Commonware
I am excited to announce our seed investment in Commonware alongside Dragonfly Capital and a great list of angels from the ecosystem.
In the last few years, I have come to believe that the most ambitious builders in crypto will eventually launch their own blockchain. Some will do so out of the gates. For others it will be a long, arduous journey from smart contract app to dedicated chain. The core premise behind this belief is that because blockchains are shared state machines they come packaged with externalities. I’ve written about this before. The biggest negative externalities arise when the success of a single app or cluster of apps leads to congestion, network degradation, and increased fees for all. Simultaneously, as an app gets bigger, it wants more control. The needs of its users transcend the limitations of the underlying platform. This is natural, and it should be expected.
Today, if you want to launch your own chain you deploy a rollup, an app chain, or maybe an avs using one of a handful of blockchain frameworks. But the most widely used frameworks are old, riddled with tech debt, and not feasibly tuned to your application’s bespoke needs. We’ve spoken with dozens of teams that have built with these older frameworks and when trying to make even simple changes they have consistently faced numerous rewrites, footguns, and delays.
Enough is enough. Enter Commonware: the Anti-Framework.
Commonware is a common collection of “state-of-the-art” blockchain primitives meant to work well together but are carefully constructed to ensure that each can actually be replaced or augmented by your own “tuned” extensions. Rather than prioritizing standardization, blockchains will be better off choosing the right primitives for their specific needs.
Initial primitives of Commonware include: p2p, networking, consensus, execution, storage, runtime, mempool, etc. Most importantly, making modifications to any of these primitives (or introducing your own) can be performed while in production on a live network and reliably tested via the commonware deterministic simulation engine.
For the most ambitious blockchain developers, we believe Commonware will help to solve your problems.
- Stop waiting for high performance EVM chains to ship. Combine reth based execution with simplex consensus and get an EVM blockchain that can do 300ms block times.
- Stop paying oracle providers. Combine your favorite vm with a runtime that fetches and verifies critical pricing data as a part of your chain’s consensus.
- Stop navigating the dark forest. Tune your mempool to run auctions before block processing via dedicated gossip channels for market makers and block builders.
Commonware is led by Patrick O’Grady. I first met Patrick six years ago when we worked together on the crypto engineering team at Coinbase. For two years we helped Coinbase’s products support and maintain integrations with new blockchains. Admittedly, Patrick was 10x the engineer that I was. Today you can safely add two more orders of magnitude to that. He designed and shipped Rosetta (now known as the Coinbase Mesh API) and later joined Ava Labs where he was VP of Engineering for over three years. When he told me about his plans to build what is now Commonware, I jumped at the opportunity to work together again.
We’re thrilled to support Patrick and the rest of the Commonware team.
