Norbert Vadas

Designing DeFi just started in NYC. If you are around and interested in how at @ZenithFdn we are connecting TradFi and DeFi, by bringing EVM compatibility to Canton, drop me a message! I'd be happy to chat!

@barnabemonnot @ethereumfndn @TimBeiko @ralexstokes Legend. I am very grateful for your support and mentorship back in the EPF days in 2023, and for our chats ever since. Wishing you all the very best, Barnabé!

Excited to announce this evolution of Protocol, the @ethereumfndn teams stewarding, researching and developing the Ethereum protocol. After our re-launch of Protocol in June last year, @TimBeiko, @ralexstokes and I are now passing the torch to our talented colleagues @corcoranwill @kevaundray and @fredrik0x. They are taking on the task of delivering on Scaling, UX and Hardness objectives, with the protocol strawmap in their pocket (strawmap.org). --- It is also time to announce that I made the decision to leave the Ethereum Foundation, my home for the past 6.5 years ❤️ I am so grateful for this opportunity I had, to work with amazing individuals, on the most impactful project there is. Looking back from when I started (here it is -> x.com/barnabemonnot/…), it has been a wild ride from early EIP-1559 work, to the Merge, to MEV markets, to staking, finality, interoperability and UX; and from my beginnings in the Robust Incentives Group to co-leading Protocol for the past year. Over this past year, our Protocol priorities, particularly our "Improve UX" work, shifted my attention to nearer-term questions. Throughout, I've been excited to take on a more product-centric view. Making Ethereum's unique features more available to users today is on my mind; so is participating in the plurality of ways that Ethereum gets built. I'd love to hear from friends old and new about what excites them at the moment, and share where I'm at. Please reach out!

Not all atomic swaps are created equal. When someone says "atomic", it’s worth asking: atomic at what layer? This is not a minor semantic distinction. It has significant implications for finality, latency, security, and composability. The answer determines whether you're getting a promise that depends on both parties behaving rationally within a set of timelock-enforced rules, or a genuine, protocol-level guarantee that your transaction either fully executes or never happens at all. @ZenithFdn provides consensus-level atomicity with @CantonNetwork, everyone else is pitching economic atomicity. Take a deep dive and read more in our recent blog post to learn more. Zth.

Cross-chain infrastructure has a vocabulary problem. The word "Atomic" appears in bridge protocols, HTLC swaps and interoperability solutions of every kind. It's being used to describe mechanisms that deliver fundamentally different guarantees, and the industry isn't being precise enough about the difference. > Economic atomicity is what most bridges and cross-chain swaps deliver. The smart contract guarantees an all-or-nothing outcome at the application layer, but both legs still settle on separate chains through separate consensus mechanisms. The guarantee depends on both parties behaving rationally within timelock windows that are measured in hours. When a validator gets compromised, a chain reorgs, an attacker locks counterparty capital and simply waits, the smart contract can't protect against any of it. The window of exposure between two separate settlement events is where the damage happens. > Consensus-level atomicity is what Zenith delivers. Both legs of a transaction are processed within the same single consensus mechanism as one indivisible operation. There is no window and no timelock. The protocol itself guarantees that both legs commit together or neither does, regardless of what either party does or what the infrastructure beneath them does. For consumer applications that distinction is manageable, but for institutional finance moving real capital across chain boundaries, it's the difference between infrastructure you can depend on and infrastructure that works until something goes wrong. The EVM execution adds a few hundred milliseconds to Canton's native finality time, that's the entire overhead. Compared to timelock windows measured in hours, the latency difference alone changes what's possible to build. We wrote the full breakdown about two flavours of atomic that are worth understanding clearly before you build on either: zenith.network/resources/blog… Zth.

@willoftyre @ZenithFdn @CantonNetwork Sure, happy to chat. I'll DM you.

