What makes the new L1 project MegaETH with its luxurious financing lineup stand out?

Author: Felix, PANews

On June 27, the new blockchain MegaETH developer MegaLabs completed a $20 million seed round financing, led by Dragonfly, with participation from Figment Capital, Robot Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, and others. 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 adopts a structure of equity plus token warrants, bringing MegaETH's fully diluted token valuation to at least $100 million.

With such a luxurious financing lineup, what makes MegaETH stand out in the fiercely competitive L1 space? Can it reshape the L1 landscape in the future? This article will give you a glimpse.

Why do we need another blockchain?

Although advancements in blockchain architecture have significantly lowered the barriers to creating new chains (including L1s and L2s), leading to the emergence of many new chains (currently over 50 L2 projects), simply creating more chains does not solve the scalability issues of blockchain. Each individual chain still imposes significant limitations on the dapps it hosts. For example, the table below shows the target gas and block times per second for currently mainstream EVM chains.

Table: Comparison of gas parameters for various EVM chains in 2024 (Source: Paradigm)

The above table clearly indicates that existing EVM chains face significant limitations in several areas:

• Low transaction throughput
• Complex applications cannot be deployed due to insufficient computational power
• Applications requiring high update rates or fast feedback loops are unfeasible with longer block times. All chains in the table, except Arbitrum One, update their state once per second.

What makes the MegaETH blockchain different?

The idea of the MegaETH blockchain arose because most EVM blockchains can only achieve hundreds of transactions per second (TPS), while MegaETH aims to achieve 100,000 TPS.

MegaETH claims to be the first fully Ethereum-compatible "real-time blockchain." Real-time means that MegaETH can process transactions immediately and publish result updates in real-time. Additionally, MegaETH supports high transaction throughput and strong computational power to maintain a real-time experience even during peak user demand.

MegaETH leverages Ethereum's security, Optimism's fault-tolerance system, and its own optimized sorter to achieve real-time performance.

Specifically, two key technologies of MegaETH—heterogeneous blockchain architecture and "super-optimized" EVM execution environment—help it achieve real-time transmission at 100,000 TPS. The heterogeneous blockchain architecture enhances performance by allowing network nodes with different hardware configurations to specialize in executing specific tasks. The super-optimized EVM execution environment pushes throughput, latency, and resource efficiency to the hardware limits.

Node Specialization

MegaETH concentrates performance-critical tasks such as transaction execution into a small group of sorting nodes while massively decentralizing security-critical tasks like block validation. This key architectural decision allows MegaETH to significantly enhance 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 a large volume of transactions and reliably publishing the resulting state changes at intervals as low as 10 milliseconds.

Memory Computing

The sorters of MegaETH store the entire EVM world state and state tree in memory, achieving a 1000-fold increase in state access speed 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 memory computing, is essential for high-performance, data-intensive Web2 applications. With 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 instantaneously. This technology eliminates the inefficiencies of interpreting EVM bytecode and simulating stack machines. For compute-intensive applications, performance can be improved by 100 times.

Super I/O Efficiency State Trie

Maintaining the state tree is the biggest bottleneck for EVM-compatible blockchains due to intensive disk I/O operations. MegaETH has designed a new state Trie to replace the Merkle Patricia Trie (MPT), minimizing disk I/O and effectively scaling to TB-level state data while maintaining full EVM compatibility.

State Synchronization Protocol

MegaETH employs an efficient peer-to-peer protocol to propagate state updates from sorters to full nodes, ensuring low latency and high throughput. This ensures that even nodes with poor network connections can stay synchronized with the latest state at an update rate of 100,000 TPS.

MegaLabs Founding Team

According to the official website, MegaETH developer MegaLabs was established in early 2023.

• CEO: Li Yilong, holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and previously worked at software company Runtime Verification Inc.;
• CTO: Yang Lei, Ph.D. from MIT;
• CBO: Kong Shuyao, former Global Business Development Director at ConsenSys (Kong continues to serve as an advisor to ConsenSys);
• Growth Lead: Namik Muduroglu, previously worked at ConsenSys and Hypersphere.

Notably, MegaETH's public testnet is set to launch in early autumn, with the mainnet expected to go live by the end of the year. It has not yet been decided whether the native token will launch simultaneously with the mainnet. Currently, fewer than 20 people are dedicated to the development of MegaETH, and the new funding will be used to build the blockchain, attract developers, and grow the community. With a founding team of Chinese background, whether MegaETH can become a "dark horse" in the L1 space remains to be seen.