The End of Fragmentation: The Return of the World Computer

Author: Prince

The vision of Ethereum was initially to create a permissionless and infinitely open platform where anyone with an idea could participate. Its principle is simple: one world computer, sharing a global state view. The value of Ethereum lies in the fact that anyone can build useful applications, and every application is interconnected.

With the development of Ethereum, its scaling roadmap has brought new opportunities and challenges. New closed ecosystems are beginning to emerge.

Entrepreneurs are pursuing higher performance or seeking practical and effective ways to make their products stand out. For some developers, the simplest way to achieve their goals is to create their own blockchain ecosystem. This ecosystem expands in almost every possible direction: new blockchains are launched (horizontal growth), and aggregations are also introduced to expand the underlying layer (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, when viewed individually, is a reasonable decision. However, from a more macro perspective, this ongoing expansion begins to undermine the belief that Ethereum will one day become the “world computer”. Nowadays, the same assets exist on multiple platforms and in various forms. The same exchanges or lending markets appear on every chain.

The permissionless features still exist, but the coordination mechanism is beginning to fade. As states, assets, liquidity, and applications become increasingly fragmented, the once infinite garden starts to resemble a complex maze.

The True Cost of Fragmentation

Fragmentation not only creates technical barriers but also changes the feelings of developers when choosing to build applications.

The products delivered by each team can run as expected. However, as fragmentation increases, these teams have to migrate the same applications to other chains in order to retain existing users. Each new deployment seems like a step forward, but for most developers, it feels like starting from scratch. Liquidity gradually diminishes, and users follow suit.

Ethereum continues to grow and develop, but it has gradually lost the cohesion of the community. Although the ecosystem remains active and continues to grow, individual interests are beginning to outweigh coordination and connection. This infinite garden is starting to show signs of overgrowth and neglect.

No one did anything wrong. Everyone follows the incentive mechanism. Over time, only a sense of fatigue remains. The lack of permission has brought abundance, but within that abundance, the center that once held everything together begins to loosen.

The Return of Coherence

MegaETH represents the first real opportunity for Ethereum to scale its block space supply in a single execution environment to meet demand. Today, the L2 block space market has become crowded. Most projects are competing for the same pool of users while offering similar block space. Throughput bottlenecks still exist, and high activity on a single sequencer artificially drives up transaction costs. Despite significant technological advancements, only a few scaling solutions have genuinely improved the experience for users and developers.

MegaETH aims to change that. It is one of the closest attempts to realize Ethereum's original vision – to build a world computer. By providing an execution environment with latency below 10 milliseconds, a gigabyte Gas limit, and ultra-low transaction costs, the MegaETH team is working to achieve the vision of a world computer. All data is processed on a single shared state (setting aside privacy issues) and real-time execution is achieved, which should be the guiding light for our industry and the only way we can truly compete with Web 2.0.

As a founder building on MegaETH, what impresses me the most is not the speed or millisecond-level latency, but the fact that after many years, all applications built on Ethereum can finally connect and stay in sync, and at a low cost with minimal waiting time. When all contracts and transactions exist 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 have to worry about which “version” of the network they are trading on.

This is what MegaETH means by “Big Sequencer Energy”: Ethereum has a high-performance execution layer designed for real-time applications. For the first time in years, users can build applications in the Ethereum execution environment without worrying about where users are located. All users can share the same execution environment again, supporting latency-sensitive applications such as high-frequency trading, on-chain order books, real-time lending, and fully on-chain multiplayer games—none of which are achievable with Ethereum's current resource limitations.

Enter: MegaMafia

In the context of MegaETH, those who have experienced fragmentation are beginning to rebuild once again. 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 at different levels: trading, credit, infrastructure, gaming, and so on. But their goals are consistent: to make Ethereum a unified whole again. MegaETH provides such an opportunity, and MegaMafia gives 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 functioning well can ultimately work together.

The Role of Avon in Global Computing

Avon brings the same concept into the credit market.

Among all DeFi categories, lending is the most severely affected by fragmentation. Each protocol operates a different version of the same concept. Each market has its own liquidity, rules, and risks.

Anyone who has used these markets knows that feeling. You check the interest rates on one app, then compare on another app, and still don't know which one is more trustworthy. Liquidity is stagnant because it cannot flow between different protocols.

Avon has introduced a coordination layer instead of deploying another funding pool. Its order book connects different strategies (independent markets), allowing them to respond to each other in real-time. You can understand it as many funding pools connected through a shared layer (i.e., the order book). When one side changes, the other sides can perceive it. Over time, the lending market will operate again like a single interconnected market. Liquidity will flow to where the most competitive conditions are. Borrowers will obtain the most competitive interest rates possible.

Coordination is not just about optimizing interest rates or control. More importantly, it provides a unified perspective for loans during market fluctuations.

Moving Towards a Cohesive Ethereum

Ethereum does not need another chain. It needs a center where people gather and maintain Ethereum.

MegaETH provides a trading venue. MegaMafia will provide trading power. Avon will provide a coordination layer to allow funds to flow within the system.

In recent years, Ethereum has been facing fragmentation issues; we believe that MegaETH will drive Ethereum to achieve the vision of a world computer and reach unprecedented scale.

As Ethereum begins to regain its rhythm, MegaETH will ensure that builders can achieve this at almost unlimited scale.