@NorbertVadas @ZenithFdn @CantonNetwork very intereting. i'm building something on canton and would love to try out zenith... any way we could speak soon? send me a dm if possible

Zenith is two things, and the distinction matters. Zenith EVM is the reference environment operated by Zenith directly. The entry point for developers wanting to deploy Solidity on @CantonNetwork immediately: full tooling compatibility, atomic composability with Canton subnets, one RPC configuration change and you're live. Zenith Stack is the framework for enterprises and institutions to launch their own customizable EVM environments. Custom tokens, fee structures, and compliance parameters, entirely within the operator's domain. Each environment maintains full Ethereum equivalence while remaining atomically composable with Canton and other Zenith Stack chains simultaneously. And the composability extends further. A single transaction can span multiple parallel Zenith Stack instances and Canton subnets in a single atomic operation. Every leg succeeds or the entire transaction fails with no partial execution risk. One stack, every use case. Zth.

You are raising an important point. Actually all Zenith Stack chains, including Zenith EVM, the reference instance operated by Zenith, are designed to be cross-composable and can settle atomically to Canton. This is possible because all Zenith Stack chains have their Daml contract on Canton, which registers incoming txs triggering an EVM event on the specific instance, calls out to the Solidity contracts deterministically using the external_call() primitive we built in Daml, triggers native EVM execution, receives results, and settles the new state root. Since all EVM events for all instances are routed through Canton, when you have a tx between two Zenith instances, Canton will also act as the coordinator. The Canton validators hosting instance A's Daml contract and instance B's Daml contract will all be involved as parties in the tx. The native Canton tx including the EVM payloads can have multiple external calls in its operation tree, and therefore the two legs on the two EVM instances will be executed and settled atomically within the same single Canton tx. This way you can actually have composability and atomic settlement on Canton across Zenith instances as well.

The composability claim needs unpacking. Atomicity and composability are different things. Atomicity: both legs succeed or both fail. Canton gives you that across Zenith instances. Composability: Contract A calls Contract B, reads the return value, branches on it. One execution context. That's what Solidity devs mean when they say "composable." Each Zenith Stack instance is a separate EVM state machine. Contract A in Instance 1 can't CALL Contract B in Instance 2 the way they would on Ethereum. The call crosses the Canton boundary through external_call(), into a different execution context. That's atomic settlement of independent state transitions, not EVM composability. The Polyglot Canton whitepaper is explicit: cross-instance re-entrancy fails entirely. It's a double spend in UTXO terms. What you actually get: full Ethereum composability within a single Zenith instance, atomic bundling across instances. Powerful for DvP settlement, but not a single shared execution context.

We are hiring a Head of Security and a BizDev Associate. We’re a small team who need to punch way above our weight. Every single person owns their section of the business and has full authority to figure out how we can reach our goals. If that sounds like you go ahead and apply.

Nice design that has already been done by @CantonNetwork @ZenithFdn & @zksync with slight differences.

This is what many people seem to misunderstand. Every Zenith EVM transaction is a @CantonNetwork transaction. Every transaction burns $CC and grows the collective pie.

🚨HSBC SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETES TOKENIZED DEPOSITS ON CANTON NETWORK This full-stack solution by @HSBC was used for the issuance, transfer, and atomic settlement of its Tokenised Deposit Service (TDS) with other digital assets. This marks the first time HSBC’s tokenized deposits were issued and used on a public blockchain network, demonstrating seamless interoperability and 24/7 programmable settlement while maintaining full regulatory compliance and privacy controls. HSBC is locked and loaded with: ➜ ~$300B+ market cap ➜ $71B+ annual revenue (FY 2025) ➜ $1.787 trillion in customer deposits ➜ operations in 56 countries and territories ➜ leadership as one of the world’s largest banking and financial services organizations HSBC continues advancing real-world tokenized finance at a global scale. The pilot highlights how tokenised deposits can move atomically alongside digital assets on Canton’s privacy-enabled network of networks. This is a significant step toward mainstream institutional adoption of programmable money and tokenized cash on @CantonNetwork. Zth.

