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GM, Tim here.

Heres what caught my DeFi-eye recently:

Youve heard of ETH, but what on earth is MegaETH?

Thats what many myself included thought when hearing the little-known project had just raised $20 million.

MegaETH is a new blockchain (yes, another one) that says its the first to operate in real-time.

This, it claims, means it can achieve 100,000 transactions per second with millisecond-level responsiveness.

It can take up to 13 seconds to get transactions processed on existing blockchains like Ethereum.

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Dragonfly Capital led MegaETHs seed round.

I dont know if MegaETH will live up to the hype. But a lot of well-respected industry figures certainly thought it was a good investment.

Angel investors include:

Some onlookers have compared MegaETH to Monad, another project promising speed and throughput improvements compared to the current generation of blockchains.

In April, Monad Labs raised $225 million in a round led by Paradigm.

Jump Crypto president Kanav Kariyas resignation was a good thing for Lidos LDO, apparently.

After Kariya announced his departure on June 24, LDO jumped some 7%.

The reason, onlookers said, is that under Kariya, Jump Crypto sold off more than five million LDO tokens in 2022 and 2023, depressing the assets price.

It is not clear whether Kariya was personally involved in Jumps sale of LDO. He didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.

Its a mix of a joke and somewhat true, Will Sheehan, founder of crypto data platform Parsec Finance, said.

Jump was selling Lido through 2022 and 2023, and sometimes in crypto a [crypto Twitter] joke becomes an actual negative narrative.

Hivemapper, a Solana-based mapping project, has big ambitions.

It wants to overtake Google Maps, and its using token incentives to do so.

Like many so-called DePIN projects, short for decentralised physical infrastructure network, Hivemapper issues a token, called HONEY.

Those who use a dashcam to contribute to the projects mapping service can earn HONEY.

Hivemapper CEO Ariel Seidman told DL News this incentive setup can produce street-level imagery 20 to 100 times fresher than Googles.

But theres a hitch.

Hivemapper is struggling to generate demand for its product and thus demand for HONEY.

The tokens price is down 85% from its December peak.

Solana memecoin launchpad Pump.fun crosses $50 million in cumulative revenue.

At its current pace, pump.fun is set to bring in over $252 million annually. (DefiLlama)

VOTE: GnosisDAO to finance new GnosisVC venture fund

VOTE: Lido takes next step in bringing stETH to Ethereum layer 2s

VOTE: Compound votes to launch USDT market on its v3 version

Ethereum co-founder Buterin pens a blog post on how to speed up transaction confirmation on Ethereum.

DeFi users are withdrawing Ether liquid restaking tokens from protocols at an unprecedented rate.

Got a tip about DeFi? Reach out at tim@dlnews.com.

The rest is here:

Vitalik Buterin just invested in this little-known blockchain project - DLNews

MegaETH, an upcoming L2 branded as the real-time Ethereum boasting sub-millisecond latency and capable of processing over 100k transactions per seco nd (TPS), just announced that it has received $20M in seed funding at a $100M+ valuation!

The star-studded raise was led by Dragonfly Capital and includes notable angle participation from Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, Consensys founder Joe Lubin, Lido/Flashbots strategy lead Hasu, prolific crypto trader Cobie, and EigenLayer founder Sreeram Kannan.

The big names involved have attracted some major attention to the upstart chain.

Today, were discussing how MegaETH is innovating on contemporary Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) blockchain implementations to provide industry-leading performance capabilities and decentralization guarantees.

High performance alt L1s require their nodes to perform identical tasks without specialization, imposing a fundamental tradeoff between performance and decentralization. In comparison, MegaETH takes advantage of Ethereums L2s technology to create differentiated roles for nodes with varying hardware requirements.

MegaETH decouples the task of transaction processing from full nodes and creates three major roles for infrastructure operators: sequencers, provers, and full nodes. Although actual block production becomes increasingly centralized with MegaETH, flexible hardware requirements from node specialization ensures trustless block validation and could provide industry-leading decentralization guarantees.

A single active MegaETH sequencer will be responsible for ordering and executing user transactions, eliminating the consensus process during normal operations, and will pass state differences (i.e.; changes to the blockchains state) to full nodes via a peer-to-peer network, who then apply the state diffs to update their local state. Notably, MegaETH transactions are not re-executed by full nodes to verify block integrity; they instead validate blocks indirectly using proofs provided by the prover.

Even the highest performance L2 in existence BNBs opBNB imposes significant limitations on its applications. Despite a relatively high throughput target of 100M Gas per second, opBNB can only process 650 Uniswap swaps per second, compared to modern Web2 databases which can achieve an equivalent 1M TPS.

Further, these networks tend to have long block times above 1 second that are impractical for applications that require real-time performance, like high frequency trading.

While blockchains have frequently turned to one-off solutions like parallelization in their pursuit of scale, enabling transactions touching different parts of state to be processed simultaneously on multiple CPU cores, the benefits of this specific approach are limited by the fact that many transactions contain dependencies, resulting in only modest boosts from parallelization for blockchain speed.

Addressing bottlenecks in isolation for any system often fails to yield significant improvement, as resolution of the initial limiting factor simply shifts the bottleneck to another component.

Instead of optimizing only a few components of its stack like competitors, MegaETH aims to identify the numerous problems plaguing existing blockchains and build a new system that fixes the litany of issues discovered simultaneously.

Such ambitions necessitate scaling node hardware to its limits while preserving decentralization (achieved through specialization) and require the creation of a system innately designed to approach the theoretical upper performance limit for a decentralized blockchain.

To this end, the MegaETH sequencer will store the entirety of its state in-memory and be the first blockchain to implement in-memory compute, a critical feature for high-performance Web2 applications that should enable MegaETH to accelerate state access by 1,000x compared to alternative solid state drive storage methods utilized by competitors.

Computation-intensive applications will receive a 100x boost to their performance on MegaETH thanks to a just-in-time (JIT) compiler that translates smart contract code into MegaETHs native machine code, a set of instructions that a servers CPU can directly interpret and execute, helping to increase smart contract speed and efficiency in execution.

Maintaining the Ethereum Merkle Patricia Trie (MPT), a core data structure that represents the current state of all assets and relevant information, is a major limiting factor for all EVM implementations, but MegaETH is creating a new state trie from scratch that will maintain full EVM compatibility while minimizing disk input/output operations and storing terabytes of state data.

Finally, MegaETHs 100k transactions per second must be propagated to its network of full nodes; a highly efficient peer-to-peer protocol will pass state updates from the sequencer with low latency and high throughput, allowing full nodes with even a modest connection to remain synchronized at max update rates.

The significant performance improvements targeted by MegaETH over contemporary EVM implementations should provide a major boost to L2 performance and could finally produce a decentralized blockchain capable of handling real-world adoption!

Although some contend that MegaETH is best suited as a competitor against an Ethereum ecosystem largely uninterested in scaling its base layer, the optimizations achieved by MegaETH are made possible solely through its ability to outsource security and censorship resistance to existing decentralized networks, like Ethereum and EigenLayer.

See original here:

What's the Deal with MegaETH? - Bankless