Compiled by: Felix, PANews
On June 27, MegaLabs, the developer of the new blockchain MegaETH, completed a $20 million seed round of financing, led by Dragonfly, with participation from companies such as Figment Capital, Robot Ventures, and Big Brain Holdings. Angel investors include Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, ConsenSys founder Joseph Lubin, EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan, ETHGlobal co-founder Kartik Talwar, Helius Labs co-founder Mert Mumtaz, Santiago Santos, Hasu, and Jordan Fish (also known as Cobie). This round of financing uses the structure of equity plus token warrants, bringing MegaETH's fully diluted token valuation to at least $100 million.
With such a luxurious financing lineup and being in the fiercely competitive L1 track, what is the difference between MegaETH and others? Can it reshape the L1 landscape in the future? This article will give you a glimpse.
Why do we need another blockchain?
Although the advancement of blockchain architecture has greatly lowered the threshold for creating new chains (including L1s and L2s), and many new chains have emerged (currently there are more than 50 L2 projects), simply creating more chains does not solve the scalability problem of blockchains. Because each individual chain still imposes significant restrictions on the dapps it hosts. For example, the following table shows the target gas per second and block time of the current mainstream EVM chains.
Table: Comparison of gas parameters of various EVM chains in 2024 (Source: Paradigm)
The above table clearly shows that existing EVM chains face significant limitations in several areas:
Low transaction throughput
Complex applications cannot be put on-chain due to insufficient computing power
Applications that require high update rates or fast feedback loops are not feasible with longer block times. All chains in the table, except Arbitrum One, update their state once per second.
What is different about the MegaETH blockchain?
The idea of ââthe MegaETH blockchain came about because most EVM blockchains can only achieve 3-digit transactions per second (TPS), while MegaETH aims to achieve 100,000 TPS.
MegaETH claims to be the first "real-time blockchain" that is fully compatible with Ethereum. Real-time means that MegaETH can process transactions immediately and publish result updates in real time. In addition, MegaETH supports high transaction throughput and strong computing power to maintain a real-time experience even during peak user demand.
MegaETH uses Ethereum security, Optimismâs fail-safe system, and its own optimized collator to achieve real-time performance.
Specifically, MegaETH's two key technologies: heterogeneous blockchain architecture and "ultra-optimized" EVM execution environment, help it achieve 100,000 TPS real-time transmission. Heterogeneous blockchain architecture improves performance by allowing network nodes with different hardware configurations to specialize in specific tasks. The ultra-optimized EVM execution environment pushes throughput, latency, and resource efficiency to the hardware limit.
Node Specialization
MegaETH centralizes performance-critical tasks such as transaction execution to a small set of sequencer nodes, while decentralizing security-critical tasks such as block verification at scale. This key architectural decision allows MegaETH to significantly improve network performance while minimizing hardware requirements for full nodes.
Real-time EVM
MegaETH introduces the first real-time EVM execution engine, capable of seamlessly processing large numbers of transactions as they arrive and reliably publishing the resulting state changes at intervals as low as 10 milliseconds.
In-memory computing
MegaETH's sorter stores the entire EVM world state and state tree in memory, which speeds up state access by 1000x compared to SSD-based systems. High-end servers with 1-4 TB of memory are readily available in the cloud, providing ample capacity for future state growth.
This technology, known as in-memory computing, is essential for high-performance, data-intensive Web2 applications. Thanks to node specialization, MegaETH brings this cutting-edge technology to blockchain for the first time.
Smart Contract Compilation
MegaETH uses just-in-time (JIT) compilation to transparently convert smart contracts into native machine code on the fly. This technology eliminates the inefficiencies of interpreting EVM bytecode and emulating stack machines. For computationally intensive applications, performance can be improved by 100 times.
Super I/O Efficiency Status Trie
Maintaining the state tree is the biggest bottleneck for EVM-compatible blockchains due to intensive disk I/O operations. MegaETH designed a new state trie that replaces the Merkle Patricia Trie (MPT), minimizing disk I/O and efficiently scaling to TB-level state data while maintaining full EVM compatibility.
State Synchronization Protocol
MegaETH uses an efficient peer-to-peer protocol to propagate state updates from sorters to full nodes, with low latency and high throughput. This ensures that even at an update rate of 100,000 TPS, nodes with poor network connections can keep up with the latest state.
MegaLabs Founding Team
The official website shows that MegaETH developer MegaLabs was established in early 2023.
CEO: Li Yilong, who holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University and previously worked at software company Runtime Verification Inc.
CTO: Yang Lei, PhD from MIT;
CBO: Kong Shuyao, former head of global business development at Consensys (Kong continues to serve as an advisor to Consensys)
Head of Growth: Namik Muduroglu, formerly of Consensys and Hypersphere
It is worth noting that MegaETH's public testnet will be launched in early autumn, and the mainnet is expected to be launched at the end of the year. It has not yet been decided whether the native token will be launched at the same time as the mainnet. Currently, there are less than 20 people working on MegaETH development, and the new funds will be used to build the blockchain, attract developers and grow the community. Whether MegaETH, whose founding team has a Chinese background, can become a "dark horse" in the L1 track in the future, let's wait and see.
References: MegaETH, The Block
Related reading: Solanaâs officially endorsed accelerator Colosseum: Raised $60 million, which early projects did it support?
