Recently at the #REDeFiNETOMORROW2025 CEO of AltiusLabs event, Annabelle shared about Altius Labs' ambitious journey, from successfully raising $11 million in seed capital from leading investors to its vision of a multi-chain world with parallel execution and superior interaction capabilities.
You'll gain insight into how Altius is solving current congestion issues, optimizing the developer experience, and opening the door to new generation blockchain applications, from high-frequency finance to gaming and real-world assets.
Let's listen together to discover the technological breakthroughs that Altius Labs is bringing and envision a future where blockchain becomes faster, more efficient and more accessible than ever!
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Annabelle Huang: Awesome, welcome everyone. I'm so glad to be here with Tanwa, the CEO and co-founder of Altius Labs. Hi Tanwa, how are you?
Tanwa: We're glad to have you here. Great to have you join us again this year. Can you give a quick intro of yourself and what you're working on in about 30 seconds and then we'll dive into more details?
Annabelle Huang: Sure, happy to be back here. My name is Annabelle, like you mentioned, the co-founder and CEO of Altius. We're building a VM agnostic modular execution layer, abstracting the high-performance execution part of the blockchain stack to enable next level performance for any blockchain. Before Altius Labs, I was one of the managing partners at Amber, and before that, I was part of the AirSwap team, building decentralized exchanges (DEXs) at the very early stage.
Tanwa: There's so much to unpack, but we're going to unpack all of them in this session. The first thing you said is you're building an execution layer, and I cannot help but notice that you didn't say a blockchain. I think everyone is out there building blockchain, but you're building an execution layer as a service rather than a blockchain. So what's the main difference here?
Annabelle Huang: That's a great question. Instead of building another general purpose blockchain, whether it's an L1 or L2, we chose a more technically complicated route of abstracting the execution layer from the consensus layer itself and bring optimizations directly into the execution layer. The thesis here is really one thing: I don't think we need more general purpose chains. I believe in a multi-chain future where we're going to see many chains built for specific purposes, almost like different apps on your phone in the App Store. And we wanted to build something useful that can empower the next generation of multi-chain future by bringing our expertise in distributed systems and high-performance computing to develop the execution layer that's compatible with any chain.
And as you said, modularity is not a new concept, but if you look at the blockchain stack, we have execution, we have data availability, we have consensus, and ultimately settlement. Before, we have monolithic chains with most of these functionalities paired together. And we're seeing newer, more modern chains that already disaggregate the DA layer, disaggregate the consensus and execution. You can choose to settle on any chain or even settle on multiple chains. So we're really trying to push the boundary of the next modular layer at the execution level.
Tanwa: Let's talk about the benefits of doing so. First, if we think about blockchains that want to go fast, we often think about something like Solana, a monolithic approach that tries to go really fast. What you're saying here, last year and also in other places, is that Altius is going to bring web 2 level performance without having to sacrifice decentralization. So what kind of performance are we talking about here? Are we comparing to Solana, are we comparing to Visa, are we comparing to Twitter? What level of performance are we targeting? And to say that you can do that without having to sacrifice decentralization seems like you're challenging the blockchain impossible trinity: blockchain for our audience, you can pick two out of three basically--you can be fast, you can be secure, or you can be decentralized. In the past, people often chose to sacrifice decentralization in order to achieve security and speed. But Altius Labs is trying to do all three at the same time. How much speed can you get basically and how do you overcome that impossible trinity?
Annabelle Huang: In terms of the speed that we can achieve, considering where Ethereum is with EVM, or Solana with SVM, or even many Move based chains in Move VM, I would say that every generation of chains that launch to market, the VM itself or architecture has been improved. Of course, especially compared to what even Bitcoin can do TPS wise, but what we're doing is really introducing optimizations on top of any existing VM. So we're not literally redoing a new VM, with a new language that's going to be hard for developers to pick up, but we're just bringing optimizations to each existing VM.
In terms of speed, we can enable Solana level performance or even faster than Solana level in terms of throughput, in terms of latency, for existing EVM chains by introducing parallel execution or multi-threading at the EVM level, as well as more optimized state management or database management. And the same optimizations can be applied to even SVM or Move VM, even though they already have some sort of parallel execution baked in at the VM level.
