Interview with Altius Co-founder: How does Altius make all blockchains "Solana-level" performance?

_ Guests: Anit Chakraborty, co-founder and CTO of Altius, former engineer of Hudson River Trading_

Annabelle Huang, Co-founder and CEO of Altius, former managing partner of Amber Group

Interview compilation : Riley, ChainCatcher

Recently, crypto infrastructure project Altius announced the completion of a US$11 million Pre-Seed round of financing, attracting widespread attention from the industry. ChainCatcher exclusively interviewed Annabelle Huang and Anit Chakraborty, co-founders of the project, and shared in-depth professional history and Altius' technical architecture and vision.

It is revealed that Altius is developing a modular execution layer stack that aims to provide high-performance execution support for various public and application chains. The unique feature of this technology is that developers can obtain high throughput and low latency transaction execution capabilities without modifying existing code, which is especially suitable for high-frequency trading and DeFi derivatives and other application scenarios that require extremely high execution efficiency.

Annabelle Huang emphasized in the interview that Altius is not creating another high-performance public chain, but hopes to significantly reduce the infrastructure investment cost of developers through the "execution layer as a service" model. At present, the project has entered the stage of key technology verification, is undergoing integration testing with multiple EVM ecosystems, and plans to launch a shared execution layer network in 2025.

ChainCatcher: Can you share your personal experience and professional background, as well as your current responsibilities and work content at Altius? What prompted you to decide to commit to creating a completely new crypto infrastructure project?

Annabelle Huang : I am Annabelle, CEO and co-founder of Altius. I started to get involved in cryptocurrencies around 2018, when I left my career in traditional finance and participated in the construction of the early DeFi project AirSwap (an early DEX of Consensys) in New York. Building DeFi was a pretty interesting journey, and I later moved from New York to Hong Kong to focus on bringing more liquidity to the chain, but it was very tough and it was still challenging as the infrastructure was not ready yet. Market makers were still studying the system of centralized exchanges at that time, and they didn't know much about on-chain trading or decentralized trading. By chance, I met the founding team of Amber Group, who is from the same traditional financial background , in Hong Kong and decided to work together to build Amber Group into a leading liquidity provider for centralized exchanges and decentralized trading venues.

Now, Amber Group offers not only secondary market transactions, but also venture capital and incubation services. After 6 years of building Amber into a mature platform, I decided to leave last year and focus on building Altius to solve the gap in the next generation of infrastructure and bring more basic functions (not only DeFi but also various other applications) to the chain.

Anit Chakraborty : I am Anit Chakraborty, co-founder and chief technology officer of Altius, and I worked for Hudson River Trading, one of the world’s top high-frequency trading companies. I am the 12th employee of the company, where I invested a lot of time in researching high-performance computing and distributed systems – a field that has been my interest from university to graduate school.

This job is very cool and the company is very successful. We constantly challenged the limits of the most cutting-edge technologies at the time and developed various algorithmic models that could operate in real markets. After working there for 14 years, I accumulated some savings and decided to stop for a while and spend more time with my family. It was at this time that I came to me with a mutual friend of Annabelle (my colleague at Hudson River Trading, an Annabelle CMU alumnus) who felt my skills at Hudson River Trading were suitable for solving some of the problems with blockchain and infrastructure.

Later, he introduced that Annabelle and I met. After in-depth exchanges, we found that we had a highly consistent vision in blockchain high-performance infrastructure. Blockchain and infrastructure problems have always existed, and the situation will only become increasingly difficult in the future. Given Annabelle's professional background and my experience in the field of distributed systems, we all think it's perfect for us to try to solve this problem.

ChainCatcher: What is Altius 's market positioning and long-term vision? What industry pain points do you hope to solve? Can you share the background and industry experience of the team members?

Annabelle Huang : The first pain point, I think this pain point is actually quite common - everyone in this field should have a deep understanding of it at some stage. First of all, from the perspective of adoption rate, although we have been discussing the popularization of on-chain applications and witnessing the possibility of various new basic applications being implemented on blockchain, there is still a huge gap between the current user experience of Web3 and the standards that the massive Web2 users are accustomed to.

