It’s tricky to measure crypto’s technological growth, but blockchain applications are still hard to construct. Decentralization causes a lack of common standards among infrastructure parts.
Initia, formed by late-20s engineers, aims to improve multichain network interoperability and ease app-specific blockchain creation. Most consumers have heard of Ethereum and Bitcoin, but app chains have developed to provide developers with greater control over economic and governance systems.
Users face a lot of friction due to the fragmentation of the blockchain landscape, including gas fees (imagine paying in JPY, USD, and EUR to use different features in an app), wallets (imagine connecting PayPal, Apple Pay, and WeChat Pay to one app), and explorers.
According to Initia co-founder Ezaan Mangalji, known as “Zon,” moving assets across blockchains makes this 10x worse.
Because USDC has been “transferred to that chain over X, Y, and Z different paths or bridges,” Mangalji added, it might have several versions on the same chain, such as bUSDC, USDCet, and USDCso. One of the amazing things about Initia is that all assets are fungible across multichains, so there would only be one USDC across thousands of app-specific blockchains.
Developers building across chains must also jump through several hoops. Roll-ups may “exacerbate fragmentation and are rigid or inflexible for developers,” Mangalji added, while improving blockchain efficiency and scalability by eliminating validator sets.
Cosmos, another blockchain scaling option, is “very flexible” but difficult to manage. “Each Cosmos chain is a Layer 1 blockchain that requires a validator set and requires teams to pay for security by rewarding validators,” the creator said.
Mangalji claims that Initia’s Layer 1 blockchain network allows L2 rollups to quickly expand and gain sovereignty, with the Cosmos SDK underlying it for complete flexibility.
Initia abstracts app chains’ technological complexity to make them more user- and developer-friendly.
Initia co-founder Stan Liu stated, “I think the ultimate goal is to have thousands and tens of thousands of applications being built on crypto, in Web3, and specifically on Initia, without knowing that this is a crypto project.” “We want to provide the Apple App Store so thousands of users can easily access these applications.”
Initia got $7.5 million in initial funding for its testnet launch. Delphi Ventures and HackVC led the large seed round despite the crypto funding slump. Nascent, Figment Capital, Big Brain, and A. Capital also invested.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) was Liu and Mangalji’s 2022 crypto startup focus. They suspended the project following FTX’s collapse and switched to blockchain infrastructure. Mangalji stated the pivot’s purpose:
“We realized that during all these downturns, the problems with current blockchains, given that we had been trying to make one ourselves, were user fragmentation and developer complexity,” he added. So we paired up again to carry out Initia’s idea, which is making a lot of these elements in-house by making the necessary adhesive to assemble modular stacks.
Initia has 20 employees worldwide and is headquartered in Singapore. The business will invest its additional capital in ecosystem growth, chain and platform development, and Layer 2 applications.
