Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News
Although crypto has garnered increasing attention on Wall Street and among retail investors, an awkward reality persists: most existing public chains are trapped in a closed loop of the 'crypto circle', disconnected from real-world services, data, and user habits, making it difficult for blockchain to integrate into the lives of ordinary people. At the same time, developers also wish to focus on business logic rather than spending a lot of effort on integrating oracles, maintaining nodes, or handling off-chain data.
Against this backdrop, the real-world blockchain Rialo aims to break down the barriers between blockchain and the real world, enabling teams to deliver applications for production environments as easily as Web2 development, allowing blockchain to seamlessly integrate into the operational logic of the real world like smartphones.
What is Rialo?
Rialo is a blockchain developed by Subzero Labs specifically for the real world, but its positioning goes beyond the traditional Layer 1, Layer 2, or Layer 3 framework, with the full name being 'Rialo isn’t a layer 1'.
As Subzero Labs co-founder Ade Adepoju metaphorically stated in (Fortune) magazine: 'It's like the evolution from iPod to iPhone — we don't need another device that can only play music, but rather a versatile tool that can integrate a camera, internet, and GPS.'
Rialo's core goal is to lower the threshold for blockchain usage, allowing developers from non-crypto fields to easily build applications. Its most notable feature is 'native connection to the real world': for example, developers can directly call web information (such as FICO credit scores) in smart contracts without relying on third-party oracles; users can log in with familiar identities like social accounts or emails, without starting from scratch to learn wallet operations.
When explaining why Fabric Ventures invested in Rialo, they stated that Rialo changes the focus of blockchain L1 by embedding core functionalities that real-world developers need directly into the protocol. Calls, data flows, timers, and cross-chain operations have become native instructions rather than relying on external calls. Oracles, cross-chain bridges, indexers, and other 'traditional' infrastructure may no longer be necessary.
Team and funding background
In early August, Subzero Labs announced the completion of a $20 million seed round financing, led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Sui developer Mysten Labs, as well as Variant, Hashed, Fabric Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Mirana Ventures, Susquehanna, Edge Ventures, Flowdesk, and others. According to Fortune magazine, CEO Ade Adepoju stated that this financing was completed in the first quarter of this year, involving equity and token warrants.
Members of the Subzero Labs team have previously worked at companies or projects such as Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, TikTok, Citadel, Mysten Labs, and Solana, possessing rich experience in blockchain, artificial intelligence, distributed systems, and hardware.
Co-founder and CEO Ade Adepoju: 30 years old this year, residing in New York City, previously worked at chip manufacturer AMD, and later served as an engineer at Dell and Netflix. At the end of 2021, Ade Adepoju entered the crypto field, joining Mysten Labs as a founding engineer (as of February 2024).
Co-founder and CTO Lu Zhang: Former engineer at Mysten Labs.
How does Rialo work?
Although Rialo has not disclosed its blockchain architecture, its brief introduction indicates that its operational logic revolves around 'combining RISC-V and Solana VM compatibility', 'reducing friction', and 'native integration', which can be understood from several levels.
Combining RISC-V and Solana VM compatibility: Rialo is committed to reducing the need for middleware such as cross-chain bridges and oracles, integrating RISC-V smart contracts and Solana VM compatibility.
It is worth mentioning that in April this year, Vitalik Buterin proposed replacing the Ethereum EVM with the open-source instruction set architecture RISC-V at the Ethereum Magicians forum to enhance scalability. In the vision for Ethereum's 'lean Ethereum' development over the next decade, published by Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake in August, it was pointed out that Ethereum would undergo significant upgrades at the consensus layer, data layer, and execution layer, potentially building EVM 2.0 based on the open-source RISC-V instruction set. Vitalik Buterin explained that replacing ZK-EVM with RISC-V could greatly improve the efficiency of Ethereum's execution layer, addressing one of the main scalability bottlenecks and significantly enhancing the simplicity of the execution layer.
Developer-friendly technical architecture: Unlike traditional public chains, Rialo has embedded the capability for 'real-world interaction' from its design stage. For example, a single line of HTTPS call in a smart contract can extract real-time data anywhere, and seamlessly integrate any off-chain API within the smart contract. At the same time, Rialo optimizes the programming experience of smart contracts, introducing mechanisms like 'event-driven' and 'asynchronous processing' similar to traditional software development, allowing developers to write logic as simply as regular code.
User experience 'de-blockchainization': Rialo hopes to reconstruct the identity system, allowing users to log in with email, SMS, or existing social identities as Web3 passports. Additionally, Rialo will support sending encrypted messages. Rialo claims that transaction confirmations are at sub-second speeds, with stable and predictable fees, avoiding issues like 'Gas fee surges' and 'sandwich attacks' commonly seen in traditional public chains; at the same time, Rialo supports features familiar to Web2 users, such as 2FA and scheduled transactions.
Ecosystem synergy, breaking down the 'on-chain and off-chain' barriers: Rialo's underlying protocol will support direct interaction with various real-world services, such as payment systems and weather. This 'native integration' capability allows applications on Rialo to cover a wider range of scenarios.
Summary
When applications are simple enough and scenarios are common enough, cryptographic technology has the potential to truly step out of the 'small circle'.
Of course, Rialo still faces challenges: how to maintain decentralization while connecting to the real world? How to balance decentralization and compliance? How to balance data openness and privacy protection?