This piece is a visitor submit by Blocmates. Blocmates is a useful crypto information and academic useful resource that provides readability within the usually difficult and jargon-filled crypto house. On this article, author Gaz of Blocmates breaks down Megaeth, one of many hottest Layer 2s, together with explaining the technical explanation why so many individuals are enthusiastic about yet one more Layer 2. This can be a completely pleasing learn, particularly for these wishing to maintain abreast of EVM ecosystem developments.
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Megaeth Enters the Layer 2 Race with Unprecedented Velocity and Scalability Targets
Okay so by now you might be most likely sick of all these Layer 2s (L2s) coming to market and performing poorly. I get it, I really feel the identical manner. With over 50 L2s in existence, one may definitely argue that sufficient is sufficient.
In saying that, Megaeth may very well be a unique kind of participant, and its backers appear to suppose the identical.
Peter Thiel made it clear in his ebook “Zero to One” that to ensure that a brand new product to have any affect on a market it wants to enhance on the present factor by an element of at the least 10.
That is precisely what Megaeth hopes to realize.
Bringing Web2 efficiency to the blockchain is not any straightforward feat. It requires a variety of rethinking and a few critical technical changes. Actual-time funds, transactions, and derivatives are simply among the doable outcomes that would develop into a actuality if Megaeth can obtain its objectives.
These guys raised $20 million of their seed spherical on the finish of final month, led by Dragonfly Capital. Different huge backers, reminiscent of Huge Mind Holdings, Figment Capital, and Robotic Ventures, additionally received concerned.
Add to this among the greatest angels to be discovered on Crypto Twitter (CT), particularly Cobie, Mert, Hasu and Vitalik himself, and absolutely you will have the recipe for fulfillment. Now all you must do is cook dinner the rattling factor.
So, is that this simply one other ponzi scheme with a wierd rabbit theme, or will Megaeth deliver Vitalik’s “Finish Sport” into the realm of actuality?
Resolve for your self.
What’s Megaeth?
As acknowledged by the Megaeth staff themselves, “Megaeth goals to push the efficiency metrics of ETH L2s to the bounds of the {hardware} they run on, bridging the hole between blockchains and conventional cloud computing servers.”
In its easiest kind, this implies a real-time blockchain able to pumping out transactions at speeds of 100,000 per second with immediate latency, even beneath the strains of an overloaded community.
Velocity and scalability is the important thing.
Now, to realize this, it takes some critical changes beneath the hood. To actually perceive this, we first want to take a look at what present Layer 1s (L1s) and L2s are doing to get an thought of what makes Megaeth that rather more subtle.
The inside workings of L1s and L2s
To ensure that a blockchain to vary its state, transactions must be sorted and added sequentially. The consensus mechanism kinds transactions into an order, and the execution mechanism provides them to the chain. Nodes carry out these duties.
Because it at the moment stands within the L1 panorama, nodes all carry out the identical duties to make sure consensus and execution. Nonetheless, every L1 has totally different {hardware} necessities that must be met for these nodes to perform, and growing these necessities could cause issues within the area of decentralization vs. efficiency.
This problem is eloquently described within the following clip by Megaeth co-founder in true rabbit trend.
https://x.com/hotpot_dao/standing/1807806098000482815
Now, as talked about within the above brief clip, L2s have managed to discover a strategy to get round this “straggler” drawback by differentiating the duties carried out by nodes into areas of specialization. In different phrases, some nodes do some issues higher than others.
This may be seen in particular sequencer nodes and several types of roll-ups, which use totally different tech stacks to get the job executed.
So what makes Megaeth higher?
The Megaeth crew hasn’t simply jumped in head first and began spinning up new redacted concepts. As an alternative, they’ve taken a “measure, then construct” strategy that entails rigorously inspecting how sure modifications will have an effect on efficiency and solely altering what is admittedly needed.
Firstly, they discovered that by delivery safety to the bottom layer itself, on this case, Ethereum and Eigen DA, they’ll critically enhance features of the L2 efficiency metrics. Nothing new, proper?
The subsequent step to growing velocity and scalability is to take away the duty of execution from full nodes.
Within the Megaeth community, they’ve created three principal roles: provers, full nodes, and sequencers. By giving nodes specialised duties, these duties are unfold out, and the load on nodes is drastically lowered.
A sequencer’s job continues to be sorting and executing transactions, which simply so occurs to be essentially the most compute-intensive activity.
It’s because of this that sequencer nodes are run on servers with vastly extra energy and higher-end {hardware} necessities. Furthermore, Megaeth solely runs one lively sequencer at a time which eliminates the consensus masses within the execution section.
