Author: KarenZ, Foresight News
Despite the increasing attention that crypto is receiving on Wall Street and from retail investors, there remains an awkward reality: 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 hope to focus on business logic rather than expending a lot of energy on connecting oracles, maintaining nodes, or dealing with off-chain data.
In this context, the real-world blockchain Rialo aims to break down the barriers between blockchain and the real world, enabling teams to deliver applications suitable for production environments as easily as Web2 development, making blockchain 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 previous Layer1, Layer2, or Layer3 frameworks, with the full name 'Rialo isn't a layer 1'.
Using a metaphor from Ade Adepoju, co-founder of Subzero Labs, in Fortune magazine: 'It's like the evolution from the iPod to the iPhone — we don’t need another device that only plays music; we need a versatile tool that integrates a camera, internet, and GPS.'
The core goal of Rialo is to lower the barrier to 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 such as social accounts and emails, without starting from scratch to learn wallet operations.
Fabric Ventures explained its investment in Rialo by stating that Rialo changes the focus of blockchain L1 by embedding the core functionalities needed by real-world developers directly into the protocol itself. Calls, data streams, timers, and cross-chain operations 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 financing background
In early August, Subzero Labs announced the completion of a $20 million seed round of financing, led by Pantera Capital, with other participants including Sui developer Mysten Labs, 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 Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, TikTok, Citadel, Mysten Labs, Solana, and other companies or projects, possessing considerable 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: Formerly an engineer at Mysten Labs.
How does Rialo operate?
Although Rialo has not yet disclosed its blockchain architecture, from its brief introduction it is evident that the operating logic revolves around 'integrating RISC-V and Solana VM compatibility', 'reducing friction', and 'native integration', which can be understood from several perspectives:
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 of this year, Vitalik Buterin proposed to replace the Ethereum EVM with the open-source instruction set architecture RISC-V in the Ethereum Magicians forum to improve scalability. In the vision for 'lean Ethereum' development released by Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake in August, it was pointed out that Ethereum will undergo significant upgrades at the consensus layer, data layer, and execution layer, possibly building EVM 2.0 based on the open-source RISC-V instruction set. Vitalik Buterin explained that replacing ZK-EVM with RISC-V could significantly improve the efficiency of Ethereum's execution layer, addressing one of the major scalability bottlenecks and greatly enhancing the simplicity of the execution layer.
Developer-friendly technical architecture: Unlike traditional public chains, Rialo was designed with the capability for 'real-world interaction' embedded from the start. For example, a single line of HTTPS call in a smart contract can extract real-time data from anywhere and can seamlessly integrate any off-chain API within the smart contract. At the same time, Rialo optimizes the programming experience for smart contracts, introducing mechanisms similar to traditional software development such as 'event-driven' and 'asynchronous processing', enabling developers to write logic as simply as regular code.
The 'de-blockchainization' of user experience: Rialo aims to reconstruct the identity system, allowing users to log in to their Web3 passport using email, SMS, or existing social identities. Additionally, Rialo will support sending encrypted messages. Rialo claims transaction confirmations occur at sub-second speeds, with stable and predictable fees, avoiding issues like 'gas fee surges' and 'sandwich attacks' common in traditional public chains; at the same time, Rialo supports 2FA, scheduled transactions, and other features familiar to Web2 users.
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 data. This 'native integration' capability allows applications on Rialo to cover a wider range of scenarios.
Summary
When applications are simple enough and scenarios are commonplace, crypto technology has the potential to truly step out from 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 with privacy protection?