From being ignored to overnight fame, what is the mystery behind MegaETH favored by Vitalik?

Author: Karen, Foresight News

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

What is MegaETH?

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

MegaETH believes that the current EVM chain has limitations such as low transaction throughput, difficulty in onboarding complex applications, and slow block generation time. High-throughput blockchains suffer from congestion and reliability issues, and Layer2 has not truly optimized for performance.

MegaETH claims to be the first real-time blockchain fully compatible with Ethereum, a breakthrough made possible by MegaETH's full utilization of Ethereum security, the integration of Optimism's fault-proof system, and the combined use of its own optimized sequencer.

Officially, MegaETH is said to have high transaction throughput, abundant computational power, and the ability to achieve millisecond-level response time even under heavy loads. The goal is to push the performance of Ethereum L2 to its hardware limits and narrow the gap between blockchain and traditional cloud computing servers. MegaETH claims to be able to process 100,000 transactions per second with millisecond-level response speed.

MegaETH Team and Investment Background

The main team members of MegaETH have strong backgrounds, including academic elites from top universities in the United States with professional backgrounds in blockchain and computer science, as well as professionals who have held important positions at ConsenSys. Shuyao Kong said that currently, the MegaETH team consists of no more than 20 people.

• Yilong Li: Co-founder and CEO of MegaETH, holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, and previously served as a senior software engineer at Runtime Verification Inc.
• Lei Yang: Co-founder and CEO of MegaETH, he received a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Peking University in 2018 and a Master's degree from MIT in 2020. He recently obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT, and is also a member of the Networked and Mobile Systems group (NMS) at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL), focusing on efficient consensus and synchronization in distributed systems. Lei Yang's current research focuses on computer network issues in blockchain settings.
• Shuyao Kong: Co-founder and CBO of MegaETH, known as 'Cake Brother' on Twitter, according to public information, she served as the Global Business Development Director at ConsenSy from October 2017 to April this year. Shuyao Kong's personal Twitter profile indicates that she is a consultant for Consensys.
• Namik Muduroglu: MegaETH co-founder and head of growth, former employee of Consensys and Hypersphere.

Yesterday, MegaLabs, the developer of MegaETH, announced the completion of a $20 million seed round financing. The financing was led by Dragonfly and supported by Figment Capital, Folius Ventures, Robot Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, Tangent, and Credible Neutral, as well as 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 structure of this round of financing is equity plus token warrants, which brings MegaETH's fully diluted token valuation to '9 digits', at least $100 million. When asked whether the native token of MegaETH will be launched with the mainnet (scheduled to launch by the end of the year), Kong said no decision has been made yet.

How does MegaETH operate? How to achieve real-time performance?

In MegaETH, there are three main roles: sorter, prover, and Full Node. MegaETH achieves node specialization by decoupling transaction execution tasks from Full Nodes.

Among them, like any L2, the sequencer is responsible for sorting and executing user transactions. The difference is that MegaETH has only one active sequencer at any given time, thereby eliminating the consensus overhead during normal execution.

Most full nodes receive state changes from the sequencer through the p2p network, and directly update the local state. They do not re-execute transactions; instead, they indirectly verify blocks using proofs provided by the prover.

Main components and their interactions of MegaETH, Source: MegaETH

MegaETH uses the security of Ethereum, the Proof-of-Stake system of Optimism, and an optimized sequencer to achieve real-time performance through two key technologies: heterogeneous blockchain architecture and highly optimized EVM execution environment. In this heterogeneous blockchain architecture, network nodes with different hardware configurations can focus on specific tasks to improve performance. The execution environment can push throughput, latency, and resource efficiency to the hardware limit.

MegaLabs said that MegaETH has higher hardware requirements for sequencer nodes and lower hardware requirements for full nodes, because sequencer nodes handle heavy execution work with lower proof of validation computation costs. This specialization enables MegaETH to have sequencer nodes that are 20 times more expensive than regular Solana validators (with 5-10 times higher performance), while maintaining the cost of full nodes comparable to Ethereum L1 nodes.

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

MegaETH will be launched on the public testnet in early autumn, and will be launched on the mainnet by the end of the year. Recently, it has also launched a 10x builder program called MegaMafia,

To help developers and founders build applications with the MegaLabs team and its advisors.

MegaETH real-time blockchain is expected to meet the high throughput and low latency requirements of complex applications. For the entire chain game, real-time blockchain means a smoother and more realistic gaming experience. For the DePIN project, a more efficient and reliable data on-chain process is required. Can MegaETH demonstrate strong driving force for the development of entire chain games, DePIN, and other complex applications, provide an ideal operating environment, and transform cutting-edge blockchain technology concepts into accessible reality? We will continue to follow the progress of MegaETH.