In terms of your second question, decentralization: again, because we're not building our own blockchain, we're just solving it at the execution level, so we can at least ensure the decentralization of smart contract execution. I mean there's other blockchains achieving high performance by running very specialized or very performant sequencer or validator. Think about a beefy SSD machine, and you can achieve performance by running everything in memory on one of these machines or having a few machines that's co-located to run them together. But again, then you don't really have a decentralized set of validators or sequencers.
What we're introducing is a sharded database architecture that we call a scalable database, to solve in between the database and execution. So when you're executing a smart contract, when you're reading and writing to the database or the Merkle tree in the case of Ethereum, we apply sharded architecture so the high-performance execution can run on commodity hardware--meaning things that you can buy anywhere, like spinning up a standard AWS node without having to find or pay for a very expensive and specialized machine.
And an added benefit that this provides, besides decentralization, is actually solving the state bloat problem. Imagine a chain that's super active, you need to run a full node or store everything in memory. Even for the highest performance machine or the machine with the biggest memory is still at risk of running out of memory or running out of state. But with our architecture, since it's scalable through sharded architecture, we can just add more machines to solve the stability issue. So we're bringing high performance to any blockchain but at the same time future-proofing them on performance and also on database management.
Tanwa: That's very interesting because for people who have been in crypto for a while, we all remember the excitement of being able to run anything on our desktop, or even on the laptop back in the old days. You can mine Bitcoin on a laptop, you can mine Ethereum on a laptop, and then I think things gradually became more demanding. And now if you try to run a node of any blockchain, good luck if you don't use any hyperscale to serve your node or your sequencer. So I see Altius' direction or Altius' design choices is refreshingly different.
But now, let's talk about the people that are going to use Altius, because you allow developers to tune execution later. If you're a developer on a DeFi right now, what you're going to do is: one, you pick a blockchain, maybe you pick Ethereum, maybe you pick Solana, and then you study the programming language for that blockchain and write the smart contract. And now Annabelle from Altius comes up and say: "No, no, don't do that, use Altius and we'll act as the middleware between you and the execution layer of the chain you choose, and we're going to make it better." So how does that change the developer experience? Do they still write Solidity on Ethereum, for example, when they deploy the smart contract, is it to EVM or is it to Ethereum, or what does it look like?
Annabelle Huang: There's different ways that we're talking to developers. The more direct way would be blockchain developers. So if you're building or maintaining an existing chain, or you're building a new one, you can work with Altius stack, the Altius execution engine to rapidly update your existing VM. You get the high performance and more optimized state management almost immediately. So we can help upgrade any blockchain basically.
But if you're a smart contract developer, then part of it relies on which chain you're deploying to to work with Altius stack. Or instead, like I mentioned, I believe in a multi-chain future. I want to make it as easy as possible for application developers to launch custom blockchains that's built for their own specific purposes while still maintain a high performance like a Solana or any other blockchain that requires a lot more expertise to build.
So for mature application developers that are considering moving to their own blockchain for different reasons for customizations that might better serve their application, they can also create an application chain using Altius stack.
Tanwa: Well, that's going to change how people do things because the next question is actually interesting to me. In programming, we have something called zero-cost abstraction. When I want to do something, no matter how I code it, it's going to be compiled into something efficient. Altius does the same thing with parallel execution. From my limited understanding, and I hope you can help me on this, if I'm a developer and I write a smart contract, and I hope my smart contract can be executed in parallel on Altius, Altius actually handles the parallel management for me by looking at the byte code of the smart contract and try to optimize for parallel at that level, right? And from your experience or from your benchmark, let's take something fairly typical like swapping something on DEX, how much speed up would we expect if we optimize for parallel at the byte level?
Annabelle Huang: That's a great question. Basically, if the underlying chain is using Altius stack, meaning that if it's running the available EVM--which is sequential execution--you'll be able to do parallel processing right away. For any smart contract that's executed through Altius engine, we'll do the analysis and schedule the transactions to be executed in parallel.
How we handle parallel execution is also different from a lot of existing methods that you'll see with SVM or SDM block in Move VM where the parallelization happens at the transaction level. Meaning that you would look at this block of transaction, you would optimistically run all of them in parallel, and when you hit a conflict, such as a few transactions are touching the same state, you know that you can't run them in parallel right now because you have to determine who comes first. Then you would revert back to the transaction level and rerun the conflicting transactions, and then get to a finalized state that's been resolved.
