News
MegaLabs Raises $20 Million Seed Round and Builds the First Real-Time Blockchain with Full Ethereum Compatibility
June 27, 2024 – MegaLabs today announced a $20 million Seed Fundraise led by Dragonfly to develop MegaETH, the first real-time blockchain that combines the security and ubiquity of Ethereum with modern, cutting-edge speed and performance. Other institutional investors include Figment Capital, Folius Ventures, Robot Ventures, Big Brain Holding, Tangent, and Credibly Neutral. Notable angels Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Lubin, Sreeram Kannan, Cobie, Santiago Santos, Karthik Talwar, Hasu, and Mert Mumtaz also participated.
Existing blockchains are failing to meet the growing demand for decentralized applications. High-throughput blockchains, like Solana, are unable to scale to meet user demand and suffer from constant congestion and reliability issues. Ethereum Layer-2 blockchains, while easy to develop, are not optimized for performance and are fundamentally limited in the number of users they can serve.
People increasingly want to store their savings in on-chain stablecoins, bet on world events on-chain, and post to social networks on-chain, but today’s blockchains can’t deliver the smooth, reliable experience people are used to in mainstream consumer applications. . In a world where only 1,000 people could use TikTok at a time and Venmo transactions would fail half the time, the market would demand a better solution and user experience. Frustratingly, this is often the experience when using decentralized applications on existing blockchains today, and that’s why Ethereum needs MegaETH.
MegaETH is the first Real-Time Blockchain, capable of transmitting transactions at 100,000 transactions per second with millisecond-level responsiveness. Its near-instantaneous performance unlocks fully onchain applications that can finally match the experience of best-in-class web2 apps, while delivering on the promise of decentralization.
MegaETH achieves its real-time performance through two key techniques: a heterogeneous blockchain architecture, which boosts performance by allowing network nodes with different hardware configurations to specialize on specific tasks, and a hyper-optimized EVM execution environment that pushes throughput , latency and resource efficiency at the limits of hardware. These techniques are in stark contrast to today’s homogeneous architectures, which can only use less than 1% of the processing capacity of a modern Web2 server.
“Our mission is to bring Web2-grade real-time performance to cryptocurrencies. By leveraging Ethereum’s superior security and censorship resistance guarantees, we can explore a much broader design space to build the fastest possible execution layer and state synchronization network without compromising the core values of blockchains. Our holistic R&D approach allows us to rigorously and pragmatically address all potential bottlenecks,” said Yilong Li, CEO and co-founder of MegaLabs. “We are excited to empower everyone, everywhere with real-time applications powered by MegaETH.”
“MegaETH is the iPhone moment for cryptocurrencies: a one-of-a-kind platform that makes everything before it seem like an antique,” said Tom Schmidt, GP at Dragonfly. “Decentralized applications are experiencing exponential growth in demand, but existing blockchains have failed to keep pace. They fall and fail when they start to see the first hints of mass adoption. You couldn’t have built the modern Internet by cobbling together a bunch of pocket calculators and you can’t build a financial infrastructure to serve the entire world by patching decades-old software.
MegaETH is the first blockchain that allows developers to create applications that work and look like world-class modern software, while remaining true to the values that make these applications unique: permissionlessness, transparency, security, and trustworthiness. We’re excited to support MegaETH and we’re even more excited to see what people build on top of it.”
“Think compute-intensive DeFi primitives that represent incremental improvements in both user experience and capital efficiency, fully on-chain gaming with high tick rates, instant payment networks with negligible transaction fees, scalable real-time social networks, DePIN projects that instantly bring physical Web2 data on-chain,” said Shuyao Kong, CBO and co-founder of MegaLabs. “These are unique use cases powered only by the MegaETH real-time blockchain. After a decade of experimentation, it’s time to build Web2-scale applications.”
The MegaETH public testnet will go live in early fall, allowing developers to take advantage of performance unlocking and build applications that have never been possible before in the industry. MegaLabs recently launched MegaMafia, a 10x builder program that works closely with founders exploring the frontier of decentralized applications. This is an open invitation to create delightful 0-1 applications in close collaboration with the MegaLabs core team.