Blockchain
Modular blockchain startup Astria has secured $5.5 million in its newest seed funding spherical led by Maven 11.
The mission goals to alleviate censorship issues generally confronted by budding blockchain networks with what’s often called “shared sequencing.” Different traders who participated within the spherical embody 1kx, Delphi Ventures and Lemniscap.
There’s two dominant blockchain architectures in crypto right now: monolithic and modular. Astria needs to assist decentralize the latter.
Fashionable networks Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana are monolithic blockchains. This implies one blockchain is designed to deal with all companies, together with executing transactions, ordering knowledge and verifying data.
Modular structure is designed in order that totally different duties are cut up between a number of blockchains with particular areas of performance. This course of is usually often called sharding.
Every structure has professionals and cons. Monolithic blockchains are sometimes optimized for velocity or decentralization however lack scalability. Alternatively, modular blockchains can take a very long time to construct however are versatile and upgradable.
Sharing sequencers to keep away from centralization
Astria hopes to resolve an enormous downside that modular blockchains face: dependency on community members often called sequencers — who course of and order transactions in blocks able to be added to the chain.
Not like monolithic blockchains equivalent to Ethereum, the place sensible contract builders can depend on the blockchain’s validators to stay censorship-resistant, modular blockchains require their very own sequencers (as do rollups).
Current modular blockchains and rollups typically are solely in a position to make the most of a single sequencer to course of transactions, placing them liable to centralization.
“There are optimizations by batching transactions on the sequencer layer to the bottom layer, however the elementary tradeoff is working it as a centralized entity and we basically view that as antithetical to the purpose of crypto,” Josh Bowen, the CEO and founder at Astria, informed Blockworks.
As a shared sequencer community, Astria goals to assist builders deploy censorship-resistant rollups.
“The important thing innovation is the concept that the sequencing job, this ordering of transactions, might be separated from the duty of executing transactions,” Bowen mentioned.
Completely different to Cosmos’ interchain safety
Astria’s community is to not be confused with shared safety options carried out on Cosmos.
Cosmos’ “interchain safety” (also called “replicated safety”) differs in that shared validators have the ability to execute transactions. Astria’s shared sequencers solely orders the transactions able to be processed.
“Which means Astria’s sequencers don’t retailer the state of any rollups, permitting the community to offer ordering for an arbitrarily massive variety of distinct rollups,” Bowen mentioned.
“Cosmos Hub’s replicated safety requires Hub validators to execute transactions for client chains, so each new client chain will increase the useful resource necessities for the validators.”
Astria is at present creating “Astria EVM,” a rollup backed by its shared sequencer community. Astria EVM — or Ethereum virutal machine — would be the principal EVM inside Celestia’s knowledge availability cluster, bringing liquidity into the hub, the corporate mentioned.
“We’re seeing increasingly more traction on rollups, which is clearly according to the modular thesis that we’re advocates of, ” Balder Bomans, common accomplice at Maven 11, mentioned in an announcement.
“The shared community could have sturdy censorship resistance and supply simple deployment of rollups on a shared liquidity layer — whereas retaining native interoperability between the rollups.”
