much more like towards the centralized side
has been doing pretty well.
I think the markets may also say otherwise,
but overall on-chain activity still looks pretty decent,
at least within certain ecosystems, you know, like mental network.
Is DeFi still strong from the ecosystem growth side of things? Is it something where you feel it might be toned down a bit,
or are you looking to see more
so position and be somewhere else you know? Yep so in our eyes DeFi is definitely still very much
alive it's just maturing so growth today is more selective and more fundamental driven compared to
the previous cycles. So for ME for how how our team think about it is that DeFi
still remains as an important growth channel, especially around core money markets and also
infrastructure use cases. But we are also trying to expand beyond not just DeFi, not just on the
on-chain money market side, but also including some of these strong
traction narratives out there in the market right now, let's say on the tokenized RWA assets,
on the treasury allocations like the DATs, what are they going to do with all of the ETH that they
purchased? There are definitely ways and areas where we can collaborate deeper with these DATs
and also changes integrated products like what I've mentioned on the Bybit use case where we
help them enhance on the backend infra liquidity. So our approach is to build MEth so that it can grow wherever ETH capital naturally wants to sit,
not just relying on a single narrative
and be very passive and react.
I'm going to throw this question out to everyone in this call.
But if you guys had to choose one ecosystem right now,
which one would it be? You know, there's
a lot out there right now. So, and you can't use the ones that haven't, you use the ones
that launched in the past year. So for example, um, Monad, you know, and what else? I don't
know. Choose one. If you had, if you had to choose one. Only in the past year. Just curious.
Yeah, in only the past year, you had to choose one that you guys would potentially look to deploy on.
Or maybe even Hyper EVM.
Like the last, in this entire cycle, the ones that were talked about.
Linear, I guess?
Hyper EVM.
Yeah, what?
Hyper EVM.
Is that the favorite?
Yeah, I guess so. We actually...
We depend on that right now.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, I guess I think that's consensus though.
Like the favorite ecosystem for most people, I guess that still uses like DeFi generally is still Hyper-EVM.
But it's a controversial topic, but that's interesting to know.
I was just curious.
So, you know, now, John, you know,
on top of what was already mentioned by Jess and Edmund,
you know, last year also kick-started
really heavy institutional presence
as we've been going through this entire live stream so far.
Do you think that Ethereum has largely shifted away
from, you know, on-chain DeFi
to something different as well?
And what does Ethereum currently kind of look to you in terms of growth?
Yeah, yeah.
I think those are two very good questions, right?
So to answer the first one on, you know, whether Ethereum has shifted away from DeFi,
I wouldn't say that is entirely true.
I think it's just more that, you know, we've,
DeFi natives like us have gone through, you know,
the whole DeFi summer and we're just very used to what,
what we think DeFi should look like.
It's like constant pushing of boundaries and stuff like that.
But I think it's more of the fact that Ethereum really,
that was a stress testing phase, right?
And it's just a very large scale experiment
that just happened to involve a lot of people around the world.
Super chaotic, super speculative uh and you know i i think as we all know now maybe 80 percent of the time unsustainable but i think uh you know in terms of you know whether it
shifted away no right because really just validated something very fundamental that you know something
like ethereum which is you know basically composable finance, trust minimized systems,
is something that works, right?
And you still see that with some of the protocols
that are still going strong, right?
Aave, Maker, I guess Fluid, Morpho,
basically all the large standing protocols
that are still surviving
and still pushing the institutional boundaries, right?
They have made use of the systems that have been created since the early 2010s and have
survived until now.
And so I think really what we are seeing now is not really movement away from on-chain
DeFi but industrialization of on-chain DeFi.
So instead of having yield experiments in the past where you see gamified stuff like
DeFi Kingdom and stuff
like that, you are seeing more of the institutions. Let's say for example, more recently, Robinhood's
L2. You can be bullish or bearish on that. It doesn't really matter. It's just that the
direction in which DeFi is going, it's still that way. It's that people are firstly experimenting
on all these weird stuff and And then now institutions are experimenting
on how they can industrialize what they have on chain, right?
And then I guess many other people are doing alternative L1 or L2s
that could complement that as well.
But in general, that's just what I think DeFi really looks like.
It's just more of a growth in terms of how we're experimenting already.
And I think one more point, right?
And that's to answer your second question of what Ethereum's growth look like.
I think for me, really, you know, when I first joined this industry,
before the understanding of, you know, all the stuff we could do on DeFi,
it was really that, you know, blockchains as a whole would be the
backbone of the economy or the backbone of how financial systems work. And I
think that most of the people who came from traditional industries who jumped
to crypto had that first idea before they came in. And I think with the
proliferation of AI, and I think many people have been talking about this as
well, is that most of these AI systems that we are seeing people use and will very likely be very, very apparent in the next few years, I wouldn't even say a decade, the next few years, is that a lot of these agents or entities would probably be transacting, doing stuff on behalf of us. And so I think Ethereum's growth really comes from the fact that it is a system that can
do deterministic stuff.
You can verify all your settlements.
You can basically coordinate without much trust needed.
And so with those primitives in mind, agents and AI agents will probably, in terms of optimizing
where they would use or where they would transact on
would maybe be Ethereum or some other thing like that, right?
