MegaETH, a high-performance blockchain designed to make Ethereum applications nearly instantaneous, launched its public mainnet on Monday, entering an ecosystem mired in a fundamental debate over how Ethereum should evolve.
The project, which billed itself as a Layer 2 “real-time blockchain” targeting over 100,000 transactions per second (tps), would make on-chain interactions closer to traditional web applications than today’s crypto networks. Ethereum runs at less than 30 tps, according to Token Terminal.
This publication caps a rapid rise that has attracted both technical curiosity and major financial support. The project’s development arm, MegaLabs, raised a $20 million seed round in 2024 led by Dragonfly. Last October, it announced an oversubscribed $450 million token sale, backed by some of the most recognizable names in crypto, including Ethereum co-founders Vitalik Buterin and Joe Lubin. The sale was one of the largest crypto fundraisers this year.
The native MEGA token, which underpins the network’s economy, is not fully unlocked at launch. According to the team, token distribution and utility will be rolled out gradually, with some unlocks tied to stages of network usage.
MegaETH’s debut comes as Ethereum’s long-standing scaling roadmap comes under scrutiny, particularly by Buterin. For years, the second-largest blockchain by market capitalization has relied on Layer 2 networks, off-chain systems that aggregate transactions and feed them back onto the base layer, to handle the bulk of the ecosystem’s growth.
But in recent discussions, Buterin suggested that Ethereum may need to invest more in scaling the Layer 1 network to reduce fragmentation and simplify the user experience.
These comments sparked a debate across the ecosystem. Proponents of Layer 2s say so-called rollups remain essential and are already delivering significant performance gains. Critics say an overreliance on them has scattered liquidity and users across dozens of networks. MegaETH’s high-speed, low-latency design falls squarely in the middle of this argument, betting that there is still strong demand for chains that push performance well beyond current standards.
Read more: MegaETH Raises $450M in Oversubscribed Token Sale, Backed by Ethereum Founders
