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MegaLabs Raises $20 Million in Seed Funding 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 stablecoins on-chain, bet on world events on-chain, and publish content to social networks on-chain, but today’s blockchains can’t deliver the snappy, reliable experience that people are used in major 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 today when using decentralized applications on existing blockchains and this is 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-level real-time performance to cryptocurrencies. By leveraging Ethereum’s superior security and censorship-resistance guarantees, we can explore a much broader design space to create the fastest execution layer and network state synchronization possible without compromising the core values of blockchains. Our holistic approach to research and development allows us to address all potential bottlenecks in a rigorous and pragmatic way.” 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 crypto’s iPhone moment: a first-of-its-kind platform that makes everything that used to be look like an antique,” said Tom Schmidt, Dragonfly’s GP. “Decentralized applications are experiencing exponential growth in demand, but existing blockchains have not kept pace. They fall and fail when they start to see the first signs of mass adoption. You couldn’t build 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 ten-year-old software.
MegaETH is the first blockchain that allows developers to create applications that function and feel like world-class modern software, while remaining true to the values that make these applications unique: permissionlessness, transparency, security and reliability. 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 a step function improvement in both user experiences and capital efficiency, fully on-chain games with high tick rates, instant payment network with negligible transaction fee, scalable, real-time social network, 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 MegaETH’s real-time blockchain. After a decade of experimentation, the time has come 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.