But with Altius, what we've implemented is what we call deterministic concurrent control, plus static analysis at the op-code level of smart contracts. Think of it as a more granular level, we're looking at each instruction in the transactions instead of the overall transactions. The result is we'll run everything optimistically in parallel, but when there's a conflict, we actually go inside each conflicting transaction and see which op-code or line of instruction is actually touching the conflicting state, and we'll only rerun those in parallel. So you can think of it as a more granular and efficient parallel execution and conflict resolution.
So you would have additional speed from this, plus our sharded database management, which would help with accelerating database IO reads and writes. Combining the two, if you think Ethereum mainnet hasn't even hit a million gas per second, a lot of the top L2s like Base and a few other L2s are currently at around 50 million gas per second. Their goal this year is to get to 250 million gas per second. But with Altius architecture, you can get to 1 or 2 gigagas per second almost immediately. And obviously there's more optimizations that we can keep doing. This is the immediate performance uplift that we hope to bring to different chains.
Tanwa: To our audience, I promised Annabelle at the beginning of the session that if it gets too technical, I'm going to try to make it into a simpler version, and the five-year-old version will be me in this case. The way I think about this, it's not 100% correct, of course, but it might help some of our audience to get an idea. I think about ride sharing. If two people request an Uber, and one person wants to go up north but one person only wants to go halfway up north. The different parallel process would say, hey, these two transactions are conflicting because you can't have a car going to two destinations. Therefore, only one passenger gets to go. But if you go down to the op-code level or instruction level, there's actually no conflict. You can have two people riding the same car, you just have to drop one person in the middle and then continue on to the second passenger's final destination. So if we optimize at the level of actual physical instruction, you get more optimization. And of course, we see this type of service from ride sharing applications. I'm sure Annabelle is cringing because that's overly simplistic, but that might help our audience a little bit on a metaphor of what's going on at some level. Is that right?
Annabelle Huang: Yeah, that's actually a good way to visualize it. Another example we like to use is remember in 2021, NFT was super hot, and when you mint NFT, you always have a counter. I can say you want to mint 100, so you have number count, OK, I minted one. The next transaction, I have to add one, so my instruction is OK N+1. But because all this is touching N, in the traditional parallel execution world, all that is conflicting. You have to do one by one anyway. But for us, realize that OK, if it's only the last instruction, we can run it, just rerun the last instruction in this entire transaction. So you're not literally reminting. And suddenly, you save a lot of re-executions and you save a lot of gas in rerunning these things. And with our sharded database, you can say, OK, since it's only N+1, what if we shard it into 16 machines and then they'll eventually count to 100, and you can just add them up at the end. This is another way to explain why it can work better in parallel in this way.
Tanwa: Mentioning NFTs sometimes breaks my heart. I probably have way too many. I'm lucky because I mainly have Pudgy, because they're cute and I think they're one of the few that are holding value.
Annabelle Huang: They're doing well. Luca is one of our speakers too, so we're loving what we're having.
Tanwa: Let's put aside the architecture and the technical aspect of Altius, which is very fascinating, but I also want to talk about the other side of Altius. You successfully raised $11 million in the seed round, which is amazing from top investors such as Founders Fund, Pantera Capital. For an early stage investment of this size, what does it signal to you in terms of infrastructure investment in the blockchain space?
Annabelle Huang: That's a great question. I hear a lot of opinions, especially this year, that we simply have too much infra and they're not valuable, they're all vaporware. While some of that might be true, I still think we have a massive gap in terms of where we are and where we want to be. We're really looking at mass adoption. And Altius is playing a part of scaling or solving some piece of interop to ultimately achieve that vision for what we all want. And why we're all in this space to build.
