4 Buzzy Projects Accelerating the Ethereum Virtual Machine

The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) has quietly become the backbone of blockchain development. It's not just the technology — it's the ecosystem of developers, tools, and applications that have grown around it. 

Today, there are a bunch of teams rethinking Ethereum’s design choices, enhancing the EVM to create blockchains that can handle billions of users and thousands of transactions per second. They're taking the strengths of the EVM and pushing the boundaries with new architectures and features.

This article highlights the projects that are accelerating the EVM for massive scalability and paving the way for the future of crypto adoption. Today, we're digging into Monad, MegaETH, Berachain, and Sei. 👇

🟣 Monad

First off, let's talk Monad.

Monad is an L1 blockchain that has raised $225 million to supercharge the EVM by introducing optimistic parallel execution, targeting a throughput of 10,000 transactions per second.

Parallel execution allows independent transactions to run simultaneously, significantly speeding up processing. Think of it like using multiple washing machines at once: instead of waiting for each one to finish, everything gets done faster while still appearing orderly.

Beyond parallel execution, Monad optimizes performance across the entire stack:

• Enhances performance with its custom consensus mechanism, MonadBFT, which enables single-slot finality for faster transactions. 
• Employs deferred execution to separate processing from consensus, improving efficiency and block times. 
• Its parallelized custom database, MonadDB, allows asynchronous state access, speeding up data handling. 

Notably, Monad's architecture is optimized for consumer-grade hardware, making decentralization more accessible without requiring costly setups for validators.

What Monad Brings to the Table on Bankless

Monad is one of ETH’s most formidable challengers.

BanklessJack Inabinet

🟢 MegaETH

Next up is MegaETH.

MegaETH is an Ethereum L2 that pushes Ethereum’s security to new performance levels. Its aim is bold: to build the first real-time blockchain capable of handling 100,000 transactions per second while relying on Ethereum and EigenDA for security and data availability.

The key to MegaETH’s throughput is specialization. Most blockchains make every node do the same tasks — verifying, reaching consensus, and executing transactions. MegaETH changes that by dividing roles. 

There are three types of nodes: sequencers, provers, and full nodes. Sequencers handle transaction ordering and execution. Full nodes simply receive state updates to keep their local copies of the chain current. Provers work in the background, validating everything with cryptographic proofs. 

Major components of MegaETH and their interaction. Source: MegaETH Research

MegaETH also boosts the EVM with in-memory computation, where the sequencer holds the entire EVM world state in memory. This speeds up state access by 1,000 times compared to traditional systems. Moreover, improvements in block-building algorithms and other updates allow MegaETH to tackle issues like latency and throughput.

🐻 Berachain

Of course, we have to talk Berachain.

Berachain is a high-performance, EVM-identical L1 blockchain, meaning its execution layer mirrors the EVM runtime environment of the Ethereum Mainnet. This results in a system that supports all the familiar tools and operations developers already know, but with added advantages.

At the heart of these advantages is BeaconKit, a modular, EVM-focused consensus client framework on which Berachain is built. The main benefit of BeaconKit is its ability to integrate the features of the CometBFT consensus algorithm with the EVM execution environment. This effectively modularizes the stack, separating consensus and execution layers to enhance the overall Berachain experience.

Source: BeaconKit - A Modular Framework for Building EVM Consensus Clients 

BeaconKit can also pair with any EVM execution client, allowing every upgrade to the EVM — like Dencun — to be applied to Berachain automatically. This means Berachain not only retains its EVM-identical status but also speeds it up, scales it, and adds composability without losing compatibility. For example, thanks to BeaconKit, Berachain can achieve single-slot finality, meaning blocks are finalized instantly instead of waiting the usual 12-15 minutes on Ethereum — and much more.

Berachain’s Higher Aspirations on Bankless

From stoner NFTs to a much-hyped Ethereum-adjacent L1, the Beras have been busy.

Jun

🔴 Sei

Lastly, let's dig into Sei.

Sei combines the EVM environment with parallel execution, enabling faster and cheaper transactions while leveraging existing tools and the developer community. Its parallel execution allows multiple transactions simultaneously, significantly boosting throughput, and is complemented by SeiDB for rapid state updates.

What's new about Sei is its "Twin Turbo" consensus mechanism, which accelerates block times to just 400 milliseconds. It achieves this through two key techniques that eliminate common inefficiencies in consensus protocols:

• Intelligent Block Propagation — speeds up block creation, reduces waiting times for validators, and ultimately reduces latency.
• Optimistic Block Processing — accelerates finality as validators start processing transactions as soon as they receive a block proposal.

Additionally, Sei incorporates features like interoperability between EVM and CosmWasm, opening the door to the Cosmos ecosystem. 

However, Sei does trade off some decentralization among its nodes, as these features introduce quadratic communication complexity. This means that as more validators join, the number of messages grows significantly, making it harder to scale the network. 

🤔 Closing Thoughts

These ambitious projects aim to scale throughput to thousands of transactions per second, building on Ethereum's achievements. Most are still in early stages; three of the four have yet to launch on mainnet. Only time will reveal their success in scaling, driving adoption, and enabling efficient application development.

What does this mean for Ethereum?

One silver lining is that some of these high-performance chains are L2s, aligning with Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap for scaling. Another positive aspect is that they are all EMV-compatible, building on existing tooling while enhancing it in unique ways, thus advancing EVM adoption.

This is also a critical moment for the Ethereum community, as many are questioning why efforts aren’t more focused on scaling Ethereum itself as an L1. Vitalik appears to be in "wartime mode", churning out blog post after blog post about the potential futures for Ethereum. The gist is that Ethereum has several paths to scaling the Ethereum L1’s throughput and importantly, all the avenues are being discussed and explored.