Mustafa Al-Bassam

rollup research flourished because Ethereum hoped it would fix scaling after sharded execution was deemed too complex to ship. but after 4+ years building in this space, it’s clear to me: rollups aren’t primarily useful for "scaling" an ecosystem, unless scaling means running identical chains competing for the same use cases. they’re a new primitive for building new blockchains easily and cheaply. spinning up and maintaining a validator set is hard and expensive. if you’re building anything high-performance, each replica has high operational costs. and since it’s likely new software, you’ll need operators willing to deal with ongoing bugs. they’ll demand a premium. all of this costs money and attention. resources startups should be extremely careful with. rollups let you skip the validator set entirely. pay for data as you go. if any party wants full security or transparency on your chain’s operations, they just run a full node pointed at the same DA layer namespace. that’s it. if you’re building a new chain, let’s talk.

We've talked a lot about this on the Pod, but the Great SaaS Meltdown has started and there's no going back. What exactly is happening? In short, hi growth, low/no profitability SaaS is no longer a winning strategy because the big question mark is the durability of that growth in the short term and, because of AI, the lack of profits in the long term. Every SaaS company has sold the dream (to investors and employees) that they will growth quickly now, and harvest lots of cash later. With AI, this assumption may be completely out the window. Now the threshold question is whether their growth will be overtaken by a much cheaper AI-developed solution? If you are a venture supported SaaS startup and are a legacy Heuristics+APIs+CRUD product, it is likely that a new AI oriented workflow is coming for you. Investors in private markets can see this now and think that money to fund short term growth will not be rewarded. Investors in public markets no longer believe long term profitability is possible. They would rather pivot into something they think is more resilient. This is a change in the risk calculus that has existed for the past 15 years and why the chart below is the chart below. Good luck to all the players!

Thanks to new cryptography, we developed a DA product that hit 1Terabit/s in blockspace throughput. This enables new kinds of onchain markets that weren't possible before, not just crypto trading. 1 tps for every human on earth.

Introducing Fibre: 1Tb/s of blockspace

Introducing Fibre: 1Tb/s of blockspace