So, what infrastructure gaps do we really want to bridge? The answer to this question is largely due to my work experience in the DeFi field. While our trading background does provide a unique perspective for this, the most fundamental pain points always revolve around the two core issues of performance and cost. Take Hudson River Trading as an example (and other high-frequency trading platforms are the same) - the primary reason why they do not adopt on-chain transactions on a large scale is that existing blockchains simply cannot meet the performance standards required for high-frequency trading. The delay level we are discussing here is not second or even millisecond level, but needs to reach nanosecond level or even more extreme levels. This naturally leads to a key proposition: how can we achieve this level of performance on blockchain?

It was based on these thoughts that I began to conceive the form of the next generation of infrastructure— when the industry no longer needs to expand the block space by simply increasing the number of chains, what Altius has to do is to build a high-performance foundation layer for the entire industry. Our focus is not on blind expansion, but on deeply optimizing the utilization of existing block spaces through technological innovation, especially those dedicated block spaces. At the same time, we are also exploring how to fundamentally improve the execution efficiency of on-chain transactions through the breakthrough design of distributed systems.

In the long run, what Altius really wants to build is to enable any application developer who needs customized infrastructure to achieve cutting-edge performance at the execution level. This way they can focus on what really matters – building applications, developing ecosystems, driving user adoption. And our mission is to help them build a future-oriented blockchain infrastructure that can stand the test of time.

As far as the current team composition is concerned, we are still in the early stages and are not large in scale, but most of the members have a deep engineering background. Some of these members have worked with Anit at Hudson River Trading, and most of the employees are experts in the field of distributed systems. Through the new round of financing, we have also introduced executive members responsible for growth. We are always striving to build a comprehensive and diverse team: to overcome complex technical challenges and ensure effective market entry strategies so that our technical solutions can be truly delivered to every developer who needs it.

ChainCatcher: Because most of your teams come from high-frequency trading companies, most of these companies have a very high-intensity working environment. Will Altius also speed up, expand rapidly in a short period of time or even reach industry leadership?

Annabelle Huang : High-frequency trading is actually a very professional sub-sector. The high-frequency trading team has invested a lot of energy to optimize every link and every layer of the technology stack, just to pursue extreme performance. This also explains why there are so many engineers and traders from high-frequency trading backgrounds in the cryptocurrency industry solving complex problems. But I would like to add another point: it is very difficult for application developers to maintain machine-level leading performance standards - the amount of resources and time spent is simply unrealistic. This is like requiring every startup to build its own physical data center to host services instead of using AWS directly.

The problem we want to solve and the value we provide is that we empower our expertise in high-performance systems to application developers so that any blockchain project that needs continuous expansion can immediately obtain this capability.

ChainCatcher: On February 18, Altius announced that it had completed a US$11 million Pre-Seed round of financing, led by Founders Fund and Pantera Capital, and received investment support from many well-known institutions such as Archetype, DCG, No Limit Holdings and Amber Group. Why do you think Altius can attract the favor of these top investment institutions? What valuable resources and support do these investment institutions provide to Altius?

Annabelle Huang : As a former investor, I can probably understand what early investors usually focus on. First of all, product direction is crucial at this stage - what we need to solve must be the general pain points of the industry, such as: How to achieve large-scale adoption? How to improve Web3 user experience (UI/UX) and liquidity fragmentation issues? When there are so many different chains on the market, what chain should users use?

At the heart of Altius is to optimize and solve performance problems. But more importantly, I think the qualities of early teams are the key - in this rapidly iterative crypto industry, team acuity and execution are more important than anything else.

I'm lucky to have worked with several funds during the Amber Group period - we led the GPs Joey and Paul of Founders Fund and Pantera Capital. I have known each other since the early financing stage of Amber Group and have been working for many years. I think this trust is two-way—the trust of investors in the Altius team, and Altius also believes that they will fully support Altius' development. In terms of resources and support, different types of investors provide different types of help - large funds have a complete platform team that provides us with all-round support in the early stages of their business; in addition, our institutional investors and angel investors have also provided a lot of personal support, such as assisting us in formulating development strategies, guiding market entry strategies, sharing in-depth insights on the latest industry trends, and introducing founders and teams worth communicating - these support has irreplaceable value.

ChainCatcher: As you mentioned earlier, Altius will focus on optimizing the performance of the execution layer. So in the current environment, what do you think will be the most important application scenarios or use cases for this high-performance execution layer?

Annabelle Huang: I think it can be divided into two major application scenarios. First are existing projects on Layer1 and Layer2, which have an urgent need to continuously optimize execution layer performance in order to provide better support for their ecosystem. Solana is a good example. It significantly improves the user experience by improving performance. Whether it is trading meme coins or other operations, users can directly feel the improvement in on-chain efficiency. Our goal is to push this performance optimization to a higher level and provide upgrade solutions for all public chains with such needs.

