What exactly is MegaETH, which became an overnight sensation favored by Vitalik?

Author: Karen, Foresight News

From being ignored to an overnight sensation, has MegaETH, the real-time blockchain, already positioned itself at the forefront of blockchain technology? Just yesterday, MegaETH developer MegaLabs announced the completion of a $20 million seed round financing led by Dragonfly, with support from Vitalik Buterin, Consensys founder Joseph Lubin, EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan, and others.

What is MegaETH?

The founding of MegaLabs can be traced back to early 2023, when it was established as a research project aimed at scaling blockchain performance without sacrificing security or decentralization. It currently boasts a real-time, high-performance devnet and is developing a real-time blockchain limited only by hardware constraints.

MegaETH believes that current EVM chains face limitations such as low transaction throughput, difficulty in bringing complex applications on-chain, and slow block times. High-throughput blockchains suffer from congestion and reliability issues, while Layer 2 solutions have not truly optimized for performance.

MegaETH claims to be the first fully Ethereum-compatible real-time blockchain. This technological breakthrough is attributed to MegaETH's full utilization of Ethereum's security, the integration of Optimism's fault-proof system, and the combined application of its own optimized sequencer.

The official statement claims that MegaETH features high transaction throughput, rich computational capabilities, and millisecond-level response times even under heavy load, aiming to push Ethereum L2 performance to hardware limits and bridge the gap between blockchain and traditional cloud computing servers. MegaETH asserts it can process 100,000 transactions per second with millisecond-level response speeds.

MegaETH Team and Investment Background

The core team of MegaETH has a strong background, comprising academic elites from top universities in the United States with expertise in blockchain and computer science, as well as professionals who have held significant positions at ConsenSys. Shuyao Kong stated that the current team size of MegaETH does not exceed 20 members.

• Yilong Li: Co-founder and CEO of MegaETH, holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, and previously worked as a senior software engineer at Runtime Verification Inc.
• Lei Yang: Co-founder and CEO of MegaETH, obtained a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Peking University in 2018, a Master's degree from MIT in 2020, and recently earned a PhD in Computer Science from MIT. He is also a member of the Network and Mobile Systems group (NMS) at MIT CSAIL, with research focused on efficient consensus and synchronization in distributed systems. Lei Yang's current research focuses on computer networking issues in blockchain setups.
• Shuyao Kong: Co-founder and CBO of MegaETH, known on Twitter as "Brother Pie," has served as the Global Business Development Director at ConsenSys from October 2017 to April this year. Shuyao Kong's personal Twitter bio indicates he is an advisor at ConsenSys.
• Namik Muduroglu: Founding member and Growth Lead of MegaETH, previously worked at ConsenSys and Hypersphere.

Yesterday, MegaETH developer Mega Labs announced the completion of a $20 million seed round financing, led by Dragonfly, with participation from Figment Capital, Folium Ventures, Robot Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, Tangent, and Credible Neutral, as well as support from several top angel investors in the industry, including Vitalik Buterin, Consensys founder Joseph Lubin, EigenLayer founder and CEO Sreeram Kannan, Cobie, ETHGlobal co-founder Kartik Talwar, Hasu, Santiago, and Helius Labs co-founder and CEO Mert Mumtaz.

According to The Block, the financing structure consists of equity plus token warrants, bringing MegaETH's fully diluted token valuation to "nine figures," or at least $100 million. When asked whether MegaETH's native token would launch alongside the mainnet (scheduled for the end of the year), Kong stated that no decision has been made yet.

How Does MegaETH Work? How Does It Achieve Real-Time Performance?

There are three main roles in MegaETH: sequencers, provers, and full nodes. MegaETH achieves node specialization by decoupling transaction execution tasks from full nodes.

Similar to any L2, the sequencer is responsible for ordering and executing user transactions. The difference is that MegaETH has only one active sequencer at any given time, eliminating consensus overhead during normal execution.

Most full nodes receive state changes (state diffs) from the sequencer via a p2p network and directly update their local state. They do not re-execute transactions; instead, they indirectly verify blocks using proofs provided by the provers.

Main components of MegaETH and their interactions, source: MegaETH

MegaETH utilizes Ethereum's security, Optimism's fault-proof system, and optimized sequencers, and achieves real-time performance through two key technologies: heterogeneous blockchain architecture and super-optimized EVM execution environment. The aforementioned heterogeneous blockchain architecture improves performance by allowing network nodes with different hardware configurations to focus on specific tasks, while its execution environment pushes throughput, latency, and resource efficiency to hardware limits.

MegaLabs states that MegaETH has high hardware requirements for sequencer nodes and lower hardware requirements for full nodes, as the sequencer nodes handle heavy execution workloads while the computational cost of verifying proofs is lower. This node specialization allows MegaETH to have sequencer nodes that are 20 times more expensive (with 5-10 times better performance) than ordinary Solana validators while keeping the costs of full nodes comparable to Ethereum L1 nodes.

Expected hardware requirements for each type of node in MegaETH, source: MegaETH

MegaETH plans to launch a public testnet in early autumn and the mainnet by the end of the year. Recently, it also launched a 10x builder program called MegaMafia to help developers and founders build applications in collaboration with the MegaLabs team and its advisors.

The real-time blockchain of MegaETH is expected to meet the demands of complex applications for high throughput and low latency. For full-chain gaming, a real-time blockchain means a smoother and more realistic gaming experience. For DePIN projects, a more efficient and reliable data on-chain process is required. Whether MegaETH can demonstrate a strong driving force for the development of complex applications like full-chain gaming and DePIN, providing an ideal operating environment and transforming cutting-edge blockchain technology concepts into tangible reality, we will continue to monitor MegaETH's progress.