It’s hard to keep up with the technical evolution of crypto, but one thing hasn’t changed much: blockchain applications are notoriously difficult to build. This is partly due to their decentralized nature, resulting in a lack of uniform standards across different pieces of infrastructure.
Initia, founded by a group of developers in the late 20s, is trying to bring more interoperability to multi-chain networks and simplify the process of building blockchains or application chains for specific applications. Popular home blockchains such as Ethereum and Bitcoin have captured the attention of most users, but application chains have emerged recently to provide developers with more freedom in customization, such as financial and governance structures.
This fragmentation of the blockchain landscape creates a lot of friction for users, who have to deal with different types of gas fees (imagine having to pay in JPY, USD, and EUR just to use different functions in an app), wallets (imagine asked to connect PayPal, Apple Pay and WeChat Pay in one app) and explorers (and imagine opening Firefox, Safari and Chrome for different tasks in the same app).
“This becomes 10x worse when you move assets between blockchains,” Initia co-founder Ezaan Mangalji, who goes by “Zon,” told TechCrunch.
For example, the stablecoin USDC can have different versions on the same chain, such as bUSDC, USDCet, and USDCso, because it has been “transferred to that chain through different X, Y, Z paths or bridges,” Mangalji explained. “One of the great parts of Initia is that in the multi-chain world all assets are fungible, so in this example there will only be one type of USDC on potentially thousands of application-specific blockchains.”
Similarly, developers must jump through many hoops as they build chains together. While there have been efforts like aggregations that work to improve efficiency and scalability in blockchains by removing sets of validators, the method can “exacerbate fragmentation and is inflexible or inflexible for developers,” Mangalji said.
Meanwhile, Cosmos, another solution that addresses blockchain’s scaling problem, is “very flexible” but not easy to operate. “Each Cosmos chain is a level 1 blockchain that requires a set of validators and requires teams to pay for security by giving rewards to those validators,” noted the founder.
Initia, according to Mangalji, helps overcome both of these challenges by providing a Layer 1 blockchain network built specifically to enable an L2 aggregation system, where these aggregations can easily reach scale and dominance, and each has the Cosmos SDK underneath for full flexibility.
In general, Initia removes the technical complexity of application chains, aiming to make them friendlier to both end users and application developers.
“I think the ultimate goal is to build thousands and tens of thousands of applications in crypto, on web3, and specifically on Initia, without knowing that it’s a crypto project,” said Initia’s other co-founder, Stan Liu. “What we want to do is provide the Apple App Store so that thousands of users have really easy access to these apps.”
Initia recently raised $7.5 million in seed funding to work on the testnet launch. Led by Delphi Ventures and HackVC, the investment marks a fairly significant injection amid the current slowdown in crypto fundraising. Other investors from the round are Nascent, Figment Capital, Big Brain and A.Capital.
When Liu and Mangalji decided to create a crypto startup together in 2022, they started in a different direction: decentralized finance, or DeFi. They stopped the project after the collapse of FTX and eventually changed their way to work on the blockchain infrastructure. Mangalji explained the motivation behind the pivot:
“We realized that in all these downfalls, the problems with current blockchains, since we were trying to build one ourselves, [was] with the fragmentation that occurs for both users and developer complexity,” he said. “So we basically worked together to create this vision of Initia now, which makes a lot of these parts in-house by creating the right glue that joins the modular stacks together.”
Headquartered in Singapore, Initia operates a team of 20 people around the world. The startup plans to spend its new funding on growing its ecosystem, further developing its chain and platform, and supporting Layer 2 applications.
