Buterin invested in the development of the scalable EVM blockchain MegaETH

What’s new? MegaETH blockchain developer MegaLabs has raised $20 million in a seed round of funding led by Dragonfly and with participation from Figment Capital, Robot Ventures, Big Brain Holdings, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum software company ConsenSys CEO Joseph Lubin, EigenLayer protocol CEO Sreeram Kannan and infrastructure provider Solana Helius Labs CEO Mert Mumtaz.

Material by The Block

What else is known? MegaLabs started fundraising last December and completed it in May, co-founder and chief commercial officer Shuyao Kong told The Block. Investors were offered shares and token warrants, bringing the fully diluted valuation (FDV) of the MegaETH coin to a “9-digit amount,” meaning at least $100 million.

MegaLabs was founded in early 2023 by the former global head of business development at ConsenSys and its current advisor Shuyao Kong and former Runtime Verification software company employee Yilong Li, who holds a PhD in programming from Stanford.

MegaETH aims to bypass the throughput limitations exhibited by Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compliant blockchains. According to Kong, their number of transactions per second (TPS) is in the triple digits, while MegaETH aims to reach 100 000 TPS.

MegaETH is positioned as the first real-time, fully Ethereum-compatible blockchain. The network utilizes Ethereum’s security mechanisms, a fail-safe from the Optimism blockchain team, and a proprietary sequencer to ensure high speed and resilience.

MegaETH’s public testnet will be launched in early fall, with the mainnet expected by the end of this year. The decision to launch the native token at the same time as the mainnet has not yet been made.

The company will use the new funding to further develop the blockchain and attract third-party developers to its ecosystem as part of its MegaMafia program. Kong said the company employs less than 20 people and has no plans to expand its staff.

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Vitalik Buterin commented on his investment in the project as follows:

“Creating hyper-scalable EVM implementations is a key prerequisite for truly scaling Ethereum. I am excited to see brilliant developers taking on this challenge.”