Guests: Anit Chakraborty, Co-founder and CTO of Altius, former engineer at Hudson River Trading

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

Interview Organized by: Riley, ChainCatcher

Recently, the crypto infrastructure project Altius announced the completion of a $11 million Pre-Seed funding round, attracting widespread attention in the industry. ChainCatcher exclusively interviewed the project's co-founders Annabelle Huang and Anit Chakraborty, who shared in-depth insights about their personal career journeys, as well as Altius's technical architecture and vision.

It was revealed that Altius is developing a modular execution layer stack aimed at providing high-performance execution support for various public chains and application chains. The uniqueness of this technology lies in the fact that developers can achieve high throughput and low latency transaction execution capabilities without modifying existing code, making it particularly suitable for high-frequency trading, DeFi derivatives, and other applications that demand high execution efficiency.

In the interview, Annabelle Huang emphasized that Altius is not creating another high-performance public chain, but rather aims to significantly reduce the infrastructure investment costs for developers through a "Layer as a Service" model. Currently, the project has entered a critical technology validation phase, integrating testing with multiple EVM ecosystem chains, and plans to launch a shared execution layer network in 2025.

ChainCatcher: Can you share a bit about your personal experiences and professional background, as well as your current responsibilities and work at Altius? What motivated you to embark on creating a brand new crypto infrastructure project?

Annabelle Huang: I am Annabelle, the CEO and co-founder of Altius. I started getting involved in cryptocurrency around 2018 when I left my career in traditional finance to participate in early DeFi projects in New York, specifically building AirSwap (an early DEX under Consensys). Building DeFi was quite an interesting journey, and later I moved from New York to Hong Kong to focus on bringing more liquidity on-chain, which was very challenging due to the infrastructure not being ready yet. At that time, market makers were still studying centralized exchange systems and were not very familiar with on-chain or decentralized trading. By chance, I met the founding team of Amber Group in Hong Kong, who also came from traditional finance backgrounds, and we decided to work together to make Amber Group a leading liquidity provider for both centralized exchanges and decentralized trading venues.

Now, Amber Group not only provides secondary market trading but also offers venture capital and incubation services. After six years of building Amber into a mature platform, I decided to leave last year to focus on establishing Altius to address the infrastructure gap for the next generation and bring more foundational functionalities (not just DeFi, but various other applications) on-chain.

Anit Chakraborty: I am Anit Chakraborty, the co-founder and CTO of Altius. I previously worked at Hudson River Trading, one of the world's top high-frequency trading firms, where I was the 12th employee. I spent a lot of time researching high-performance computing and distributed systems—areas that have been my interest since college and graduate school.

It was a very cool job, and the company was very successful. We constantly pushed the limits of cutting-edge technology at the time, developing various algorithmic models that could operate in real markets. After working there for 14 years, I accumulated some savings and decided to take a break to spend more time with my family. At that time, a mutual friend of Annabelle's (a colleague of mine at Hudson River Trading and Annabelle's CMU alumnus) reached out to me, believing that my skills from Hudson River Trading would be very applicable to solving some issues in blockchain and infrastructure.

Later, he introduced me to Annabelle, and after in-depth discussions, we found that we shared a highly aligned vision regarding high-performance infrastructure in blockchain. The issues in blockchain and infrastructure have always existed, and the situation will only become more challenging in the future. Considering Annabelle's professional background, combined with my experience in distributed systems, we both felt it was fitting 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 address? Can you share the backgrounds and industry experiences of your team members?

Annabelle Huang: The first pain point I believe is quite common—everyone in this field should have experienced it at some point. First, from the adoption rate perspective, while we have been discussing the popularization of on-chain applications and witnessing the possibilities of various new foundational applications on the blockchain, there remains a significant gap between the user experience of current Web3 and the standards that Web2 mass users are accustomed to.

So, what gaps in the infrastructure layer do we hope to bridge? The answer to this question largely stems from my work experience in the DeFi field. While our trading background indeed provides a unique perspective, the fundamental pain points always revolve around performance and cost. Take Hudson River Trading as an example (other high-frequency trading platforms are similar)—the primary reason they have not widely adopted on-chain trading is that existing blockchains simply cannot meet the performance standards required for high-frequency trading. The level of latency we are discussing is not in seconds or even milliseconds, but needs to reach nanoseconds or even more extreme levels. This naturally leads to a key proposition: how can we achieve this level of performance on the blockchain?

