The founding team is led by Stephen Grugett, one of the co-founders of Manifold Markets, the play-money prediction platform that launched in December 2021. MNX was formally announced in February 2026 and is currently live on testnet at testnet.mnx.fi. No mainnet launch date had been publicly announced at the time of publication. The project's stated mission is to create serious financial infrastructure for AI-linked assets, a category that has no comparable on-chain trading venue at scale today.

"We've spent four years learning what prediction markets are good at and where they fall short," the founding team wrote in the February launch announcement. "MNX is our attempt to take what we've learned and apply it to serious financial infrastructure for the AI economy." The team's pitch to investors centers on a perceived gap: while trillions of dollars flow into AI companies and hardware, there is no liquid market where traders can take direct positions on those outcomes.

What Traders Can Actually Do on MNX

The platform will offer three product types on a unified interface: perpetual futures (contracts with no expiry date, common in crypto), traditional futures, and prediction markets. Assets include Anthropic and OpenAI private-market valuations, AI benchmark scores tracked by research firm Epoch AI, GPU and chip pricing data provided by semiconductor analyst firm SemiAnalysis, and equity perpetuals on stocks including Nvidia, TSMC, and ASML. Leverage of up to 50x will be available.

The exchange uses batch auctions that settle every 200 milliseconds rather than a continuous order book. The design is intended to reduce the advantage that high-frequency trading bots typically have on most decentralized exchanges (DEXs), where speed differences measured in fractions of a second determine who gets the better price. A unified margin engine will allow a trader's collateral to cover positions across all three product types simultaneously, which reduces the total capital a trader needs to hold against combined risk. Funds remain on-chain at all times under a non-custodial model, meaning MNX never holds user assets directly.

Why MegaETH

MNX's choice of MegaETH as its underlying blockchain is central to these design goals. MegaETH is an Ethereum Layer-2 network (a scaling solution that processes transactions separately from the Ethereum mainnet but settles final state there) that launched its mainnet on February 9, 2026. The network processed 35,000 transactions per second in stress testing and targets 100,000 TPS with sub-10 millisecond block times. MegaLabs, the developer behind MegaETH, raised $20 million in seed funding led by Dragonfly Capital and counts Vitalik Buterin and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin among its backers. A token sale in October 2025 raised $450 million.

MegaETH's on-chain metrics tell a more complicated story right now. Total value locked (TVL) on the network peaked near $580 million in late April 2026 and has since pulled back to approximately $120 million. The MEGA token trades around $0.046, down roughly 79% from its token generation event price of $0.22. The chain does have active DeFi infrastructure: Aave V3, GMX, and Ethena are all live on MegaETH. Separately, Aave deposits on the network surpassed $575 million by early May 2026, a distinct milestone reflecting deposit activity on one protocol within the broader ecosystem.

Regional Relevance

For users outside the United States, MNX's non-custodial structure carries practical significance. In South Asia, crypto adoption grew 80% year over year through mid-2025, with India, Vietnam, and Pakistan driving roughly $2.36 trillion in transaction volume. Coinbase launched in India with rupee rails and perpetual futures access on June 1, 2026, a signal of growing institutional and retail appetite for derivatives products. Indian traders have historically faced regulatory ambiguity around offshore centralized exchanges. MNX's on-chain, non-custodial design sidesteps that constraint because no offshore entity holds user funds. In Africa, where DeFi has gained traction as practical financial infrastructure rather than speculation, the model similarly bypasses the KYC barriers and banking restrictions that limit access to centralized derivatives venues. The maturation of that infrastructure is visible in concrete milestones: on April 9, 2026, VALR, Africa's largest crypto exchange by volume, integrated with Onafriq, the continent's leading digital payments gateway, deepening on-chain financial connectivity across the region.

What Comes Next

MNX is entering a market that traditional finance is also eyeing. CME Group and the Intercontinental Exchange have both confirmed plans to develop GPU compute futures. China's Shanghai Futures Exchange is designing AI inference token futures contracts, targeting a daily market of over 140 trillion tokens across 37 commerce sectors. Analysts at CoinDesk have argued that equity perpetuals could eventually surpass crypto perpetuals in volume as the boundary between traditional finance and crypto infrastructure continues to erode. One unresolved question for MNX specifically is regulatory: the legal treatment of on-chain futures tied to private AI company valuations is entirely untested, and that uncertainty is material for any institutional or semi-institutional trader evaluating these products. For MNX, converting a testnet and a well-funded thesis into a liquid mainnet venue is the next test. Specific investor names for the pre-seed round had not been publicly confirmed at the time of publication.