MegaLabs Raises $20M Seed Round, Builds First Real-Time Blockchain With Full Ethereum Compatibility

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June 27th, 2024 – MegaLabs announced today a $20M 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. Renowned angels such as Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Lubin, Sreeram Kannan, Cobie, Santiago Santos, Karthik Talwar, Hasu, and Mert Mumtaz also participated. 

Existing blockchains are failing to serve the growing demand for decentralized applications. High throughput blockchains, such as 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 post content to social networks on-chain, but today’s blockchains cannot offer the snappy, reliable experience that 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 over half of the time, the market would demand a better solution and user experience. Frustratingly, this is often the experience when using decentralized applications today on existing blockchains and is why Ethereum needs MegaETH.

MegaETH is the first Real-Time Blockchain, capable of streaming transactions at 100,000 transactions per second with millisecond-level responsiveness. Its near-instant performance unlocks fully onchain applications that can finally match the experience of best-in-class web2 apps while delivering on the promises 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 to hardware limits. These techniques stand in stark contrast to today's homogenous architectures, which can only utilize less than 1% of the compute capacity of a modern Web2 server.

"Our mission is to bring Web2-level real-time performance to crypto. By leveraging Ethereum's superior security and censorship resistance guarantees, we can explore a much larger design space to create the fastest execution layer and state synchronization network possible without compromising the core values of blockchains. Our holistic R&D approach allows us to address all potential bottlenecks in a rigorous and pragmatic way." said Yilong Li, CEO & Co-Founder of MegaLabs. "We are excited to uplift everyone, everywhere, with real-time applications built on MegaETH."

“MegaETH is the iPhone moment for crypto: a once-in-a-generation platform that makes everything before it look like an antique,” said Tom Schmidt, GP at Dragonfly “Decentralized applications are experiencing exponential growth in demand, but existing blockchains have not been able to keep up. They fall over 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 financial infrastructure to serve the entire world by patching decade-old software. 

MegaETH is the first blockchain that lets developers build applications that work and feel like first-class modern software while keeping true to the values that make these applications unique: permissionlessness, transparency, security, and reliability. We’re excited to be backing MegaETH and we’re even more excited to see what people build on it.” 

“Think of compute-intensive DeFi primitives that are 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 and real-time social network, DePIN projects that instantly bring Web2 physical data on-chain,” said Shuyao Kong, CBO & Co-Founder of MegaLabs. “These are unique use cases powered only by MegaETH’s real-time blockchain. After a decade of experimentation, the time to build web2 scale applications is now”.

The MegaETH public testnet will go live early fall, allowing builders to harness the performance unlock and create applications that have never before been possible in the industry. MegaLabs recently launched the MegaMafia, a 10x builder program working closely with founders that explore the frontier of decentralized applications. This is an open call to build delightful, 0-1 applications in close collaboration with the MegaLabs core team.

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