The validation and the trust that we received from our investors validates that they also believe that there's a massive gap and they want to invest in teams with long-term vision and the patience to build for the long run to try to solve that. Obviously, with my past relationship with many of these investors when I was running Amber, they knew that myself, the team that we have, many of them came from web 2 enterprises. My co-founder and CTO, he's from over 20 years of experience, 14 years specifically at high frequency trading firms Hust River Trading, one of the top HFT shops globally. That gives our investor a validation that we're here to build for the long run. We want to leverage what we've built before in our career to solve a very ambitious problem, but we're not going to stop until we get there. A short answer to your question, there's still a lot of infrastructure gaps that we need to solve, but we also need the right team with the right long-term mindset to realize that.
Tanwa: I find complaining about too much investment in infrastructure very perplexing because it's like complaining about building too many roads and bridges. Maybe we'll need them at some point, better to start building now. And to your point, it's not just building more but building the right thing. This leads me to the next question. Altius has chosen to go the modular approach. But of course, infrastructure also includes building a new layer 1, building a new layer 2, building another modular approach to something. So do you see, since you've chosen a modular approach, do you see it all going modular in the future or is there still a place for additional layer 1s and layer 2s?
Annabelle Huang: I think we're going to see more chains, going back to what I mentioned earlier, my belief in the multi-chain world, we're going to see more chains but I think we're going to see an era of more purpose-built chains. Meaning this is a chain that's specifically customized for on-chain trading or another chain that's customized for gaming, because we're entering an era where we're going to see more applications brought on chain. The specifications of what's most needed and the marginal improvements that we can see by specializing that, for example, what Hyperliquid has done with their own purpose-built blockchain, is really built for order book and for high-performance trading on chain. So I'm sure we'll see more of that for different use cases.
There's still a world for general purpose chains, maybe Ethereum would become the settlement layer for a lot of things that will be traded on chain, again, it's hard to get that level of security decentralization that has been tested over time. But are we going to see more general purpose blockchains, new and launching to market? I would argue that it might be tough. And I think people are looking for next generation applications, and rightfully so, users shouldn't care about the infrastructure, they shouldn't care about which chain it is and how should I think about solving these cross-chain bridging aspects. It's almost like you shouldn't care if your application is developed by Apple or Android, as long as it's easy to use. In that case, I think we're going to see more modularity, meaning more specialized services, taking a deeper look into each layer, each aspect, from the application level to the blockchain level so we get better performance and better UI/UX ultimately. And we're definitely going to see more purpose-built blockchains to achieve that application chain future.
Tanwa: Speaking of people that don't want to know they're using blockchains, enterprises are notoriously want to benefit from blockchain transactions: fast, concise, but hard time dealing with the fact that they might have to use a blockchain custodial solution, that's hard, security is hard. You just mentioned what type of new application can happen with the next generation infrastructure such as what you're building. From an enterprise perspective and from a retail perspective with Altius, what type of new application can we see that was not possible before?
Annabelle Huang: That's a great question. The first thing that comes to mind, just given my experience and our team's experience in trading, especially high frequency trading, is that we're going to get to a level where decentralized trading infrastructure can almost compete with the centralized ones. I say almost because it's always going to be hard to have both decentralization and the exact same level of performance, but with DeFi, I think we can get to a close enough place. And we're going to be able to see more completely on-chain order books, besides what Hyperliquid has done, and maybe there could be enterprise on-chain trading or institutional on-chain trading. They might need some portion that's permissioned or KYC'd, but can be customized for those use cases.
Obviously, I don't know when that will happen, but I'm super excited to see more social, entertainment-related, or gaming-related use cases brought on chain. Maybe there's going to be interesting social experiments that we can do in a completely on-chain world where we rely on the blockchain to trust and coordinate in ways that maybe we can't in the web 2 world or in the physical world.
Another one would be around real-world assets or settlement in general. Can we get to Visa or Mastercard level speed. We're obviously seeing Stripe doing a lot on stablecoins with their acquisition of Bridge and Privy. If we see more of those move on chain because it's faster, cheaper, then from the infrastructure perspective, can we make sure that can also compete with web 2 level speed.
Tanwa: Exciting fights are waiting, because I was all in that on-chain gaming is going to be a big thing and it is a big thing now. But I thought it was going to be so much bigger until people have to download Metamask to play a game and then all of a sudden it's not fun anymore. But we're getting there, especially with solution like Altius comes in and speeds up the gaming because I think gaming is going to benefit the most from parallel execution, because you have player in this corner of the game doing something and player in the other corner of the game doing something else that might not be related. So there's no reason why one person has to wait for the other person to finish the transaction first. It makes total sense.
