The End of Fragmentation: Towards a Coherent Ethereum
Author: Prince Compiled by: Block unicorn Ethereum's initial vision was a permissionless, infinitely open platform where anyone with an idea could participate. Its principle is simple: a world computer sharing a single global state view. Ethereum's value lies in the fact that anyone can build useful applications, and that all applications are interconnected. As Ethereum evolves, its scaling roadmap brings both new opportunities and challenges. New closed ecosystems are beginning to emerge. Entrepreneurs seek higher performance or practical ways to make their products stand out. For some developers, the simplest way to achieve this is to create their own blockchain ecosystem. This ecosystem expands in almost every possible direction: new blockchains are launched (horizontal growth), and aggregations are introduced to expand the underlying layers (vertical growth). Other teams choose to build their own dedicated execution and consensus layers (application-specific blockchains) to meet the needs of their projects. Each expansion, viewed individually, is a reasonable decision. But from a broader perspective, this continuous expansion is beginning to undermine the belief that Ethereum will one day become the "world computer." Today, the same assets exist on multiple platforms and in multiple forms. The same exchanges or lending markets appear on every chain. The permissionless nature remains, but the coordination mechanisms are beginning to disappear. As state, assets, liquidity, and applications become increasingly fragmented, what was once an infinite garden is starting to resemble a complex maze. The real cost of fragmentation Fragmentation has not only created technical obstacles, but it has also changed how developers feel when choosing to build applications. The products delivered by each team initially functioned as expected. However, with increasing fragmentation, these teams were forced to migrate identical applications to other chains in order to retain existing users. Each new deployment seemed like progress, but for most developers, it felt like starting from scratch. Liquidity gradually eroded, and users left with it. Ethereum continues to grow and thrive, but it has gradually lost its community cohesion. Although the ecosystem remains active and continues to grow, individual interests have begun to take precedence over coordination and connection. This boundless garden is beginning to show signs of overgrowth and neglect. No one did anything wrong. Everyone followed the incentive mechanism. Over time, all that remained was exhaustion. Abundance was brought without permission, yet within this abundance, the very foundation that once held everything together began to crumble. Return of coherence MegaETH represents Ethereum's first real opportunity to scale block space supply to meet demand within a single execution environment. Currently, the L2 block space market is congested. Most projects are vying for the same user base, offering largely similar block space. Throughput bottlenecks persist, and high activity on individual sequencers artificially inflates transaction costs. Despite significant technological advancements, only a handful of scaling solutions have truly improved the user and developer experience. MegaETH aims to change that. It is one of the closest attempts to realizing Ethereum's original vision—building a world computer. By providing an execution environment with latency below 10 milliseconds, gigabit gas caps, and ultra-low-cost transactions, the MegaETH team is striving to achieve the vision of a world computer. All data is processed on a single shared state (ignoring privacy concerns for now), and real-time execution should be a guiding light for our industry and the only way we can truly compete with Web 2.0. As a founder building on MegaETH, what impressed me most wasn't the speed or millisecond-level latency, but rather that after many years, all applications built on Ethereum can finally connect and stay in sync, and at a low cost with short wait times. When all contracts and transactions reside in the same state machine, complex coordination mechanisms become simple again. Developers no longer need to struggle with latency or spend time optimizing contracts to improve gas efficiency; users no longer need to worry about which "version" of network they are transacting on. This is what MegaETH means by "Big Sequencer Energy": Ethereum possesses a high-performance execution layer built specifically for real-time applications. For the first time in years, users can build applications within the Ethereum execution environment without worrying about their location. All users can once again share the same execution environment, enabling latency-sensitive applications such as high-frequency trading, on-chain order books, real-time lending, and fully on-chain multiplayer games—features currently impossible due to Ethereum's resource limitations. Enter: MegaMafia In the context of MegaETH, those who experienced fragmentation are beginning to rebuild. We all know what we lost when everything fell apart. Now, the system is finally able to stay in sync, and it feels like moving forward rather than sideways. Each team works on a different level: transactions, credit, infrastructure, gaming, and more. But their goal is the same: to make Ethereum a unified whole again. MegaETH provides that opportunity, and MegaMafia has given it shape. The focus now is no longer on deploying more of the same applications, but on rebuilding the infrastructure so that the parts that are already working well can finally work together. Avon's role in world computing Avon brought the same concept to the credit market. Of all DeFi categories, lending is most severely affected by fragmentation. Each protocol operates on different versions of the same concept. Each market has its own liquidity, rules, and risks. Anyone who's used these markets knows the feeling. You check interest rates on one app, then compare them on another, and still don't know which is more reliable. Liquidity stagnates because it can't flow between different protocols. Avon introduces a coordination layer instead of deploying another pool of funds. Its order book connects different strategies (independent markets), enabling them to respond to each other in real time. You can think of it as many pools of funds connected through a shared layer (i.e., the order book). When one changes, the others are aware of it. Over time, the lending market will once again function as a single, interconnected market. Liquidity will flow to where the most competitive conditions are available. Borrowers will obtain the most competitive interest rates possible. Coordination is not just about optimizing interest rates or controlling them. More importantly, it's about providing a unified perspective on lending during market fluctuations. Towards a coherent Ethereum Ethereum doesn't need another chain. It needs a central hub where people gather and maintain Ethereum. MegaETH provides the trading venue. MegaMafia will provide the trading power. Avon will provide the coordination layer, enabling funds to flow within the system. Ethereum has faced fragmentation issues for the past few years; we believe MegaETH will drive Ethereum toward realizing its vision of becoming a world computer and reaching an unprecedented scale. As Ethereum begins to regain its rhythm, MegaETH will ensure that builders can do this at a near-infinite scale.