The second type of application scenarios mainly come from application developers. Based on our professional background in the field of trading, the most promising application direction is the various basic agreements in the field of DeFi. These protocols are extremely sensitive to performance metrics, and our solutions can bring significant performance improvements to them, including higher throughput, lower latency, and better cost structures, which will jointly enable higher frequency of on-chain transactions.

Anit Chakraborty: When we communicate with potential partners, or when we talk to people at some industry conferences, we often hear a common pain point: either the execution speed is too slow to become a bottleneck, or the database storage is so large that a single machine cannot bear it.

This actually responds to the previous discussion on industry pain points -imagine that if we can expand the system by simply adding hardware like AWS (which no blockchain can achieve at present), then we will enter a real cloud service model. Take Netflix as an example. When popular episodes require more resources, they can directly expand capacity on AWS or Google Cloud. Adding one machine can achieve a 100% capacity increase. This linear scaling capability is exactly the innovation direction we want to introduce into the blockchain field.

The actual dilemma facing the industry is: What should I do when your state database reaches the storage limit? The congestion problem of Ethereum is well known, and many Layer2 projects are also facing this bottleneck. There is currently no solution on the market. Our goal is to enable developers to solve problems simply like using cloud services - need more storage? Just add a machine to AWS.

In this way, both Layer1 and Layer2 developers and application builders can focus on their core innovations without being distracted by the scalability of the underlying infrastructure. Leaving these technical problems to us is the value Altius wants to bring.

ChainCatcher: In the crypto industry, "how to improve the efficiency of the execution layer" has always been a hot topic. In recent years, such as Monad, Sei, etc., have proposed the concept of parallel EVM. Altius also focuses on the optimization of the execution layer. What are its uniqueness and advantages? Compared with these parallel EVM projects, what different technical paths or strategies does Altius adopt to achieve better performance improvements?

Annabelle Huang: In addition to the technical differences, I think the most fundamental difference lies in the differences in core concepts. We are not going to create another universal high-performance single chain to monopolize the market, but we are committed to helping specific application chains and public chains that really need to expand their capabilities - so that they do not have to invest huge resources in underlying optimization like other high-performance public chains.

The most critical difference is that instead of creating a new high-speed chain, we hope to achieve the same or even better speed performance for applications that really require performance. Obviously, this way of providing high performance with modular solutions (rather than building a single full-stack blockchain) will greatly increase the complexity of technical design. But from the perspective of design principles and core philosophy, this is exactly what makes us the biggest difference from other projects.

Anit Chakraborty: My point of view is exactly the same - Altius is not about building a closed ecosystem, nor is it about building its own blockchain. As you mentioned before, we adopt the idea of ​​distributed systems to achieve capacity expansion by adding nodes, which is the mainstream development direction in the current high-performance computing field. But as I said, this solution is almost non-existent in the blockchain industry at present.

Can others do this too? Of course, in theory. But this requires a set of professional and technical capabilities that are currently scarce in the industry. Our goal is to introduce these expertise into the blockchain field, allowing developers to use this solution directly without having to worry about scaling - and to achieve better results than existing solutions.

ChainCatcher: What specific feature support do developers expect when they try to build high-performance applications with your services? At present, have you formulated corresponding response plans for these needs? Or have these functional plans been incorporated into your product development roadmap?

Anit Chakraborty: In fact, I think many teams deal with this problem in a slightly different way, but generally the same. The theory of parallel transaction processing has existed for decades - after all, database technology has been developing for 50 years, so many content in this area is quite mature, and there is actually not much innovation that everyone can do. Because of this, we are actually very similar to many other teams.

However, we did try to introduce some ideas of distributed systems. First, we hope to integrate all cache policies into this system. Second, we are looking at how to reduce the processing time when transaction conflicts, because this is one of the most critical issues in parallel execution.

What we are doing now is based on the work of the Paradigm team – they have developed a very good product in Rust. We expanded on this basis and adopted some of their modules. Since we are able to leverage their framework to implement these features, Rust is already our preferred solution. In the future, we will also port it to other virtual machine technologies.

But as I mentioned before, there is a small problem like storage or state management - these are modules that we develop independently of Rust and can be integrated with other systems. As for how to integrate, that is the problem that other teams need to solve. For example, our parallel execution module and state management module are completely decoupled. We designed this specifically so that the virtual machine can choose to use only one of them, or both.