Based on these considerations, I began to envision the form of next-generation infrastructure—when the industry no longer needs to simply increase the number of chains to expand block space, Altius aims to establish a high-performance foundational layer for the entire industry. Our focus is not on blind expansion but on deeply optimizing the utilization of existing block space through technological innovation, especially for dedicated block space. At the same time, we are exploring how to fundamentally enhance the execution efficiency of on-chain transactions through breakthrough designs in distributed systems.

In the long run, what Altius truly wants to build is: allowing any application developer who needs customized infrastructure to achieve cutting-edge performance on the execution layer. This way, they can focus on what really matters—building applications, developing ecosystems, and driving user adoption. Our mission is to help them create future-proof blockchain infrastructure that stands the test of time.

As for the current team composition, we are still in the early stages and not very large, but most members have a strong engineering background. Some members have previously worked with Anit at Hudson River Trading, and most employees are experts in the field of distributed systems. Through the new round of financing, we have also brought in executive members responsible for growth. We are always striving to build a comprehensive and diverse team: tackling complex technical challenges while ensuring effective market entry strategies so that our technological solutions can truly reach every developer who needs them.

ChainCatcher: Since most of your team comes from high-frequency trading firms, which typically have very intense work environments, will Altius also accelerate its pace and rapidly expand to become an industry leader in a short time?

Annabelle Huang: High-frequency trading is actually a very specialized niche. High-frequency trading teams invest a lot of effort into optimizing every aspect and every layer of the tech stack, all in pursuit of 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 want to add another point: for application developers, maintaining machine-level leading performance standards continuously is very difficult—this requires an unrealistic amount of resources and time. It's like asking every startup to build their own physical data centers to host services instead of directly using AWS.

The problem we aim to solve and the value we provide is—we empower application developers with our expertise in high-performance systems, allowing any blockchain project that needs to scale continuously to immediately gain this capability.

ChainCatcher: On February 18, Altius announced that it had completed a $11 million Pre-Seed funding round, co-led by Founders Fund and Pantera Capital, with participation from several well-known institutions including Archetype, DCG, No Limit Holdings, and Amber Group. Why do you think Altius was able to attract the attention 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 somewhat understand what early investors typically focus on. First, at this stage, the product direction is crucial—we must address industry-wide pain points, such as: how to achieve large-scale adoption? How to improve the Web3 user experience (UI/UX) and the issue of liquidity fragmentation? When there are so many different chains in the market, which chain should users actually use?

The core of Altius is to optimize and solve performance issues. But more importantly, I believe the characteristics of the early team are key—in this rapidly iterating crypto industry, the team's sensitivity and execution capability are more important than anything else.

I was fortunate to have collaborated with several funds during my time at Amber Group—we have known GP Joey and Paul from Founders Fund and Pantera Capital since the early financing stages of Amber Group, and we have been working together for many years. I believe this trust is mutual—the investors' trust in the Altius team, and Altius's belief that they will fully support Altius's development. In terms of resources and support, different types of investors provide different types of help—large funds have well-established platform teams that provide comprehensive support for us in the early stages of entrepreneurship; in addition, our institutional investors and angel investors also provide a lot of personal support, such as assisting us in formulating development strategies, guiding market entry strategies, sharing deep insights into the latest industry trends, and introducing founders and teams worth connecting with—these supports are invaluable.

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

Annabelle Huang: I believe the main application scenarios can be divided into two major categories. The first category includes existing projects on Layer 1 and Layer 2 that have an urgent need to continuously optimize execution layer performance to better support their ecosystems. Solana is a great example; it has significantly improved user experience by enhancing performance, allowing users to directly feel the increase in on-chain efficiency whether trading meme coins or performing other operations. Our goal is to elevate this performance optimization to a higher level, providing upgrade solutions for all public chains with such needs.

