MegaLabs,
the
main
developer
firm
behind
a
new
Ethereum
scaling
protocol
designed
to
be
so
fast
it’s
considered
“real-time,”
announced
Thursday
that
it
has
raised
$20
million
in
a
seed
round
led
by
Dragonfly
Capital.
The
round
also
saw
participation
from
Figment
Capital,
Folius
Ventures,
Robot
Ventures,
Big
Brain
Holding,
Tangent
and
Credibly
Neutral,
and
included
angel
investors
such
as
the
co-founder
of
Ethereum
Vitalik
Buterin,
CEO
of
Consensys
Joseph
Lubin,
creator
of
EigenLayer
Sreeram
Kannan,
and
Hasu
of
Flashbots.
The
fresh
round
of
capital
will
go
towards
building
out
the
MegaETH
protocol,
with
the
aim
of
having
a
testnet
go
live
in
the
next
few
months.
MegaETH
calls
itself
a
“real-time
blockchain,”
meaning
that
it
focuses
on
the
speed
of
processing
transactions,
with
plans
to
stream
“100,000
transactions
per
second
with
millisecond-level
responsiveness.”
“We
define
a
real-time
blockchain
to
be
a
blockchain
that
can
process
transactions
as
soon
as
they
arrive,”
said
Yilong
Li,
co-founder
of
MegaLabs,
in
an
interview
with
CoinDesk.
“Then
you
produce
the
resulting
outputs
at
a
very
high
frequency.”
According
to
a
press
release,
MegaETH
achieves
its
scaling
in
two
ways:
through
its
“heterogeneous
blockchain
architecture,
which
boosts
performance
by
allowing
network
nodes
with
different
hardware
configurations
to
specialize
on
specific
tasks,”
as
well
as
a
“hyper-optimized
EVM
execution
environment
that
pushes
throughput,
latency
and
resource
efficiency
to
hardware
limits.”
An
EVM
execution
environment
is
a
blockchain
operating
system
compatible
with
Ethereum’s
programming
standard.
The
idea
of
MegaETH
was
partly
inspired
by
Buterin’s
2021
blog
post,
titled
“Endgame,”
where
he
addresses
scaling
Ethereum.
“Creating
hyper-scalable
EVM
implementations
is
a
key
prerequisite
for
truly
scaling
Ethereum,”
Buterin
wrote
in
a
message
about
MegaETH,
forwarded
by
a
MegaLabs
representative
over
Telegram.
“I
am
excited
to
see
brilliant
developers
taking
on
this
challenge.”