What is MegaETH? Everything You Need to Know

From obscurity to overnight sensation, is MegaETH poised to become a frontrunner in real-time blockchain technology? On June 28, MegaETH’s developer, MegaLabs, announced the completion of a $20 million seed funding round led by Dragonfly, with support from notable figures such as Vitalik Buterin, Consensys founder Joseph Lubin, and EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan.

What is MegaETH?

MegaLabs was founded in early 2023 as a research project aimed at scaling blockchain performance without compromising security or decentralization. Currently, it boasts a real-time, high-performance devnet and is developing a real-time blockchain limited only by hardware.

MegaETH contends that current EVM chains suffer from low transaction throughput, difficulty in deploying complex applications, and slow block times. High-throughput blockchains face congestion and reliability issues, while Layer 2 solutions have not been truly optimized for performance.

MegaETH claims to be the first fully Ethereum-compatible real-time blockchain (akin to an L2). This technological breakthrough leverages Ethereum’s security, integrates Optimism’s fault-proof system, and uses its own optimized sequencer.

According to the official statement, MegaETH features high transaction throughput, robust computing power, and millisecond response times even under heavy loads. Its goal is to push Ethereum L2 performance to hardware limits, narrowing the gap between blockchain and traditional cloud computing servers. MegaETH asserts it can process 100,000 transactions per second with millisecond-level response times.

MegaETH Team and Investment Background

MegaETH’s core team comprises highly skilled individuals with backgrounds from top U.S. universities and significant professional experience in blockchain and computer science. The current team consists of fewer than 20 members.

• Yilong Li: Co-founder and CEO of MegaETH, holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, and was a senior software engineer at Runtime Verification Inc.
• Lei Yang: Co-founder and CEO, earned a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Peking University in 2018, a Master’s degree from MIT in 2020, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT. He is also a member of the Networks and Mobile Systems (NMS) group at MIT CSAIL.
• Shuyao Kong: Co-founder and CBO, known as “Bing Xiong” on Twitter, previously served as Global Business Development Director at ConsenSys.
• Namik Muduroglu: Founding member and Head of Growth, formerly with ConsenSys and Hypersphere.

On June 28, MegaLabs announced the completion of a $20 million seed funding round led by Dragonfly, with participation from Figment Capital, Folius Ventures, Robot Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, Tangent, Credible Neutral, and top industry angel investors, 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 funding round included both equity and token warrants, bringing MegaETH’s fully diluted token valuation to at least $100 million. When asked whether MegaETH’s native token would launch with the mainnet (expected by year-end), Kong said no decision had been made.

How Does MegaETH Work?

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

Similar to any Layer 2, the sequencer is responsible for ordering and executing user transactions. Unlike other L2s, MegaETH has only one active sequencer at any given time, eliminating consensus overhead during normal execution.

Most full nodes receive state diffs from the sequencer via the p2p network and directly update their local state. They do not re-execute transactions but indirectly verify blocks using proofs provided by provers.

MegaETH leverages Ethereum security, Optimism’s fault-proof system, and optimized sequencers, utilizing heterogeneous blockchain architecture and a highly optimized EVM execution environment to achieve real-time performance.

This architecture allows network nodes with different hardware configurations to focus on specific tasks, pushing throughput, latency, and resource efficiency to hardware limits.

MegaLabs states that MegaETH’s hardware requirements are high for sequencer nodes but low for full nodes, as sequencer nodes handle heavy execution workloads while the computational cost of verifying proofs is low.

This node specialization enables MegaETH to maintain high performance while keeping full node costs comparable to Ethereum L1 nodes.

MegaETH plans to launch a public testnet in early fall and the mainnet by year-end. It recently introduced the 10x builder program MegaMafia to help developers and founders build applications with the MegaLabs team and advisors.

MegaETH’s real-time blockchain aims to meet the high throughput and low latency demands of complex applications. For on-chain games, this means smoother, more realistic experiences. For DePIN projects, it promises more efficient and reliable data on-chain processes.

Whether MegaETH can drive the development of on-chain games, DePIN, and other complex applications, and turn cutting-edge blockchain technology into practical reality, remains to be seen. We will continue to follow MegaETH’s progress closely.