Unto wants to 10x Solana’s performance — but no promises
Liam Heeger was a core Solana Firedancer developer. Now, he’s building his own L1.
Kopti Color/Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks
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Liam Heeger spent two years as a core engineer for Firedancer, the high-performance Solana client being written from scratch by Jump. In January, Heeger announced he had left Jump to create his own layer-1 blockchain called Unto. The next day, news broke that Jump was suing Heeger for violating his non-compete agreement by working on a new high-performance blockchain.
Jump and Heeger settled the case in late February, so I was finally able to catch up with Heeger and get more details on Unto. In short, the layer-1 will architect a new virtual machine to try and improve on Solana’s performance by an order of magnitude.
“We tend to agree with [Multicoin Capital managing partner] Kyle Samani. Incremental performance improvements don’t matter,” Unto co-founder Will Yoo said. “So we’re gonna need a 10x to be relevant.”
Heeger agreed, but added that he’s “not making any promises.”
Heeger helped push Solana’s virtual machine closer to its limits with Firedancer, but he isn’t building on the SVM partly because Solana “made a lot of design choices that they pivoted on really quickly,” he said. Unto plans to spend a lot of time designing the blockchain before beginning the coding process so that it can avoid some of these same forced pivots.
For that, Unto will likely have to raise more cash at some point. The San Francisco-based startup raised $2.5 million in seed funding from Framework Ventures. Jump’s lawsuit says the raise came at a $50 million valuation.
Heeger didn’t get too specific on how Unto’s new VM might look, but he said it won’t use either traditional proof-of-work or proof-of-stake 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 said.
Heeger also pointed out that in single leader based networks like Ethereum and Solana, the leader has a monopoly on blockspace for as long as they are producing a block. This is undesirable, and competition among block producers would lead to a better user experience, he added.
In any event, it doesn’t sound like Unto plans to do much media and BD in the near future. Over talking numbers or hiring KOLs, the layer-1 is looking to hire additional engineers and wants to prioritize getting some version of its virtual machine in front of people.
“The roadmap is we want to ship stuff,” Heeger said.
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