AltLayer’s founders and execs have delivered first-of-kind advances in sharded L1s and modular rollups, spanning Zilliqa’s mainnet launch to AltLayer’s restaked rollup stack and AVSs. Below is a concise list of major technical milestones attributable to the founding leadership, especially Dr. Yaoqi Jia.
Sharded L1 and smart contracts
Co-led design and launch of Zilliqa mainnet, the first public blockchain to implement network sharding with a production smart-contract platform (Scilla), marking a practical throughput-scale milestone for L1s.
Transitioned Zilliqa from research to operational mainnet with early high-volume dApps and safety-focused language design, establishing a template for secure sharded execution.
Rollups-as-a-Service (RaaS)
Introduced an early modular RaaS platform at AltLayer enabling rapid deployment of app-specific rollups, with dashboard/SDK flow to abstract node ops and maintenance.
Expanded RaaS to support multiple stacks and environments (e.g., OP Stack, Arbitrum Orbit, ZK Stack, Polygon CDK) to lower time-to-market for specialized rollups.
Restaked rollups architecture
Pioneered the “restaked rollups” model by leveraging EigenLayer’s restaking to decentralize and harden rollup services for security, liveness, and finality across ecosystems.
Defined and shipped three AVSs as core building blocks:
VITAL: decentralized state verification for rollups. [5][6]
MACH: fast finality to reduce confirmation latency across rollups.
SQUAD: decentralized sequencing with configurable multi-sequencer setups.
Decentralized sequencing and multi-operator design
Implemented configurable decentralized sequencing (SQUAD) to remove single-operator bottlenecks and enable concurrent/rotating sequencers for better censorship resistance.
Advanced interoperability and cross-rollup guarantees via AVS composition, linking verification, finality, and sequencing layers for more resilient appchains.
Ecosystem-wide rollup integrations
Extended AltLayer support across major rollup stacks and announced cross-ecosystem integrations (e.g., Polkadot-native rollups support) to broaden developer choice and portability.
Research-to-production leadership
Led the narrative and implementation shift from monolithic scaling to modular, app-specific rollups, influencing industry architectures for decentralized, specialized execution.
Drove client migration path from managed RaaS to decentralized AVS-backed operations as EigenLayer mainnet matured, aligning user needs with stronger decentralization.
If useful, a deeper dossier can map each milestone to specific release notes, repos, and dated announcements.