ChainCatcher: In the field of modular facilities, Celestia is regarded as a leading modular project with the positioning of "data available DA layer", while Altius is a new project with the "modular execution layer". Have you borrowed this term from Celestia? Or did their philosophy really inspire or inspire your construction direction?

Annabelle Huang: I think modularity was introduced as a concept, in contrast to monomer design, which is not what we claim to be the first or only thing we explore. Obviously, I think Celestia and a lot of related research have done a lot of work to promote the concept of modular design and monolithic design. We are definitely inspired in many ways. But it must be clarified that modularity, as a basic concept, has a far greater ideological origin than a single project. As you have accurately pointed out, the core value of Celestia lies in the modular innovation of the data available DA layer, while our technology path focuses on execution layer optimization in the blockchain technology stack.

ChainCatcher: In the field of modular execution layer, the Fuel project is also attracting much attention. What are the differences between Altius compared to Fuel? What are the unique advantages of Altius? How do these advantages bring substantial value to users and application developers?

Annabelle Huang: I have known the Fuel team for a long time and have witnessed the evolution of their technical architecture several iterations. It can be said that we did get some inspiration from their early designs, but the most fundamental difference is that Fuel chooses to build its own virtual machine - Fuel VM. And I think any solution that attempts to introduce a new virtual machine (VM), a new development framework or a new programming language will face huge challenges in developer adoption. This has been verified in Cairo's StarkWare and other similar cases. Even the popularization of Rust language in the blockchain field has gone through a long process.

The reason why Fuel's solution is more challenging is that it requires developers to fully adapt to a brand new virtual machine architecture and development experience, which sets a high entry barrier from the initial stage.

In contrast, our design philosophy is to maintain compatibility with existing virtual machines. We will not ask developers to change their existing development methods, nor do we need them to learn new programming languages ​​or adapt to new design paradigms. Developers can continue to write smart contracts in the familiar EVM model. While we will provide incentives to encourage them to learn more efficient coding methods, this is by no means mandatory – for EVM developers, we can still use our technology stack seamlessly if they don’t want to make any changes.

This cognition is particularly important. Even if it is turning to solutions like SVM or MoveVM, developers must declare in advance what storage addresses the contract will access in the code, which is a major change for engineers who are accustomed to the EVM development model. Our goal is to bring parallel execution and performance optimization to any branch technology stack without changing the developer experience - without requiring developers to learn new languages, and they also need to adjust existing technology stacks.

ChainCatcher: According to the official roadmap disclosed by Altius, the Altius Stack execution layer stack plans to achieve integration of EVM-compatible Layer1 and Layer2 networks in Q1 this year; expand compatibility to multiple virtual machines in the second quarter (Q2); and launch the shared execution layer Altius Stack in the fourth quarter (Q4). Can we elaborate on the specific significance of the following key route nodes?

Annabelle Huang: We initially chose EVM compatibility as the entry point, mainly taking into account the current market share and activity of the EVM chain. By prioritizing EVM optimization, we are able to demonstrate the greatest performance improvement in this area. Therefore, we decided to solve the EVM problem first.

After that, we will continue to study how to extend compatibility with other virtual machines while integrating with the EVM chain. This part of the work will be interesting. Our core goal is always to support all blockchains that require high performance, including those that are based on non-EVM custom technology stacks.

It is worth mentioning that our Altius framework design does not rely entirely on EVM semantics. With a modular interpreter design, we can extend compatibility to other virtual machines, which is also an advantage we want to take full advantage. In the subsequent roadmap, we also plan to integrate the execution instance levels of different chains into a shared execution layer, focusing on improving cross-chain interoperability. This will be the key task in the second phase. At present, cross-chain asset transfer and transaction execution efficiency are generally not high, and we hope to directly solve these problems at the execution level.

ChainCatcher: How is the development progress of Altius at present? What difficulties and challenges have you encountered in the process of advancing? And how to overcome these challenges?

Anit: As mentioned earlier, our system is mainly composed of several core modules: parallel execution module, storage module, etc. Each module itself is not very difficult to design, they are relatively independent units. Moreover, we have clear ideas on implementation solutions and the development progress is also good.

At present, the biggest problem is how to seamlessly integrate these modules into existing systems. Because as I said, these execution layer technologies on the market now, whether they are Reth or Arbitrum, their storage layer and execution layer are deeply bound. So for us, the most difficult part is to achieve architectural decoupling, and ensure compatibility with open source code libraries like Reth, while not destroying existing functions, and being able to cooperate perfectly with our own modules.