The second category of application scenarios mainly comes from application developers. Based on our expertise in trading, the most promising application direction currently lies in various foundational protocols in the DeFi space. 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. These enhancements will collectively enable more frequent on-chain transactions.

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

This actually responds to the previous discussion about industry pain points—imagine if we could expand systems simply by adding hardware like AWS (which no blockchain can currently achieve), then we would enter a true cloud service model. Take Netflix as an example; when a popular series requires more resources, they can directly scale on AWS or Google Cloud. Adding one machine can yield a 100% capacity increase—this linear scalability is precisely the innovative direction we want to bring to the blockchain space.

The real dilemma facing the industry today is: what to do when your state database reaches its storage limit? The congestion issues on Ethereum are well-known, and many Layer 2 projects are also encountering this bottleneck. Currently, there are no solutions on the market. Our goal is to enable developers to solve problems as simply as using cloud services—need more storage? Just add a machine on AWS.

This way, whether developers of Layer 1, Layer 2, or application builders can focus on their core innovations without being distracted by scalability issues in the underlying infrastructure. Handing these technical challenges over to us is the value that Altius aims to deliver.

ChainCatcher: In the crypto industry, "how to improve the efficiency of the execution layer" has always been a hot topic. In recent years, concepts like parallel EVM have been proposed by projects such as Monad and Sei. Altius also focuses on optimizing the execution layer; what are its unique features and advantages? Compared to these parallel EVM projects, what different technical paths or strategies does Altius adopt to achieve superior performance improvements?

Annabelle Huang: Beyond the technical differences, I believe the fundamental distinction lies in the different core philosophies. We are not trying to create another generic high-performance single chain to monopolize the market; rather, we are dedicated to helping specific application chains and public chains that truly need scalability—allowing them not to invest massive resources in underlying optimizations like other high-performance public chains.

The key difference is: instead of building a new high-speed chain, we prefer to enable applications that genuinely require performance to achieve equal or even better speed performance. Clearly, this modular solution approach to providing high performance (rather than building a single full-stack blockchain) significantly increases the complexity of technical design. But from the perspective of design principles and core philosophy, this is precisely what sets us apart from other projects.

Anit Chakraborty: I completely agree—Altius is not about creating a closed ecosystem or building our own blockchain. As you mentioned earlier, we adopt a distributed systems approach, scaling by adding nodes, which is the mainstream development direction in high-performance computing today. However, as I said, this kind of solution is almost non-existent in the blockchain industry at present.

Can others do this too? Theoretically, yes. But it requires a set of specialized technical capabilities that are currently scarce in the industry. Our goal is to bring these specialized skills into the blockchain space, allowing developers to directly use this solution without worrying about scalability issues—and achieving better results than existing solutions.

ChainCatcher: When developers attempt to utilize your services to build high-performance applications, what specific functional support do they expect to receive? Have you already developed corresponding responses to these needs? Or have these functional plans been incorporated into your product development roadmap?

Anit Chakraborty: In fact, I think many teams handle this issue in a similar way, even if their approaches vary slightly. The theory of parallel transaction processing has existed for decades—after all, database technology has been developing for 50 years, so much of this content is quite mature, and there is not much innovation that can be done. Because of this, our approach is very similar to that of many other teams.

However, we are indeed trying to introduce some concepts from distributed systems. First, we hope to integrate all caching strategies into this system. Secondly, we are researching how to reduce processing time during transaction conflicts, as this is one of the most critical issues in parallel execution.

What we are currently doing is based on the work of the Paradigm team—they have developed excellent products in Rust. We are expanding on this foundation and adopting some of their modules. Since we can leverage their framework to implement these features, Rust has become our preferred solution. In the future, we will also port it to other virtual machine technologies.

But as I mentioned earlier, there is a small issue with storage or state management—these are modules we developed independently of Rust that can integrate with other systems. How to integrate them is a problem that other teams need to solve. For example, our parallel execution module and state management module are completely decoupled. We designed it this way so that the virtual machine can choose to use either one or both.

ChainCatcher: In the modular infrastructure space, Celestia is regarded as a leading project with its positioning as a "data availability DA layer," while Altius is a new project focused on the "modular execution layer." Did you borrow this term from Celestia? Or has their philosophy truly inspired or influenced your building direction?

