Infrastructure never sleeps, and there are more chains than applications.
While the market is suffering from the PUA airdropped by various King projects, the primary market is still running wildly on the road of "creating King".
Last night, another Layer 1 with an explosive lineup was born - MegaETH, with a seed round of financing of US$20 million. Dragonfly led the investment, and institutions such as Figment Capital, Robot Ventures and Big Brain Holdings participated in the investment. Angel investors include Vitalik, Cobie, Joseph Lubin, Sreeram Kannan, Kartik Talwar, etc.
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Top VCs lead the investment, Vitalik and other big names in the industry act as angel investors, and the project name directly carries "ETH"... In the encryption market with limited attention, these labels all give the project "legitimacy".
Judging from the official project description, MegaETH can still be summed up in one familiar word - fast.
The first Real-Time Blockchain, delivering transactions at lightning speed, sub-millisecond latency and over 100,000 transactions per second...
Now that all market participants are tired of public chain performance narratives, how can MegaETH stand out?
We dug into MegaETH’s white paper to try to find the answer.
There are many chains, but none of them can achieve "real-time"
Assuming narrative and hype aside, why does the market need a blockchain called MegaETH?
The answer given by MegaETH itself is that simply creating more chains cannot solve the problem of blockchain scalability functionality. Now Layer1 and Layer2 are facing common problems:
All EVM chains exhibit low transaction throughput;
Secondly, due to the scarcity of computing power, complex applications cannot be uploaded to the blockchain;
Finally, applications that require high update rates or fast feedback loops are not feasible with long block times.
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In other words, all current blockchains cannot actually do:
Instant Settlement: Transactions are processed immediately upon reaching the blockchain and results are published almost instantly.
Instant processing: Blockchain systems are capable of processing and verifying large numbers of transactions in a very short period of time.
What does this kind of immediacy mean in practical application scenarios?
For example, high-frequency trading requires the ability to complete order placement and cancellation operations within milliseconds. Or it may be a game with real-time combat or physics simulation, which requires the blockchain to update the status at an extremely high frequency. Obviously none of the current chains can do this.
Node specialization, real-time performance
So, in order to achieve the above-mentioned "real-time", what is the general idea of MegaETH?
It’s too long not to read the version: Node specialization: Reduce consensus overhead by separating transaction execution tasks and full node responsibilities.
If we want to be more specific, we can see that there are three main roles in MegaETH: sequencer, prover, and full node.
Specifically, there is only one active sequencer in MegaETH that executes transactions at any time, and other nodes receive status differences through the P2P network and update local status without re-executing transactions.
The sequencer is responsible for sorting and executing user transactions. However, MegaETH has only one active sequencer at any given time, eliminating consensus overhead during normal execution.
Provers use a stateless verification scheme to verify blocks in an asynchronous and out-of-order manner.
A MegaETH simple workflow is as follows:
Transaction processing and sorting: Transactions submitted by users are first sent to the Sequencer, which processes these transactions in order to generate new blocks and witness data.
Data publishing: The sequencer publishes the generated blocks, witness data and state differences to EigenDA (data availability layer) to ensure that these data are available in the network.
Block verification: Prover Network obtains block and witness data from the sequencer, verifies it through dedicated hardware devices, generates proofs and returns them to the sequencer.
status update: Fullnode Network (full node network) receives the status difference from the sequencer, updates the local status, and can verify the validity of the block by proving the network to ensure the consistency and security of the blockchain.
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Measure first, then execute
Judging from other contents of the white paper, MegaETH itself has also realized that this "node specialization" idea is good, but it does not mean that it can be easily put into practice.
When it comes to building a specific chain, MegaETH has a good idea: measure first, then execute. That is, we first conduct in-depth performance measurements to determine the real problems of the existing blockchain system, and then look at how to put this node specialization idea into the current system to solve the problem.
So, what problems did MegaETH detect?
The following part is actually quite far away from the leeks. If you are impatient, you can just turn to the next chapter.
Transaction Execution: Their experiments showed that even using powerful servers with 512GB of memory, the existing Ethereum execution client Reth can only achieve about 1,000 TPS (transactions per second) in a real-time sync setting, indicating that existing The system has significant performance bottlenecks in executing transactions and updates.
Parallel execution: Coming to the popular parallel EVM concept, there are actually some performance issues that have not been resolved. The actual production acceleration of parallel EVM is limited by the degree of workload parallelism. Measurements by MegaETH show that the median parallelism in recent Ethereum blocks is less than 2, and even when multiple blocks are merged, the median parallelism only increases to 2.75.
