Can MegaETH, supported by Vitalik and led by Dragonfly, make ETH great again (MEGA)

According to l2beat data, there are already more than 50 L2s. Does the crypto market still need new L2s?

The answer is yes. Recently, another EVM L2 public chain MegaETH has emerged in the crypto market and received $20 million in seed round financing.

MegaETH's $20 million financing was led by crypto VC Dragonfly Capital, with participation from Figment Capital, Folius Ventures, Robot Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, Tangent and Credible Neutral. In addition, it also received investments from Vitalik Buterin, Consensys founder Joseph Lubin, Sreeram Kannan, Cobie, Karthik Talwar, Hasu, Santiago and Mert famous angel investors.

What kind of public chain is MegaETH? What is its charm that can still attract so many luxurious investment lineups when there are already many L2s?

There are already so many L1/L2, why do we need a MegaETH?

The advancement of blockchain frameworks has greatly lowered the threshold for creating new chains (including L1 and L2). As a result, a large number of new public chains have emerged recently. According to l2beat data, there are currently more than 50 L2 projects.

However, simply creating more chains does not solve the blockchain scalability problem, as 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 today’s major EVM chains.

The table above clearly shows that existing EVM chains face significant limitations in several areas. First, they all exhibit low transaction throughput. For example, while opBNB stands out among its peers with an extremely high gas rate of 100 MGas/s, it still pales in comparison to the capabilities of modern Web2 servers. For reference, 100 MGas/s is equivalent to only 650 Uniswap swaps or 3,700 ERC-20 transfers per second. In comparison, modern database servers already exceed one million transactions per second in the TPC-C benchmark.

Second, complex applications cannot be put on-chain due to the scarcity of computing power. For example, a simple EVM contract to calculate the ?th (n=10 to the 8th) Fibonacci number consumes about 5.5 billion gas, which will take the entire opBNB chain 55 seconds, with a computing speed of 100 MGas/s. In contrast, a similar program written in C only takes 30 milliseconds to complete the same task, making it 1833 times faster using a single CPU core! Now imagine the possibility of leveraging multi-core processing to unlock another 100 times the computing power of the blockchain.

Finally, applications that require high update rates or fast feedback loops are not feasible with long block times. All chains in the table, except Arbitrum One, update their state every second or more. However, complex fully on-chain dApps like Autonomous Worlds require high update rates (e.g., less than 100 milliseconds between blocks) to simulate real-time combat or physics. Additionally, high-frequency trading on-chain is impossible unless orders can be placed or canceled within 10 milliseconds.

Fortunately, none of these limitations are insurmountable for EVM chains. As technology advances, now is the time to build a real-time blockchain to unlock these potentials. A real-time blockchain is one that can process transactions as soon as they arrive and publish results updates in real time. In addition, it must support high transaction throughput and strong computing power to maintain a real-time experience even during peak user demand.

The goal of MegaETH is to create a real-time blockchain compatible with EVM. Its goal is to push the performance of Ethereum L2 to the hardware limit, narrow the gap between blockchain and traditional cloud computing servers, and bring Web2-level real-time performance to the crypto world for the first time.

MegaETH's six major features realize real-time EVM

According to Shuyao Kong, co-founder of MegaETH, MegaETH is the first real-time blockchain that supports 100,000 transactions per second and millisecond response speed.

MegaETH achieves the above real-time EVM performance through the following six key technologies:

1. Node specialization: MegaETH concentrates performance-critical tasks such as transaction execution to a small group of sorter nodes, while massively decentralizing security-critical tasks such as block verification. This key architectural decision enables MegaETH to significantly improve network performance while minimizing the hardware requirements of full nodes. The end result is an unprecedentedly fast, secure, and efficient heterogeneous blockchain.

2. Real-time EVM execution engine: MegaETH has launched the first real-time EVM execution engine, which can seamlessly process a large number of transactions when they arrive, and reliably publish the resulting state changes at intervals as low as 10 milliseconds. This unique feature is achieved by co-designing MegaETH's low-latency, stream-based block building algorithm with a concurrency control protocol that supports transaction priorities.

3. In-memery computing: MegaETH’s sorter stores the entire EVM world state and state trie in memory, making state access 1,000 times faster than 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 in-memory computing, is critical for high-performance, data-intensive Web2 applications. Thanks to node specialization, MegaETH is bringing this cutting-edge technology to the blockchain for the first time.

4. Smart Contract Compilation: MegaETH uses just-in-time (JIT) compilation technology to transparently convert smart contracts into native machine code on the fly. This technology eliminates the inefficiency of interpreting EVM bytecode and simulating stack machines. For computationally intensive applications, it can improve performance by 100 times, making MegaETH an ideal platform for building complex dApps with real-time performance.

5. Super IO-efficient state trie: Due to intensive disk I/O operations, maintaining the state trie is the biggest bottleneck for EVM-compatible blockchains. MegaETH solves this problem by replacing the Merkle Patricia Trie (MPT) with a new state trie designed from scratch. This new trie minimizes disk I/O and efficiently scales to TB-level state data while maintaining full EVM compatibility.

6. State Synchronization Protocol: MegaETH uses an efficient peer-to-peer protocol to propagate state updates from the sorter to the full node with low latency and high throughput. This ensures that even nodes with poor network connections can keep up with the latest state, even at an update rate of 100,000 TPS.

MegaETH Components

There are three main roles in MegaETH: sorter, prover, and full node.

The main components of MegaETH and their interactions

The sorter is responsible for sorting and executing user transactions. However, MegaETH has only one active sorter at any given time , eliminating consensus overhead during normal execution.

Most full nodes receive state diffs from this active sorter over the p2p network and apply these differences directly to update their local state. Notably, they do not re-execute transactions; instead, they indirectly verify blocks using the proofs provided by the prover. Advanced users such as bridge operators and market makers may still execute every transaction to achieve fast finality, although higher hardware is required to keep up with the sorter.

The prover verifies blocks in an asynchronous and out-of-order manner using a stateless verification scheme.

MegaETH Gaozhi founding team

A large part of the reason why MegaETH has received investments from major crypto VCs such as Dragonfly Capital and industry celebrities such as Vitalik is due to its luxurious founding team.

According to the official website, the main founding team of MegaETH consists of 4 people:

Li Yilong: Co-founder and CEO, PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, formerly worked at software company Runtime Verification Inc.;

Yang Lei, co-founder and CTO: received a bachelor's degree in computer science from Peking University in 2018, a master's degree in science from MIT in 2020, and recently received a doctorate in computer science from MIT. He is a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); his doctoral thesis was on efficient consensus and synchronization of distributed systems.

Kong Shuyao, co-founder and CBO, joined Consensys in 2017 and served as Consensys's global business development director for a time. She graduated from Harvard Business School in 2020 and joined MegaETH in March 2024. She is also a columnist for Decrypt.

Namik Muduroglu, Founding Member and Head of Growth, Consensys and Hypersphere.