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