(Parallelism less than 2 means that in most cases, less than two transactions in each block can be executed simultaneously. This shows that most of the transactions in the current blockchain system are interdependent and cannot be processed in large-scale parallelism. .)
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Interpreter overhead: Even faster EVM interpreters like revm are still 1-2 orders of magnitude slower than native execution.
State synchronization: Synchronizing 100,000 ERC-20 transfers per second consumes 152.6 Mbps of bandwidth, and more complex transactions require more bandwidth. Updating the state root consumes 10 times more computing resources in Reth than executing a transaction. To put it bluntly, the current blockchain resource consumption is a bit large.
After testing these problems, MegaETH began to prescribe the right medicine, which made it easier to rationalize the solution logic mentioned above:
1. High performance sorter:
Node Specialization: MegaETH improves efficiency by allocating tasks to specialized nodes. The sequencer node specifically handles transaction sorting and execution, the full node is responsible for status update and verification, and the proof node uses dedicated hardware equipment to verify blocks.
High-end hardware: The sequencer uses high-performance servers (e.g. 100 cores, 1TB memory, 10Gbps network) to process large volumes of transactions and generate blocks quickly.
2. Status access optimization:
In-memory storage: Sorter nodes are equipped with large amounts of RAM and can store the entire blockchain state in memory, eliminating SSD read latency and speeding up state access.
Parallel execution: Although the acceleration effect of parallel EVM is limited in existing workloads, MegaETH optimizes the parallel execution engine and supports transaction priority management to ensure that critical transactions can be processed in a timely manner even during peak periods.
3. Interpreter optimization:
AOT/JIT compilation: MegaETH accelerates the execution of computing-intensive contracts by introducing AOT/JIT compilation technology. Even if the performance improvement of most contracts in a production environment is limited, these technologies can still significantly improve specific high computing demand scenarios. performance.
4. Status synchronization optimization:
Efficient data transmission: MegaETH has designed an efficient state difference encoding and transmission method that can synchronize large numbers of state updates with limited bandwidth.
Compression Technology: By employing advanced compression technology, MegaETH is able to synchronize status updates for complex transactions (such as Uniswap exchanges) within bandwidth constraints.
5. Status root update optimization:
Optimized MPT design: MegaETH uses optimized Merkle Patricia Trie (such as NOMT) to reduce read and write operations and improve the efficiency of state root updates.
Batch processing technology: By batch processing status updates, MegaETH can reduce random disk IO operations and improve overall performance.
The above things are actually very technical, but beyond these technical details, you can actually see that MegaETH really has a few technical skills, and you can also clearly feel a motivation:
By disclosing detailed technical data and test results, we try to enhance the transparency and credibility of the project, allowing the technical community and potential users to have a deeper understanding and trust in the performance of its system.
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A team from a prestigious school that is often favored?
In the process of interpreting the white paper, it can be clearly felt that although the name MegaETH is a bit exaggerated, the documents and instructions often reveal the rigor and over-details of a technical Nerd.
Public information shows that the MegaETH team seems to have a Chinese background, and CEO Li Yilong is from Stanford and has a PhD in computer science; Chief Technology Officer Yang Lei has a PhD from MIT, and Chief Business Officer Kong Shuyao has a PhD from Harvard Business School. He has an MBA background and has working experience in multiple institutions in the industry (ConsenSys, etc.); the person in charge of growth has some overlapping resumes with the chief business officer, and he also comes from the prestigious New York University.
Image source: Shenchao TechFlow
Image source: Shenchao TechFlow
As a team, all four people are from top universities in the United States. Their influence in terms of connections and resources is self-evident.
Previously, we also introduced in the article "Graduates become CEOs, the origin of Nexus, led by Pantera to invest 25 million yuan". Although the CEO of Nexus is a recent graduate, he is also from Stanford, and he also seems to have a solid background. technical background.
As expected, top VCs prefer technology tycoons from top schools. In addition, Vitalik also participated in the investment and has "ETH" in his name. The technical narrative and marketing effect may be full.
At present, when the old "King of Heaven" has become "Death of Heaven", projects are in decline, and the market is stagnant, MegaETH will obviously bring about a new round of FOMO effect.
We will continue to pay attention to more information about the project test network and interaction.
[Disclaimer] There are risks in the market, so investment needs to be cautious. This article does not constitute investment advice, and users should consider whether any opinions, views or conclusions contained in this article are appropriate for their particular circumstances. Invest accordingly and do so at your own risk.
This article is reproduced with permission from: "Deep Wave TechFlow"
