MegaETH, an Ethereum Layer 2 solution aiming to deliver real-time blockchain performance, is indeed gearing up to deploy its public testnet this week. MegaETH is designed to dramatically enhance scalability while maintaining compatibility with Ethereum’s ecosystem. Its approach to scalability tackles the core limitations of Ethereum’s mainnet—low transaction throughput, high latency, and rising gas fees—by leveraging a specialized architecture and innovative design choices.
The deployment is scheduled to kick off on March 6, 2025, with a phased rollout: builders gain access first on the 6th, followed by broader user onboarding starting March 10, 2025. This aligns with statements from co-founder Yilong Li, who announced on February 4, 2025, that the testnet would launch within 30 days—a timeline that holds true with this week’s planned deployment. MegaETH promises sub-millisecond latency and over 100,000 transactions per second (TPS), with initial testnet targets of 20,000 TPS and 15ms block times, scalability expected to improve further.
Backed by heavyweights like Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and raising $30 million across funding rounds (including $20 million in a June 2024 seed round led by Dragonfly Capital), the project boasts a fully diluted valuation of at least $100 million. The testnet phase is a critical step toward its mainnet launch, slated for late 2025, and has sparked speculation about a potential airdrop for early participants, though no official confirmation exists.
Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 17 (June 9 – Sept 6, 2025) today for early bird discounts. Do annual for access to Blucera.com.
Tekedia AI in Business Masterclass opens registrations.
Join Tekedia Capital Syndicate and co-invest in great global startups.
Register to become a better CEO or Director with Tekedia CEO & Director Program.
For users, the process is streamlined: testnet ETH will be airdropped directly to registered wallets via the MegaETH Discord, eliminating the need for faucets. Builders, meanwhile, are being onboarded to test applications leveraging MegaETH’s high-throughput, low-latency architecture—think real-time DeFi, gaming, or trading platforms.
This deployment follows months of hype since MegaETH’s founding in 2023 by MegaLabs, a lean team led by Yilong Li (CEO, Stanford PhD), Lei Yang (CTO, MIT PhD), and Shuyao Kong (CBO, ex-ConsenSys). The testnet’s timing—amid a busy Q1 2025 for Layer 2 projects like Monad and Union—positions MegaETH as a contender in Ethereum’s scaling race, aiming to rival Web2 performance while staying EVM-compatible. Whether it delivers on its ambitious claims will start becoming clear this week as the blockchain opens to public testing.
MegaETH aims to deliver sub-millisecond latency (targeting 1ms block times, with the testnet starting at 15ms) and a throughput exceeding 100,000 transactions per second (TPS), though the initial testnet targets 20,000 TPS. This is a massive leap from Ethereum’s mainnet, which processes around 15–30 TPS, and even outperforms many existing L2s like Arbitrum (~200ms latency) or Optimism.
The ultimate vision is to rival Web2 systems (e.g., centralized cloud servers), enabling real-time applications like high-frequency trading, gaming, and complex DeFi protocols. Unlike Ethereum’s block gas limits (e.g., 30 million gas), MegaETH reportedly removes these caps, allowing complex, compute-heavy transactions (e.g., AI model execution or large loops) without splitting them across blocks. This is a scalability game-changer for developers, though it increases sequencer demands.
MegaETH offloads data storage to EigenDA, a data availability layer built on EigenLayer. Instead of burdening Ethereum’s mainnet with all transaction data (limited by blob space post-Danksharding), EigenDA handles high-throughput state updates (tens of megabits per second). This reduces costs and prevents congestion, as Ethereum L1 only verifies proofs, not raw data. It’s less battle-tested than Ethereum’s data layer, but it scales bandwidth and storage beyond L1’s capacity.