Liam Heeger was a core developer for Firedancer – the Jump Solana client that is being built from scratch. He spent 2 years in this role. Heeger left Jump in January to start his own layer-1 Blockchain called Unto. Next day, Jump filed a lawsuit against Heeger because he violated his non-compete contract by creating a high-performance Blockchain.
Jump and Heeger closed the case at the end of February. So I had a chance to finally catch up with Heeger, and find out more about Unto. The layer-1 is going to architect a virtual machine that will try and outperform Solana by an order-of magnitude.
“We tend to agree with [Multicoin Capital managing partner] Kyle Samani. Incremental performance improvements don’t matter,” Will Yoo’s co-founder said. “So we’re gonna need a 10x to be relevant.”
Heeger said that’s true, but added he was still adamant. “not making any promises.”
Heeger pushed Solana’s virtual machine to the limit with Firedancer. But he won’t be building on SVM, partly because Solana isn’t interested. “made a lot of design choices that they pivoted on really quickly,” He said. Unto will spend considerable time on the design of the blockchain prior to beginning the coding phase, in order to avoid these forced pivots.
Unto is likely to need more money in the future. Framework Ventures raised $2.5 Million in seed financing for the San Francisco-based company. Jump’s suit claims the money was raised with a value of $50,000,000.
Heeger was not specific about the new Unto VM, but he did say that neither proof-ofwork nor proof of stake will be used for consensus. The chain will use a globally distributed validator set, so it will appear similarly to PoS — which is what Ethereum and Solana use for consensus — but Heeger aims to create something different.
“The key issue with proof-of-stake is that it incentivizes operators purely on increasing and maintaining their stake rather than the performance of the network and being an effective operator,” Heeger stated.
Heeger pointed out also that single-leader networks such as Ethereum and Solana have a leader who has the monopoly of blockspace as long as he is producing a new block. Heeger said that this is not desirable, as competition between block producers will lead to better user experiences.
Unto doesn’t seem to have any plans for media and BD. The layer-1 wants to focus on hiring more engineers, rather than talking about numbers or hiring key opinion leaders. It also prioritizes getting a version of the virtual machine to people.
“The roadmap is we want to ship stuff,” Heeger stated.
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