MegaLabs, the developer firm of a new Ethereum scaling protocol, has secured $20 million in a seed funding round led by Dragonfly Capital. The investment also includes contributions from Figment Capital, Folius Ventures, Robot Ventures, Big Brain Holding, Tangent, and Credibly Neutral. Notable angel investors in this round are Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin, EigenLayer creator Sreeram Kannan, and Flashbots’ Hasu.
The funding will be directed towards further developing the MegaETH protocol. The project aims to launch a testnet within the next few months. MegaETH is positioned as a ‘real-time blockchain,’ emphasizing rapid transaction processing capabilities, targeting to handle up to 100,000 transactions per second with millisecond-level responsiveness.
‘A real-time blockchain processes transactions as soon as they arrive,’ explained Yilong Li, co-founder of MegaLabs. ‘The resulting outputs are generated at a high frequency.’
MegaETH achieves its scalability through a heterogeneous blockchain architecture, enabling network nodes with varied hardware setups to specialize in specific functions. Additionally, the protocol utilizes a highly optimized EVM execution environment to enhance throughput, latency, and resource efficiency to the maximum hardware capabilities. The EVM execution environment is a blockchain operating system compatible with Ethereum’s programming standards.
The concept of MegaETH was influenced by Vitalik Buterin’s 2021 blog post titled ‘Endgame,’ where he addresses Ethereum’s scaling challenges. Buterin expressed his enthusiasm for developers tackling the scalability issue: ‘Creating hyper-scalable EVM implementations is crucial for Ethereum’s growth,’ he stated.