Interpretation of the MegaETH white paper: Infrastructure never sleeps, what is so special about the huge financing L1 that Vitalik participated in?

Infrastructure never sleeps, and there are more chains than applications.

While the market is suffering from the PUA airdropped by various King projects, the primary market is still running wildly on the road of "creating King".

Last night, another L1 with an explosive lineup was born ---MegaETH, with a seed round of financing of US$20 million, led by Dragonfly, with participation from institutions such as Figment Capital, Robot Ventures and Big Brain Holdings, and angel investors Including Vitalik, Cobie, Joseph Lubin, Sreeram Kannan, Kartik Talwar, etc.

Top VCs lead the investment, Vitalik and other big names in the circle act as angel investors, and the project name directly carries ETH... In the encryption market with limited attention, these labels are everywhere to find "legitimacy" for the project ".

Judging from the official project description, MegaETH can still be summarized in one familiar word - fast.

The first Real-Time Blockchain, transmitting transactions at lightning speed, sub-millisecond latency and over 100,000 transactions per second...

All participants in the market are right Now that public chain performance narratives are tired of aesthetics, how can MegaETH stand out from the crowd?

We took a look at MegaETH’s white paper to try to find the answer.

There are many chains, but none of them can achieve "real-time"

Assuming narrative and hype aside, why is there still a need for a blockchain called MegaETH in the market?

MegaETH’s own answer is that simply creating more chains does not solve the blockchain scalability problem. Now L1/L2 are facing common problems:

• All EVM chains Exhibiting lower transaction throughput;

• Secondly, complex applications cannot be brought on-chain due to scarce computing power;

• Finally, applications that require high update rates or fast feedback loops are Longer block times are not feasible.

In other words, all current blockchains are actually unable to do:

• Real-time settlement: transactions are processed immediately when they arrive on the blockchain and the results are published almost instantly.

• Real-time processing: The blockchain system is able to process and verify a large number of transactions in a very short time.

What does this kind of real-time mean in practical application scenarios?

For example, high-frequency trading requires the ability to complete order placement and cancellation operations within milliseconds. Or it may be a game with real-time combat or physics simulation, which requires the blockchain to update the status at an extremely high frequency. Obviously none of the current chains can do this.

Node specialization, real-time performance

So, to achieve the above-mentioned "real-time", what is the general idea of ​​MegaETH? The version that is too long to read is:

Node specialization: Reduce consensus overhead by separating transaction execution tasks and full node responsibilities.

If you want to be more specific, you can see that there are three main roles in MegaETH: Sorcers, provers and full nodes.

Specifically, there is only one active ordering node (sequencer) in MegaETH that executes transactions at any time, and other nodes receive status differences through the p2p network and update local status without re-executing transactions.

The sequencer is responsible for sorting and executing user transactions. However, MegaETH has only one active sequencer at any given time, eliminating consensus overhead during normal execution.

The prover uses a stateless verification scheme to verify blocks in an asynchronous and unordered manner.

A MegaETH simple workflow is as follows:

1..Transaction processing and sorting: Transactions submitted by users are first sent to the Sequencer (sequencer), which processes these transactions in order and generates new zones. Block and witness data.

2.Data publishing: The sequencer publishes the generated blocks, witness data and status differences to EigenDA (data availability layer) to ensure that these data are available in the network.

3.Block Verification: Prover Network (Proof Network) obtains the block and witness data from the sequencer, verifies it through dedicated hardware, generates a certificate and returns it to the sequencer.

4.Status update: Fullnode Network receives the status difference from the sequencer and updates the local status. At the same time, it can verify the validity of the block through the proof network to ensure the consistency and security of the blockchain.

First measure, then execute

Judging from other contents of the white paper, MegaETH itself has also realized that this idea of ​​"node specialization" is good, but it does not mean that it can be very easily put into practice. practice.

When it comes to building a chain, MegaETH has a good idea: measure first, then execute. That is, we first conduct in-depth performance measurements to determine the real problems of the existing blockchain system, and then look at how to put this node specialization idea into the current system to solve the problem.

So, what problems did MegaETH detect?

The following part is actually far away from the leeks. If you are impatient, you can just turn to the next chapter.

• Transaction Execution: Their experiments show that even using a powerful server with 512GB of memory, the existing Ethereum execution client Reth can only achieve ~1000 TPS (transactions per second) in a real-time sync setup ), which indicates that the existing system has significant performance bottlenecks in executing transactions and updates.