Full nodes want solely to confirm proofs earlier than updating the state of the community and this activity is fairly tame in comparison with the work a sequencer has to do. Subsequently, as you will have guessed by now, the {hardware} wanted to run a full node is way lower than a sequencer.
The fundamental transaction circulate will be seen within the diagram beneath.
This idea of node specialization was lined in Vitalik’s “Finish Sport” weblog submit as having the potential to drastically enhance the velocity and trustless nature of block validation regardless of making block manufacturing extra centralized within the course of.
The staff at Megaeth believes that the present Ethereum Digital Machine (EVM) mannequin’s TPS speeds are merely not sufficient for crypto to compete with the Web2 world.
By growing the {hardware} capabilities for sequencer nodes, these nodes now have sufficient RAM to retailer the complete blockchain state, eradicating the lag created by SSD studying and making the complete course of a lot sooner.
So, sequencer nodes apart, another points must be addressed to deliver the primary real-time blockchain to life. The tech speak continues.
There may be this little course of generally known as “state sync” that’s required by all blockchains for full nodes to know what’s going on with the sequencer, and making this mechanism extremely environment friendly is sort of the problem in itself.
Lengthy story brief, the best way an ERC-20 modifies its transactions to be state-synced at the moment takes up extra bandwidth than it might if it simply despatched the information in its unique, uncooked kind.
In an effort to cut back the bandwidth wanted, this course of must be critically compressed one way or the other.
A typical blockchain information construction will be considered a tree, a Merkle Tree, for that matter. The state root is the important thing ingredient to the tree construction that each sequencers and full nodes want to take care of.
In its easiest kind, from a none-dev, left-curver like myself, *deep breath*… each time a change in state takes place, all of the leaves on the tree that retailer key values within the type of hashes, which level to different “youngster nodes” that relate to the change in state, must be up to date and the hashes recomputed.
This leads to the necessity for thousands and thousands of information reads and a shitload of compute energy.
To make this course of extra environment friendly, Megaeth will group these leaves collectively into “subtrees” to cut back the variety of information reads wanted to replace the state root.
This can be a extremely complicated course of that even the Megaeth staff says continues to be suboptimal for the sort of efficiency they’re aiming for.
Then, there’s the issue introduced by block fuel limits. These are the bounds on the utmost quantities of fuel that may be consumed inside a single block.
These limits exist to make sure that all nodes can preserve tempo with one another and no person will get left behind within the race of the rabbits.
Additionally they make sure that blocks will be reliably produced throughout the block time as failing to take action would open up a wide range of assault vectors for would-be exploiters.
The Megaeth staff is taking a look at these points very intently, and fixing these issues would be the key to producing the real-time blockchain in Vitalik’s moist goals.
Actual giga-brained stuff, little doubt!
Why does any of this matter?
To ensure that EVM chains to achieve their full potential and put up a combat with the Web2 world, issues must be sooner.
The low transaction throughput of present EVM chains merely doesn’t examine to fashionable database servers in Web2, which might course of thousands and thousands of transactions per second.
If crypto is admittedly going to eat the world then this wants to vary quick and Megaeth is seeking to take huge steps towards making this a actuality.
The velocity of the underlying chain, in flip, determines the aptitude of the decentralized functions (dapps) constructed on it. Velocity and scalability are paramount for dapps to compete with these within the conventional internet world.
Compute energy must be elevated or made extra environment friendly, and block time will must be drastically lowered.
Present block intervals of a second will must be boiled down into milliseconds to maintain tempo with the standard internet and convey issues like real-world physics and high-frequency buying and selling on-chain.
Megaeth has all this stuff in thoughts and is working to unravel these issues with a view to produce a real-time blockchain able to immediately processing transactions and publishing the ensuing updates in real-time, even when congestion ranges are excessive.
Closing ideas
Oversaturation of the complete crypto market is certainly a legitimate concern this cycle and to ensure that a brand new venture to face out, it can want one thing actually particular to set it other than the remaining.
The idea of a real-time blockchain that can enable customers to expertise never-before-seen ranges of efficiency and builders to construct with out the restrictions of the previous is definitely an intriguing product in itself.
Megaeth has clarified that will probably be greater than only a supercharged centralized sequencer.
The staff have regarded deeper on the issues confronted by present blockchain expertise and goal to construct one thing that, quote, “leaves little room for additional efficiency enhancements to the crypto infrastructure, so the trade can lastly divert sources to different challenges hindering adoption.”
With the reside testnet coming within the subsequent few months, degens and nerds alike will be capable of expertise the longer term for themselves.
Let’s simply hope that is what is required to ship us to these ungodly ranges we have now all been patiently ready for.