And so, I think for me, the growth
in Ethereum really is on, you know,
maximizing its use for
AI and being
the future of
the medium of exchange, or rather
the platform of exchange.
So, yeah, I think
in general,
just to sum it all up, TLDR, right?
DeFi is not data, DeFi is just going through
an industrialization phase.
It's still an experiment, right?
But I think it's in the right direction still.
And then in terms of how I see Ethereum growing,
it's really maturing as a lay of settlement
for future AI agents or autonomous agents.
Right. And so I think that's pretty exciting.
But yeah, I think there's still some time to go, but thankfully,
AI is progressing so fast that maybe we might see these results sooner or later.
But yes.
Wow. That's a very big bet.
And I'm going to put you under the bus because the admin will be looking at you right now.
So you mentioned AI.
So what are the key areas then of adoption?
Does that apply to Amiv?
When you think about growth, now let's think about Amiv directly.
Yeah, so okay.
You see, right?
This entire concept of AI is more of a larger scale problem
for the Ethereum community itself to solve, right?
It's just, what kind of upgrades would they want to do, you know, maybe some of the data
upgrades or maybe some of the efficiency upgrades that when autonomous agents decide to interact
with each other, they decide that Ethereum is the most optimal one.
In our case, right, if let's say, for for example I was answering the AI question, it would be making Ameth the most trustable or the most efficient, you know, token to use if these autonomous agents decide that, you know, liquid-staking tokens are the way to go, right?
And that would probably be, you know, trying to figure out, you know, where making it easy for these agents to acquire these cheaply, quickly, right?
Being able to, let's say for example with a buffer pool, right? Being able to, let's say for example, with our buffer pool, right?
Being able to unstake these kind of things
one is to one.
Because for them, it's optimization.
It's not about, oh yeah,
I think that X and X protocol
has this amount of fees
and this amount of time to unstake.
It's literally that because we have the buffer pool,
we have one to one without any fees.
And that's really the most efficient way to go.
So naturally, we would be part of the step
of any of the agent's needs for liquid staking, right? And so I think for us really, that would be kind
of like the way to go optimizing the stack. But I think in terms of, let's say for example,
you know, in general for growth towards maybe a more business oriented mindset.
Number one, as Jess mentioned, was to stupid, you know, pushing ourselves towards exchange
native infrastructure, right? So that means Bybit, which has already been using us on
the backend and all the other exchanges going down the line. And then of course, you know,
more importantly, is trying to figure out where LSTs sit within the institutionalized,
institutional and tokenized token rails, right? So what this means is that, you know, where do LSTs stand in terms of, you know,
being included into ETFs?
Where do LSTs stand in terms of, you know,
treasury considerations for some of these institutions, right?
Do they even want ETH?
If they want ETH, are they even considering staking?
And if they are considering staking,
like why or why not LSTs?
So I think those two will still be the more important things in the short term.
In the long term, obviously, all the AI stuff that I mentioned, but I think all those are
very, very big bets.
So really what we're focusing on would be what we can control for now, which is basically
working together with exchange and other institutions, just to kind of see where we can work together
with them closer. And I, you know, obviously you guys have helped to push out a lot over the last few quarters.
You know, there's Copper, there's a few others. I come off the top of my head, I can't remember,
but there was multiple. And then even the ongoing developments with MENTO and the different kind
of ecosystem on-chain developments as well. And then to even
collaborate with Bybit on such a high scale level shows the legitimacy of MIF. Even if the name
does not sound very legitimate, we managed to build something that works and is well within
the top few protocols today when it comes to liquid staking. So I think in terms of whatever we said today,
Edmund, what would you say was the team's main goal in Q1 and has that been achieved so far?
I don't, I would never say that the team would have achieved the goals, then the goals will
always be like moving. If they achieve it, then they will be unfortunately uh but yeah i think for for q1 itself the the main goal was to actually um
to get the word out about the buffer pool to actually um speak to as many parties as possible
regarding like um um sharing about how our purple pool works and why it is the solution of choice that we chose and
the overall trend of thought that we had when we pivoted towards the buffer pool. And so far,
I think it has been going pretty well. We have partners that are interested, there's partners
that are inquiring more about it. Some partners are already integrating. So I would say that that would be the the focus for um q1 and yeah definitely could be
um it's good it's on it's an ongoing process and it could be uh could be better yes could
could have uh be pushed uh harder right uh john and jess yeah awesome i mean in terms of like key priorities looking forward, I guess they all are so
interchangeable, but the buffer pool itself, getting more partners on board is quite a huge
kind of feat in mind as well. And as you guys mentioned that you guys are still talking to
different partners on the backend, some that may not be able to be mentioned on this call.
But yeah, I think we covered everything that we're meant to cover today. So
before we go off, are you guys going to any events in real life? Just putting a shout there so people
can find you. Yeah, I think that the team is preparing for token 2049 in Dubai.
So the MV team should be down for the event.
So if anyone, any partners that want to catch up
or to have a discussion about what we're working on
and even asking us regular questions
to clarify about our pool, feel free to hit us up.
And yeah, we will see you guys in um in dubai awesome do you guys have any final words before we go off
pray pray to the markets please okay
thank you guys
thank you all for your time
bye bye
