Conduit
By Chris Ahn
We’re excited to share that Haun Ventures is co-leading the Series A in Conduit alongside Paradigm, with participation from Robot Ventures, Credibly Neutral, Coinbase Ventures, Bankless Ventures, and angels.
Blockchains enable transparent financial markets, verifiable information, open developer platforms, and new social applications among other use cases. However, they have historically been limited by scalability. For example, as DeFi and NFTs took off in 2021, transaction costs surged as users competed with each other to have their transactions included on a finite amount of blockspace. The result was prohibitively expensive transactions and a poor experience for users, most of whom were new to blockchain applications.
Reliable and secure blockspace that can scale with the increase in demand is critical for additional use cases to blossom. In late 2020, rollups emerged as the architectural answer to the scalability challenge in Ethereum. Since then, rollups on Ethereum have grown rapidly and now process 18x as many transactions as Ethereum L1, and most new applications are now deploying on rollups.
However, rollups are constantly improving, and they can be cumbersome to maintain in production. Just in the last year, the OP Stack upgraded to Bedrock and enabled permissionless fault proofs, Arbitrum released Stylus, and Ethereum introduced data blobs through EIP-4844. Beyond Ethereum, Celestia launched as the first DA specific network, with others like EigenDA and Avail also soon to launch. Simultaneously, developers are also starting to customize rollups to suit their specific needs. In short: we’re seeing a combinatorial explosion in the choices and requirements around rollups.
Conduit makes it easier for any developer to launch a rollup and run it in production. Like what AWS did for servers, Conduit simplifies launching a rollup into a few clicks and scales with an application as it grows. Despite being founded less than two years ago, the company already supports 287 different rollups, helps secure over $1.2bn in TVL, and processes 20% of transactions across all of Ethereum.
Conduit earned the trust of many developers thanks to its expertise in building highly performant, reliable systems at scale. The company is led by Andrew Huang, who studied distributed systems at MIT and helped scale Wish’s infrastructure to 2 billion users globally. Andrew also led product and engineering at Quill, which was later acquired by Twitter. Andrew is joined by 14 teammates from Meta, Brex, Wish, Compound, ImmuneFi, Amazon, and Paradigm that apply their devops expertise from web2 to the bleeding edge of crypto.
We’re excited to support Conduit in their mission to scale Ethereum and enable even more blockchain use cases. Welcome Conduit!