Speaking of the vision of shared execution layer, you can give an example. As an operator of an L2 chain, you may want to focus on business logic rather than worrying about server operation and maintenance, hardware failures or sudden traffic increases all day long. Our shared execution layer is to solve these problems so that users don’t have to worry about these underlying operations and maintenance.

In addition, we can automatically scale resources according to our needs. For example, an NFT casting event will be held on the chain, and the transaction volume will definitely increase soar. You can temporarily expand in advance and shrink back when the event is over, without having to pay high fees all the time. Or when the system load reaches 99%, we can automatically help you expand capacity. You don’t have to consider these complex issues of operation and maintenance at all, just leave them to us to deal with. This is the value of the service we want to provide.

ChainCatcher: Can the community expect some extra surprises be expected in addition to planning on the roadmap? Such as airdrop activities or other benefits. Is it worth waiting for some important progress beyond the roadmap this year? Or, are there some major plans that have not been announced yet?

Annabelle Huang: Next, you will hear news about our integration with more ecological partners, which is worth keeping attention in this regard. In addition, we are still in the early stages of community building and hope to allow the community to grow with us from the beginning. We are planning various ambassador plans and community co-building solutions to enable the developer community and partner ecosystem to develop in a coordinated manner. This is definitely the direction we focus on.

We plan to announce our early ambassador program soon – this is just the first part of the community program. For early community members and developers, we will release more technical content, including internal R&D technical achievements and performance testing tools. Developers are welcome to try and provide feedback.

We would like to understand what specific application scenarios the community and investors are most looking forward to seeing, so that we can focus more on promoting the development of specific use cases and carry out in-depth cooperation with relevant partners. Although the project is still in its early stages, I believe everyone will see more details soon.

ChainCatcher: During this bull market, we have observed a decrease in the number of successful launches of crypto infrastructure projects, while users’ demand for applications is increasing. At the same time, the number of public chain infrastructure is increasing, which has led to a dilemma of more chains than applications. How do you view this phenomenon? In the future, what do you think the development trend of crypto infrastructure will be like?

Annabelle Huang: This is one of the important reasons why we use modular design in Altius instead of building another universal L1/L2. The current blockchain industry is indeed facing a current situation: the number of public chains has exceeded the number of actual applications.

I think the industry development is undergoing an important transformation -from blindly pursuing underlying protocol development to truly valuable application implementation. Although there are still many shortcomings in the infrastructure layer, the solution is by no means continuing to introduce new general blockchains or block spaces. Instead, we should focus on dedicated solutions for specific scenarios and develop targeted applications that truly meet user needs, rather than simply issuing chains and coins.

The market and users in this field have become significantly mature, and what users need are proven real use cases with sustainable business models. This is exactly the development philosophy that Altius adheres to: we are not building another infrastructure layer for our own purposes; we are building solutions for specific pain points and specific needs, committed to solving real problems, rather than creating technologies without actual needs.

ChainCatcher: Although modular public chains such as Celestia once attracted much attention, their popularity seems to have declined recently. Many people argue in Ethereum that Layer2 has snatched the transaction volume of the main chain. Even Vitalik has repeatedly proposed the concept of "ZK Rollup" from last year to this year, calling on Layer2 to return economic benefits and transaction fees to the main chain, and adopt a more decentralized and credible economic model. How do you view the future development trend of modularization? How will modular technology further affect the pattern and ecology of the encryption industry?

Annabelle Huang: This is not necessarily a problem with modularity or modular technology, but a challenge related to business model and value capture. That's a separate topic and we can spend hours discussing it. However, with regard to modular design – while I may be biased – I firmly believe in its advantages. Single chains often find it difficult to meet the customized needs of diversified applications within the ecosystem.

Solana is great, I personally like it, but it may also encounter growth pains similar to Ethereum's experience back then - it was very smooth at the beginning, but with the explosive growth of applications, problems such as gas fees and transaction success rate will be highlighted when the main network is congested, which is exactly why we need different expansion plans. If Solana continues to maintain this growth trend, I think it will eventually face the same monolithic chain bottleneck problem.

From a technical perspective, the real challenge is: how to achieve modularity without sacrificing user experience and not causing liquidity fragmentation? And this is the core problem that Altius needs to solve.