The Three Major Competitors of Parallel EVM: Monad, MegaETH, and Pharos

Recently, three important parallel EVM projects have launched their testnets one after another. Monad went live with its test network on February 19, MegaETH on March 21, and Pharos on March 24. This series of actions seems to indicate that, following AI Agents, the focus of Web3 technology has once again returned to parallel EVM, which is the hottest topic at the beginning of 2024.

EVM, as a core component of Ethereum, is responsible for executing smart contracts and processing transactions. Although the sequential execution model of EVM ensures the determinism and security of transactions, it can lead to network congestion and delays under high load conditions. Parallel EVM technology significantly improves network throughput by allowing multiple operations to be executed simultaneously, enhancing the performance and scalability of the blockchain.

In fact, parallel EVM refers not only to parallel execution but also to a comprehensive upgrade from consensus, transaction processing, pipelining optimization to storage and hardware acceleration. These improvements aim to enhance the transaction processing speed of blockchain networks, effectively alleviating the network congestion and latency issues faced by traditional blockchains.

Below, we will delve into the background and technical architecture of the three projects: Monad, MegaETH, and Pharos.

Monad

Monad is a high-performance EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain developed by Monad Labs. Its goal is to improve the scalability of the system while maintaining decentralization, addressing the low throughput issues of existing EVM-compatible blockchains.

Monad Labs was co-founded in 2022 by Keone Hon, James Hunsaker, and Eunice Giarta. Keone and James previously worked at the market-making giant Jump Trading, while Eunice comes from a non-cryptocurrency background.

The project has performed well in financing. In February 2023, it completed a seed round financing of $19 million, and in April 2024, it completed a new round of financing of $225 million. Currently, Monad's valuation has reached $3 billion.

The main advantage of Monad lies in its ability to handle 10,000 transactions per second, with a block time of only 1 second. These performance improvements are primarily due to optimizations in the following four areas:

1. MonadBFT: This is a high-performance consensus mechanism based on an improved HotStuff. It employs a two-phase BFT algorithm, with linear communication overhead in common scenarios and quadratic communication overhead in timeout situations. MonadBFT also utilizes a hybrid signature scheme and RaptorCast protocol, effectively reducing bandwidth usage and transaction latency.

2. Asynchronous Execution: By separating consensus from execution, Monad significantly improves execution throughput. This design allows the execution process to utilize the entire block time, rather than just a small portion of the block time.

3. Parallel Execution: Monad adopts an optimistic execution approach, allowing subsequent transactions to start executing before the previous transactions are completed. It ensures the correctness of execution results by tracking the inputs used during the execution process and comparing them with the outputs of previous transactions. Additionally, Monad uses a static code analyzer to predict dependencies between transactions, avoiding invalid parallel execution.

4. MonadDB: This is one of the core components of Monad, a customized KV database used to store validated blockchain data. MonadDB natively implements the Merkle Patricia Trie data structure on disk and in memory, utilizing technologies such as asynchronous I/O, concurrency control, sequential writes, and data compression, significantly improving data access efficiency and transaction processing speed.

MegaETH

MegaETH is a high-performance Layer2 blockchain developed by MegaLabs, focusing on real-time blockchain performance, providing ultra-low latency and high scalability for applications that require instant response.

MegaLabs was founded in early 2023, and its core team includes CEO Li Yilong (PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University), CTO Yang Lei (PhD from MIT), CBO Kong Shuyao (former Global Business Development Director at Consensys), and Growth Director Namik Muduroglu (formerly with Consensys and Hypersphere).

In terms of financing, MegaLabs completed a $20 million seed round of funding in June 2024 and then completed a $10 million community round of financing on the Echo platform in just 3 minutes in December of the same year. Currently, the valuation of MegaETH exceeds $200 million.

The performance metrics of MegaETH are quite impressive, achieving 100k TPS and approximately 10ms block time, while maintaining millisecond-level response times even under high load. These outstanding performances are mainly derived from the following technical characteristics:

1. Node Specialization: Different role nodes in MegaETH perform different functions, including sorters (responsible for transaction sorting and execution), provers (performing stateless validation), and full nodes (updating local state and verifying block validity).

2. Directed Optimization: MegaETH has implemented targeted optimizations for various issues faced by traditional EVM blockchains. For example, it has designed an efficient new state Trie to solve the latency issue of state data retrieval, adopted parallel execution strategies and a JIT compiler to improve execution efficiency, and designed efficient state difference encoding and transmission methods to address the problem of excessively high state synchronization bandwidth.

3. Mini Blocks: MegaETH performs a pre-confirmation every 10 milliseconds, known as Mini Blocks. This design significantly reduces the interval for transaction propagation to the rest of the network, while alleviating the burden on light clients.

Pharos

Pharos is positioned as a high-performance EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain, dedicated to creating the best RWA and payment ecosystem. Its performance metrics are quite impressive, capable of processing 50,000 transactions per second while consuming 2 billion units of gas.

Pharos was established in 2024, and its core team includes CEO Alex Zhang (former CTO of AntChain and CEO of ZAN), CTO Wishlonger (former CSO of AntChain), CMO Laura (former head of marketing at Solana Labs), COO Sally (former employee at OKX), and CCO Matthew (who led ecosystem development and business growth at Stellar and Ripple).

In November 2024, Pharos completed a $8 million seed round financing.

Pharos proposed the "parallelization level (DP)" framework, which divides the parallelization capabilities of blockchain into six levels (DP0-DP5). Pharos adopts the DP5 full-stack parallel architecture, comprehensively upgrading from consensus to hardware acceleration:

1. Scalable consensus protocol: A high throughput, low latency BFT consensus protocol.

2. Dual virtual machine parallel execution: Parallel EVM and WASM execution layers, utilizing advanced compilation technology.

3. Full Lifecycle Asynchronous Pipeline: Achieving parallel and asynchronous processing of the entire transaction lifecycle and between blocks.

4. High-performance storage: Using authenticated data structures (ADS), it provides high throughput, low latency I/O, and cost-effective state storage.

5. Modular Special Processing Network (SPN): Seamlessly integrates new software, hardware, and geographic decentralization, supporting various use cases and emerging technologies.

Summary

EVM has the most developers and the largest DApp ecosystem in the Web3 world, but Ethereum's scalability issues severely hinder the further development of EVM. Therefore, parallel EVM has become one of the most important technological directions.

Monad achieves a balance between scalability and decentralization through its parallel execution model, offering developers a throughput of 10,000 TPS while maintaining EVM compatibility. Its independent consensus provides autonomy but also relinquishes the security guarantees of Ethereum.

MegaETH performs exceptionally well in latency and throughput, with an ultra-low latency of 10 milliseconds and a throughput of 100,000 TPS, making it particularly suitable for applications that require near-instantaneous responses, such as GameFi, SocialFi, and high-frequency trading. However, its centralized ordering design may raise concerns regarding decentralization.

Pharos has a transaction processing capacity of up to 50K TPS and 2 gGas/s, comparable to other emerging high-performance EVM blockchains. Its "ant gene" makes it particularly suitable for institutional clients and compliance requirements in RWA-Fi scenarios, capable of meeting future market demands for compliant and efficient blockchain infrastructure.

From the publicly available data, the performance of MegaETH and Pharos seems to surpass that of Monad. However, considering that Monad has the largest financing scale, it still has ample resources for technological breakthroughs. Therefore, there is no absolute leader among these three projects, and developers need to weigh the priorities of performance, decentralization, and specialization when making their choices.