🚨 ATOMIC COMPOSABILITY IS THE END GAME In almost every blockchain architecture, as users interact with L2s/subnets/parachains, transaction volume, fee capture, and gas token utility moves away from the base layer, gradually fragmenting what was once a single economic system. This is why $ATOM failed, $DOT faltered, $AVAX tapped out, and $ETH has hit a ceiling. We drafted our architecture and made it public over a year ago. EEZ and others are now bringing that to Ethereum, and it’s clear why. The end game should always focused on burning your native token. For us, that is $CC. Zenith approaches network success by ensuring that execution does not pull value away from @CantonNetwork, but continues to flow entirely through it. When users interact with Zenith, EVM / SVM transactions are routed through Canton and atomically executed as part of Canton’s native transaction flow, while also preserving settlement and verification at the base layer. - An institution on Canton can initiate a transaction that locks tokens or stablecoins on the Canton side. - The Canton leg executes sub-operations including an external_call() that directly invokes the Zenith EVM application. - The Zenith leg performs the corresponding actions (e.g., minting, swapping into an RWA asset, depositing into a @Morpho-like or @aave-style vault). - Confirmation flows back to Canton atomically. - All sub-operations across Canton and Zenith succeed together or revert together in a single unified transaction. When you deploy with @ZenithFdn you inherently are deploying to Canton. It’s canonical. It’s Canton. Zth.

Zenith Team is growing! Two people joined Zenith lately worth knowing about ↓ Gustav Arentoft (@GArentoft) | Head of Ecosystem 8+ years in DeFi. BD Lead at MakerDAO from 2018-2021, closed SocGen first tier 1 bank integrated into DeFi. Head of Product for @1inch’s institutional product. Founder of @StableLab, running governance for major L1/L2s, and DeFi protocols with a 30-person team. At Zenith, he leads ecosystem, builder relationships, and institutional partnerships. Angelo Laub (@angelol) | Engineering Lead 20+ years building production systems across cryptography, blockchain, and AI infrastructure. Lead smart contract engineer for Alien Worlds (100k+ DAU). Creator of Tunnelblick, a widely used macOS OpenVPN client. At Zenith, he owns engineering execution across the multi-VM stack heading into mainnet. The right people, at the right time. Q3 mainnet is approaching, with 31,800+ Ethereum developers about to get direct access to Canton's institutional rails for the first time. The team is evolving to meet that moment. We’re also hiring: zenith.network/careers/ Welcome Gustav and Angelo! Zth.

Episode 50 of The Spelunking Podcast w/ Ricardo Mendez and @mhonkasalo is here. We try to answer one question: is this the bottom of the bear market? Tune in: youtube.com/watch?v=0WWlOF…

@andyyy Well, Canton has more traction than Ripple ever had, and the latter is at around $135B FDV. For me, that makes $CC undervalued. (Not financial advice ofc. :) )

@NorbertVadas $5B FDV?

What is the most undervalued, fundamentally strong token in crypto rn???

@nonfungibleyash @HeslinKim Thanks. I won't be able to make it this Tuesday but happy to join you next if similar topics are on the table.

@HeslinKim @NorbertVadas Have 2 other founders would love to have norbert join it

Starting @EthCC with a Builders Breakfast. ☕🥞 @CantonFdn and @ZenithFdn are hosting an intimate morning for builders at the intersection of Ethereum and institutional finance, just coffee and real conversations. Zenith brings EVM and SVM execution to Canton, so Solidity and Rust developers can now build on the same network March 30, Cannes. RSVP below 👇

Most people try to fit Zenith into existing categories: L1? L2? It’s neither. Zenith is built as the EVM execution environment for @CantonNetwork, and behaves differently from traditional L2s. It doesn’t compete with the base layer. It reinforces it.

Visa’s @CantonNetwork Super Validator is rated as a Weight of 10, the maximum given in the network. That’s the same as Nasdaq and the DTCC. That’s the same as @ZenithFdn. Let that sink in for a minute. Zth.