Annabelle Huang: Exactly, or settlement too, because you're mostly doing transfers from different wallet addresses and those can be processed in parallel. So a lot higher gas per second or a lot higher transaction per second, a lot higher throughput, a lot lower latency, and can actually achieve Visa level or faster.
Tanwa: And with this, you have said before that you believe in the multi-chain world, and Altius has baked that into the design. You are VM agnostic, meaning as a developer, I can work with any VMs through Altius, right? And as a user trading blockchains, I can also execute my transaction on any existing blockchains. From Altius' perspective, that's pretty challenging because on one hand, you have to integrate it with all the target blockchains. If you have a developer that wants to connect to three chains, then you have to do three times the work of one chain. And then you have the user side of trying to connect to all the chains because they're airdrop hunting or something that sounds like a very hard problem to scale. Just EVM and SVM alone are two different beasts, right? And to make sure you can integrate with them safely, decentralized, and efficiently sounds like a very hard thing to pull off. How do you approach this challenge?
Annabelle Huang: Well, I should let my co-founder, my CTO add on this, because he's definitely the brain behind a lot of our architecture. But how Altius framework works is that we actually implement everything in Rust, but we have an interpretation layer, almost like a translator, that can interpret different languages. Maybe you're using Solidity, maybe you're using Rust, or any other language to translate it to what's compatible with the rest of Altius framework.
That gives a lot more flexibility because we're, again, not requiring developers to learn a new language because it's hard already. You can deploy the same smart contract that you do on Ethereum or Solana. There's no change in the developer experience there, but you get the speed up through in-line blockchain improvements.
In terms of scalability, actually a lot of the computer science principles are very similar. There's obviously differences in the op-code or the semantics of EVM versus the op-code set of SVM, but it's not as different as you think. It's not 100% completely different. There's still massive overlap for a lot of the core functionalities. We just have to extend, for example, what we've built for EVM to account for the different op-code sets in SVM and then to extend to other VMs, we'll do the same. Hopefully it's a one-time effort and then the rest would be super easy to integrate through certain API calls so the chain itself can run a more upgraded and efficient execution layer immediately.
Tanwa: Oh, the reason this question really excites me is because the fragmentation of developers in the blockchain world. If for some weird reason you chose EVM as your first development environment, you're kind of stuck there. Or if you chose SVM, you're kind of stuck there as well. There's some people that hop between these two environments but that's the minority. And I feel like Altius is really going to make sure everyone can work together regardless of what language they're speaking, it's kind of like you're the Tower of Babel for execution environments and that's so cool.
Annabelle Huang: That's what we hope to do. What's even more exciting for us, besides just upgrading the performance of different individual chains, is actually that we're going to horizontally integrate our network into a shared execution layer. And where we have the opportunity to solve more interop aspect of things. So we can achieve cross-chain interop at the execution layer directly rather than through bridges or other abstraction layers that's on top of the application. For us, it can be a more native, more protocol level way to solve interop or cross-chain composability. That's a super interesting one for me because, myself as an individual user when I was at Amber, when we were acting as a resolver for many of these cross-chain temporary protocols or cross-chain swaps, it was still pretty manual, still ultimately relied on someone to manage inventory across different chains to bridge, to underwrite bridging cost or risk because a lot of times there were hacks that happened at that level. But through the execution layer, since we're already executing the smart contracts and updating the state of the blockchains that's powered by Altius, then maybe we can enable more native cross-chain interop in that way.
Tanwa: Now let's look a little bit into the future. One of the things I'm looking forward to is Altius' Open Execution Network (OEN) vision. As you said, right now if someone wants to use a new execution environment, normally it's centralized in some sort of way. If you go into L2 BEAT, most of the L2s are still in the training wheel stage, they haven't fully decentralized like they promised. But Altius is trying to achieve that and try to achieve decentralization as fast as possible with this open execution network vision. Can you tell us a little bit about what is open execution network, how is it different from what you're doing now, what's the path to get there?