Annabelle Huang: I believe modularity is a concept that has been introduced as a contrast to monolithic design; this concept is not something we claim to be the first or only to explore. Clearly, I think Celestia and many related studies have done a lot of work to promote the concepts of modular design versus monolithic design. We have certainly been inspired in many ways. But it must be clarified that modularity, as a foundational concept, has roots that extend far beyond any single project—just as you accurately pointed out, Celestia's core value lies in the modular innovation of the data availability DA layer, while our technical path focuses on optimizing the execution layer within the blockchain technology stack.

ChainCatcher: In the field of modular execution layers, the Fuel project is also receiving a lot of attention. What are the differences between Altius and Fuel? In what aspects does Altius's unique advantage manifest? 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 several iterations of their technical architecture. I can say that we have indeed drawn some inspiration from their early designs, but the fundamental difference is that Fuel chooses to build its own virtual machine—the Fuel VM. I believe that any solution attempting to introduce a new virtual machine (VM), new development framework, or new programming language will face significant challenges in developer adoption. This has been validated in cases like Cairo with StarkWare and others. Even the popularization of the Rust language in the blockchain space has taken quite a long time.

The challenge with Fuel's solution is that it requires developers to fully adapt to a completely new virtual machine architecture and development experience, which sets a high barrier to entry from the outset.

In contrast, our design philosophy is to maintain compatibility with existing virtual machines. We do not require developers to change their current development practices, 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 style. While we will provide incentives to encourage them to learn more efficient coding methods, this is by no means mandatory—EVM developers can seamlessly use our tech stack without making any changes if they choose not to.

This understanding is particularly important. Even transitioning to solutions like SVM or MoveVM requires developers to declare in advance which storage addresses contracts will access in their code, which is a significant change for engineers accustomed to EVM development patterns. Our goal is to bring parallel execution and performance optimization to any branch of the tech stack without changing the developer experience—without requiring developers to learn a new language or adjust their existing tech stack.

ChainCatcher: According to the official roadmap disclosed by Altius, the Altius Stack execution layer stack plans to achieve integration with EVM-compatible Layer 1 and Layer 2 networks in Q1 of this year; compatibility will be expanded to multiple virtual machines in Q2; and the shared execution layer Altius Stack will be launched in Q4. Could you elaborate on the specific significance of these key roadmap milestones?

Annabelle Huang: We initially chose EVM compatibility as our entry point mainly considering the current market share and activity of EVM chains. By prioritizing the optimization of EVM, we can demonstrate the most significant performance improvements in this area. Therefore, we decided to address the EVM issues first.

After that, while integrating with EVM chains, we will continue to explore how to expand compatibility with other virtual machines. This part of the work will be very interesting. Our core goal remains to support all blockchains that require high performance, including those application projects based on non-EVM custom tech stacks.

It is worth mentioning that our Altius framework design does not entirely rely on EVM semantics. Through a modular interpreter design, we can extend compatibility to other virtual machines, which is also an advantage we want to fully leverage. In the subsequent roadmap, we also plan to horizontally integrate execution instances from different chains into a shared execution layer, focusing on enhancing cross-chain interoperability. This will be a key focus of the second phase. Currently, cross-chain asset transfers and transaction execution efficiency are generally low, and we hope to address these issues directly at the execution layer.

ChainCatcher: What is the current development progress of Altius? What difficulties and challenges have you encountered in the process, and how have you overcome these challenges?

Anit: As mentioned earlier, our system mainly consists of several core modules: the parallel execution module, storage module, etc. The design difficulty of each module itself is not high; they are relatively independent units. Moreover, we have a clear idea for the implementation solutions, and the development progress is going well.

Currently, the biggest challenge is how to seamlessly integrate these modules into the existing system. Because, as I said, the execution layer technologies available on the market, whether Reth or Arbitrum, have their storage and execution layers deeply bound. So for us, the hardest part is to achieve architectural decoupling while ensuring compatibility with open-source codebases like Reth, without breaking existing functionalities, and ensuring perfect cooperation with our own modules.