• ParallelExecution: Coming to the hot parallel EVM concept, there are actually some performance issues that have not been resolved. The acceleration effect of parallel EVM in actual production is limited by the parallelism of the workload. Measurements by MegaETH show that the median parallelism in recent Ethereum blocks is less than 2, and even when multiple blocks are merged, the median parallelism only increases to 2.75.

(Parallelism less than 2 means that in most cases, less than two transactions in each block can be executed simultaneously. This shows that most of the transactions in the current blockchain system are interdependent and cannot Doing massive parallel processing. )

• Interpreter Overhead: Even faster EVM interpreters like revm are still 1-2 orders of magnitude slower than native execution.

• Status Synchronization: Synchronizing 100,000 ERC-20 transfers per second requires 152.6 Mbps of bandwidth, while more complex transactions require more bandwidth. Updating the state root in Reth consumes 10 times more computing resources than executing transactions. To put it bluntly, the current blockchain resource consumption is a bit large.

After testing these problems, MegaETH began to prescribe the right medicine, and it was able to rationalize the solution logic mentioned above:

1. High-performance sequencer:

Specialized node : MegaETH improves efficiency by allocating tasks to dedicated nodes. The sequencer node specifically handles transaction ordering and execution, the full node is responsible for status updates and verification, and the attesting node uses dedicated hardware to verify blocks.

High-End Hardware: The sequencer uses high-performance servers (such as 100 cores, 1TB memory, 10Gbps network) to handle large volumes of transactions and generate blocks quickly.

2. State access optimization:

MemoryStorage: The sequencer node is equipped with a large amount of RAM and is able to store the entire blockchain state in memory, thereby eliminating SSD read latency and speeding up state access speed.

ParallelExecution: Although the acceleration effect of parallel EVM is limited in existing workloads, MegaETH optimizes the parallel execution engine and supports transaction priority management to ensure that critical transactions can be processed in a timely manner even during peak periods.

3. InterpreterOptimization:

AOT/JITCompilation: MegaETH accelerates the execution of computing-intensive contracts even in production environments by introducing AOT/JIT compilation technology The performance improvement of most contracts in Ethereum is limited, but for specific high computing demand scenarios, these technologies can still significantly improve performance.

4. State synchronization optimization:

Efficient data transmission: MegaETH has designed an efficient state difference encoding and transmission method that can synchronize a large number of state updates under limited bandwidth.

Compression Technology: By employing advanced compression technology, MegaETH is able to synchronize status updates of complex transactions (such as Uniswap exchanges) within bandwidth limitations.

5. State root update optimization:

Optimized MPT design: MegaETH uses optimized Merkle Patricia Trie (such as NOMT) ​​to reduce read and write operations and improve the efficiency of state root updates.

Batch ProcessingTechnology: By batch processing status updates, MegaETH can reduce random disk IO operations and improve overall performance.

The above things are actually very technical, but beyond these technical details, you can actually see that MegaETH really has a few technical skills, and you can also clearly feel a motivation:

By publishing detailed Technical data and test results, attempt to enhance the transparency and credibility of the project, allowing the technical community and potential users to have a deeper understanding and trust in the performance of its system.

Team from a prestigious school, frequently favored?

In the process of interpreting the white paper, it can be clearly felt that although the name of MegaETH is a bit exaggerated, the documents and descriptions often reveal a technical Nerd's rigorous and overly detailed nature.

Public information shows that the MegaETH team seems to have a Chinese background, and CEO Li Yilong is from Stanford and has a PhD in computer science; while CTO Yang Lei has a PhD from MIT, and CBO (Business Officer) Kong Shuyao He is an MBA from Harvard Business School and has working experience in multiple institutions in the industry (ConsenSys, etc.); the person in charge of growth has some overlapping resumes with CBO, and is also from the prestigious New York University.

A team of 4 people, all from top prestigious schools in the United States. The influence of connections and resources is self-evident.

Previously, we also introduced in the article "Graduates become CEOs, Pantera leads a 25 million investment in Nexus"Introduced that although the CEO of Nexus is a recent graduate, he is also from Stanford, a well-known school. And he seems to have a solid technical background.

As expected, top VCs prefer technology tycoons from top schools. In addition, Vitalik also participated in the investment and has ETH in his name. The technical narrative and marketing effect may be full.

Now that the old "King of Heaven" has become "Dead from Heaven", projects are in decline, and the market is stagnant, MegaETH will obviously bring about a new round of FOMO effect.

We will continue to pay attention to more information about the project testnet and interaction.

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