MegaETH vs Monad: Ethereum technology showdown

Amid the rapid development of blockchain technology, Monad and MegaETH, as two emerging projects, are driving the evolution of the Ethereum ecosystem in their own unique ways.

Recently, Keone Hon, founder of Monad, and Lei Yang, co-founder of MegaETH, had an in-depth conversation to discuss their respective technical innovations, architectural design, and community culture.

Monad is a Layer 1 blockchain that aims to break through performance bottlenecks and achieve the ability to process more than 10,000 transactions per second through innovative execution and consensus mechanisms. Its design emphasizes efficiency and compatibility, allowing developers to seamlessly migrate existing Ethereum applications.

Mega ETH is a Layer 2 solution that focuses on further improving Ethereum's transaction performance, with the goal of achieving more than 100,000 transactions per second. The project aims to provide users with a faster transaction experience by optimizing the existing Ethereum architecture.

This article will summarize the content of this more than one-hour podcast interview, focusing on two blockchain projects with different architectures: Monad and MegaETH, and discuss how they promote the speed and efficiency of the Ethereum ecosystem through different technical paths.

1.Monad: Reshaping the Future of Ethereum

Keone Hon introduced the core concept of Monad in the conversation, emphasizing that it is a re-imagination of Ethereum, aiming to achieve a throughput of up to 10,000 transactions per second.

Monad optimizes the storage efficiency of Ethereum Merkle tree data by building a new database - Monad DB. Keone pointed out that the traditional Ethereum execution method is single-threaded, and Monad significantly improves the execution performance by introducing optimistic parallel execution and asynchronous execution.

In Keone's view, state access is the biggest bottleneck in the execution process. Each smart contract depends on some residual state associated with the contract, which requires reading data from the disk. Therefore, the biggest bottleneck of execution is actually state access, not just the increase in computing power.

Monad DB is designed to meet this challenge and ensure that the database can be read efficiently in parallel, thereby releasing more performance potential.

2.MegaETH: A blockchain that pursues extreme performance

Unlike Monad, Lei Yang introduced that MegaETH's goal is to build a performance-optimized blockchain that is fully compatible with Ethereum, and its vision is "the first real-time blockchain".

As Layer 2 of Ethereum, MegaETH is committed to achieving a transaction processing capacity of more than 100,000 times per second. Lei emphasized that MegaETH does not rely solely on parallelization, but focuses on improving single-threaded performance. He believes that single-threaded performance is critical to the practical use of many applications.

In terms of technical implementation, MegaETH uses a single active sorter to process all transactions, and other nodes only need to subscribe to status updates.

This design not only reduces execution redundancy, but also reduces the hardware requirements for full nodes. Lei further explained that MegaETH has developed a new data structure similar to the Merkle Patricia tree, which optimizes the use of hardware to support efficient transaction processing.

3.Debate on decentralization from different perspectives

In the discussion on decentralization, Keone and Lei have different focuses. Keone believes that Monad's architecture ensures decentralization, trusted neutrality and anti-censorship through independent single nodes and complete nodes. He emphasized that decentralization is not only a technical choice, but also a core value of the community.

Lei believes that MegaETH is superior in decentralization because it relies on tens of thousands of nodes in Ethereum to ensure finality and correctness. He pointed out that MegaETH's single sequencer can achieve extremely low transaction feedback time, which is impossible in any consensus-based system.

Although the two founders disagree on the definition of decentralization, they both agree that this feature is crucial to the long-term development of blockchain. All Layer 2 solutions can claim to be more decentralized because they rely directly on Ethereum for settlement. Monad improves Ethereum efficiency through new technologies without increasing hardware requirements. This improvement enhances Ethereum performance and supports the optimization of the entire decentralized system.

4.Thinking about technical differences from hardware to software

In terms of technical philosophy, Keone and Lei also have different views. Keone emphasized that Monad focuses on getting the maximum performance from the minimum hardware, allowing anyone to run a node with ordinary equipment. He believes that this requires software optimization rather than relying on high-end hardware. Monad's goal is to ensure decentralization while improving Ethereum's performance.

Lei said that MegaETH chose the Layer 2 architecture because it is the best performance solution and can eliminate the redundancy of execution and consensus to the maximum extent. They will not follow the old ways, but will be performance-oriented without hesitation. Lei specifically mentioned that the design of MegaETH allows the feedback time of transactions to be as low as 1 millisecond, which is unprecedented in any consensus-based system.

5.Community culture and brand image

In terms of community building, the two founders also have different focuses. Keone mentioned that Monad encourages everyone to play a role and create a positive environment. He emphasized that Monad's mascots and activities are spontaneously created and promoted by community members, reflecting the spirit of decentralization.

Relatively speaking, Lei introduced MegaETH's "Mega Mafia" brand image, which attracted developers interested in high-performance blockchain applications. They pay special attention to founders who are disappointed by the existing infrastructure and hope to realize their dreams through MegaETH.

6.When will the mainnet be launched?

Keone said that the Monad team is working hard and cannot give an exact date.

Lei replied that MegaETH is expected to be open at the end of the year or early next year.

7. Summary

Both Monad and MegaETH pursue the creation of a high-performance and decentralized EVM-compatible chain. Monad achieves its goals by reconstructing the execution layer and consensus layer, including the establishment of Monad DB and the introduction of Optimistic to support parallelization and asynchronization of transaction processing, as well as the use of Monad BFT algorithm to speed up the consensus process. At the same time, the reconstruction of the previous two also reduced the hardware requirements of the nodes and promoted the decentralization of the network.

MegaETH focuses on improving single-threaded performance. It uses a single sorter to simplify transaction processing, thereby reducing the hardware burden of the full node, and introduces a new data structure to improve overall efficiency, thereby achieving extreme performance. As Ethereum L2, he is mainly responsible for efficient execution of transactions, and decentralization is achieved with the help of Ethereum.

Through this dialogue, Keone and Lei demonstrated two different blockchain design philosophies. Although there are significant differences in the implementation paths, the two have the same goal, which is to promote the development of the Ethereum ecosystem.

This technical debate not only reveals the forefront of current blockchain technology, but also provides inspiration for future innovation. Whether it is the deep optimization of Monad or the high-performance pursuit of MegaETH, they are important forces driving the advancement of blockchain technology. I believe that under the leadership of pioneers such as Keone and Lei, the Ethereum ecosystem will surely usher in a more brilliant tomorrow.