Speaking of the vision of a shared execution layer, take an example: as an operator of an L2 chain, you might prefer to focus on business logic rather than worrying all day about server maintenance, hardware failures, or sudden traffic spikes. Our shared execution layer aims to solve these problems, allowing users to not worry about these underlying operations.

Additionally, we can automatically scale resources based on demand. For instance, if an NFT minting event is about to take place on-chain, the transaction volume will surely surge, so we can temporarily scale up in advance and scale back down after the event ends, avoiding the need to continuously pay high costs. Or when the system load reaches 99%, we can automatically help you scale up. You won't have to consider these complex operational issues at all; just leave them to us. This is the service value we want to provide.

ChainCatcher: Besides the roadmap planning, can the community expect some extra surprises? For example, airdrop activities or other benefits? Is it worth waiting for some significant developments outside the roadmap this year? Or are there any major plans that have not yet been announced?

Annabelle Huang: Next, everyone will gradually hear about our integration news with more ecosystem partners, which is worth keeping an eye on. Additionally, in terms of community building, we are still in the early stages and hope to grow together with the community from the beginning. We are planning various ambassador programs and community co-construction plans to enable the developer community and partner ecosystem to develop in synergy. This is definitely a key direction we are pushing forward.

We plan to announce our early ambassador program soon—this is just the first part of the community plan. For early community members and developers, we will release more technical content, including internally developed technical achievements and performance testing tools, and we warmly welcome developers to try them out and provide feedback.

We are very interested in understanding what specific application scenarios the community and investors are most looking forward to seeing, so we can focus on advancing the development of specific use cases and engage in deep cooperation with relevant partners. Although the project is still in its early stages, we believe everyone will soon see more details.

ChainCatcher: During this bull market, we have observed a decrease in the number of successful launches of crypto infrastructure projects, while user demand for applications is rising. At the same time, the number of public chain infrastructures is continuously increasing, leading to a situation where there are 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?

Annabelle Huang: This is one of the important reasons why we at Altius adopt a modular design rather than building another generic L1/L2. The current blockchain industry indeed faces a situation where the number of public chains has exceeded the number of actual applications.

I believe the industry is undergoing a significant transformation—from blindly pursuing the development of underlying protocols to truly valuable application implementations. Although there are still many shortcomings at the infrastructure layer, the solution is certainly not to continue launching new generic blockchains or block spaces. Instead, we should focus on dedicated solutions for specific scenarios, developing targeted applications that genuinely meet user needs, rather than simply launching chains and tokens.

The market and users in this field have significantly matured; what users need are validated, sustainable business model use cases. This is precisely the development philosophy that Altius adheres to: we are not building another infrastructure layer for our own sake; rather, we are constructing solutions aimed at specific pain points and needs, dedicated to solving real problems rather than creating technologies without actual demand.

ChainCatcher: Although modular public chains like Celestia have received a lot of attention, their popularity seems to have declined recently. Many people are arguing in Ethereum that Layer 2 is taking away transaction volume from the main chain, and even Vitalik has repeatedly mentioned the concept of "ZK Rollup" from last year to this year, calling for Layer 2 to return economic benefits and transaction fees to the main chain, adopting a more decentralized and trustworthy economic model. How do you view the future development trend of modularization? How will modular technology further impact the landscape and ecosystem of the crypto industry?

Annabelle Huang: This is not necessarily a problem with modularization or modular technology, but rather a challenge related to business models and value capture. That is a separate topic, and we could spend hours discussing it. However, regarding modular design—though I may be biased—I firmly believe in its advantages. Monolithic chains often struggle to meet the customized needs of diverse applications within the ecosystem.

Solana is great, and I personally like it a lot, but it may also encounter similar growing pains that Ethereum experienced back in the day—initially smooth sailing, but as applications explode in growth, issues like mainnet congestion, gas fees, and transaction success rates will become prominent, which is precisely why we need different scaling solutions. If Solana continues to maintain this growth trajectory, I believe it will eventually face the same bottleneck issues as a monolithic chain.

From a technical perspective, the real challenge lies in: how to achieve modularization without sacrificing user experience and without causing liquidity fragmentation? And this is precisely the core issue that Altius aims to solve.

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