Annabelle Huang: Right now, you can think that each chain would have their own set of validators or sequencers, a lot of times like you said, it's a single sequencer. What Altius helps bring is through our architecture, we can bring higher performance and lower cost and state bloat maintaining solution for these chains. And they can even decentralize the sequencer or validator sets that they're running. Obviously, Altius can be the initial server to run all the executions, but then we can decentralize that network to open up access for anyone with commodity hardware to be part of OEN and power the execution for different blockchains.
There are interesting incentives that we can look at where sometimes maybe we'll see congestion on one chain where a few other chains might be a little quiet, say there's a huge NFT mint or a huge airdrop being claimed on one chain while everything else is going normal. Currently that chain has to face the congestion because it's running with its own set of validators and there might not be massive overlap with the rest. But by introducing Altius and the OEN network, we can look at something as dynamic load balancing or dynamic load management, similar to what Netflix does or AWS, when you have high demand in one area, you can load balance across other machines that are idle or quickly add machines so the chain itself doesn't get congested. So we can introduce even interesting economic incentives so we can dynamically manage load across the execution of different chains so we don't get congestion anywhere else.
Tanwa: Let me expand that a little bit. For blockchains with current generation design, one of the bottlenecks for decentralization is the consensus. The more validator nodes you add to the network, the slower the consensus becomes. But from what you've said, because of the intentional design of Altius, the more people that participate in OEN, the more transaction you can handle, the faster it becomes because you can route the transaction in such a way that can be parallelized, can be processed in parallel but there's no conflict at the consensus layer, meaning theoretically, you have a theoretical limit to scalability or you can just horizontally keep stacking scaling the network?
Annabelle Huang: Yeah, there's a big distinction that we have to make here. Because we're only solving for execution, we're not touching consensus. But by speeding up the execution, because you get to state finality faster, then you can get to consensus faster. So we're still speeding up the chain even though the consensus, you still have to go through finality in that sense. But in modern architecture, a lot of the bottlenecks in consensus, some part of it is where the execution is a lot, some part of it is when the execution layer is communicating with the consensus layer or when it's touching the database. So we're optimizing everything in between, anything that's touching consensus, touching execution, and in between. But we're not touching or changing anything on the DA layer, on the consensus or settlement, because we want to keep it as modular as possible. But by introducing the OEN network that's further optimizing the loan management when it comes to execution, then we can get to consensus a lot faster.
Tanwa: So you get the execution of any transaction done as fast as possible and then the settlement speed or the consensus speed is up to the user to use whatever they feel comfortable with, right?
Annabelle Huang: Yeah, I mean, I don't know maybe we'll get to a new era of new consensus, even though what we've seen is more or less I think people are happy with the existing consensus mechanisms but just optimizing more at the DA level or at the execution level like what Altius is trying to do. But who knows, maybe there will be more efficient consensus or even more efficient on-line data structure and Altius will be able to be compatible with all of them. So really just pushing the boundary at the execution layer only.
Tanwa: And for our audience that's very excited to see where Altius will take them, what do we expect in the year and the next year? What's your plan and if someone wants to get involved with this exciting new technology, what are the options?
Annabelle Huang: Yeah, I have to say we're still pretty early in development stage. We're getting to the beta level of our first EVM implementation. So hopefully you'll hear more from us in terms of our first design partner group that's going to be launched in Q3. And in the rest of the year, we're going to look into expanding that beyond EVM to other VMs so we can bring our technology to solve a wider ecosystem.
If you're a developer, whether you're building a blockchain, we would definitely love to chat or if you're building an application, if you're more mature and are thinking of building your own custom application chain, please feel free to reach out. If you're an early builder, we'd love to chat and see what interesting use cases you're working on and see if there's opportunity for us to co-build or work together at the early stage. If you're a broader community, please follow us on X at @altiuslabs. Visit our website altiuslabs.xyz to track our velocity, to stay updated. And we also launched an ambassador program for the broader community if anyone's interested to apply. And lastly, reach out to any of us, myself, or anyone in the team if you just have any interesting ideas you want to chat.
Tanwa: And with that, we thank Annabelle once again for joining us here at Redefine. Hopefully we can have you back next year so you can tell us about your 2025 and I'm sure it's going to be amazing. Thank you so much.
Annabelle Huang: Thank you. Thank you SD 10X and Bloomberg for hosting this event again.