Compilation: Felix, PANews

On June 27th, MegaLabs, the developer of the new blockchain MegaETH, completed a $20 million seed round of financing, with Dragonfly as the lead investor, and Figment Capital, Robot Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, and other companies participating. 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, which values MegaETH's fully diluted token at at least $100 million.

With such a luxurious lineup of financing, plus being in the fiercely competitive L1 track, what sets MegaETH apart? Can it reshape the L1 landscape in the future? This article takes you to explore the truth.

Why do we need another Blockchain?

Despite the significant progress in the architecture of the blockchain, the threshold for creating new chains (including L1s and L2s) has been greatly reduced, resulting in the emergence of many new chains (currently more than 50 L2 projects). However, simply creating more chains cannot solve the scalability problem of the blockchain. Because each individual chain still imposes significant limitations on the dapps it hosts. For example, the table below shows the target gas per second and block time for current mainstream EVM chains.

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

The above table clearly shows that the existing EVM chains are facing significant limitations in several aspects.

• Low transaction throughput
• Due to insufficient computing power, complex applications cannot be put on the chain.
• Applications requiring high update rates or fast feedback loops are not feasible within longer block times. With the exception of Arbitrum One, all chains in the table update state once per second.

What are the differences of the blockchain MegaETH?

The idea of MegaETH blockchain emerged because most EVM blockchains can only achieve a transaction volume of three digits 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 computational power to maintain a real-time experience even during periods of high user demand.

MegaETH uses Ethereum security, Optimism's fault-tolerant system, and its own optimized sequencer to achieve real-time performance.

Specifically, MegaETH's two key technologies: heterogeneous blockchain architecture and 'super-optimized' EVM execution environment, help it achieve real-time transmission of 100,000 TPS. Heterogeneous blockchain architecture improves performance by allowing network nodes with different hardware configurations to perform specific tasks. The super-optimized EVM execution environment pushes throughput, latency, and resource efficiency to hardware limits.

Node Specialization

MegaETH concentrates the execution of transactional and performance-critical tasks to a small group of sequencer nodes, while massively decentralizing block validation and other security-critical tasks. This key architectural decision allows MegaETH to significantly improve network performance while minimizing hardware requirements for full nodes.

Real-time****EVM

MegaETH has introduced the first real-time EVM execution engine, which can seamlessly process a large number of transactions and reliably publish the resulting state changes with intervals as low as 10 milliseconds.

Memory Computing

The MegaETH sorter stores the entire EVM world state and state tree in memory. Compared to SSD-based systems, the state access speed has increased by 1000 times. High-end servers with 1-4 TB of memory are available on the cloud at any time, providing sufficient capacity for future state growth.

This technology, known as in-memory computing, is essential for high-performance, data-intensive Web2 applications. Due to node specialization, MegaETH is the first to introduce this cutting-edge technology to blockchain.

Smart Contract Compilation

MegaETH uses Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation to transparently convert smart contracts into native machine code in real time. This technology eliminates the inefficiency 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 to the greatest extent possible while effectively scaling up to TB-level state data and maintaining full EVM compatibility.

State Synchronization Protocol

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

MegaLabs Founding Team

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

• CEO: Li Yilong, holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and has previously worked at software company Runtime Verification Inc.
• CTO: Yang Lei, a PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology;
• CBO: Kong Shuyao, former Global Head of Business Development at ConsenSys (Kong continues to serve as an advisor to ConsenSys)
• Growth Director: Namik Muduroglu, who has previously worked at 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 by the end of the year. It has not been decided whether the native token will be launched at the same time as the mainnet. Currently, less than 20 people are dedicated to the development of MegaETH, and new funds will be used to build the blockchain, attract developers, and grow the community. Whether MegaETH, with a founding team of Chinese background, can become a "dark horse" in the L1 track, remains to be seen.

Reference: MegaETH, The Block

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