MegaETH, a powerful blockchain built to make Ethereum applications feel almost instantaneous, debuted on its public mainnet on Monday, entering an ecosystem embroiled in a fundamental debate over how Ethereum should scale.
The project, which had promoted itself as a layer-2 “real-time blockchain” targeting more than 100,000 transactions per second (tps), would make onchain interactions closer to traditional web apps than today’s crypto networks. Ethereum runs at less than 30 tps, according to Token Terminal.
The release caps a meteoric 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 of that year.
The native token, MEGA, 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 certain unlocks tied to network usage milestones.
MegaETH’s debut comes as Ethereum’s long-standing roadmap for scaling is under scrutiny, especially by Buterin. For years, the second-largest blockchain by market capitalization relied on layer 2 networks, off-chain systems that process transactions in batches and feed them back to the base layer, to handle most of the ecosystem’s growth.
But in recent discussions, Buterin has suggested that Ethereum may need to invest more heavily in scaling its Layer-1 network to reduce fragmentation and simplify the user experience.
These comments have sparked debate across the ecosystem. Proponents of layer 2 argue that the so-called rollups remain essential and are already delivering meaningful performance gains. Critics say overreliance on it has spread liquidity and users across dozens of networks. MegaETH’s fast, low-latency design lands squarely in the middle of that argument, betting there’s still strong demand for chains that push performance well above current standards.
Read more: MegaETH Raises $450 Million in Oversubscribed Token Sale, Backed by Ethereum Founders