What if Web3 Was as Fast and Simple as Google Search?

Blockchains promised you the utopia of a democratic internet. Your identity, assets, and network would be yours; nobody could take them from you. Well, where is it? Blockchains are busy, but with little substance and no value to you—a hollow shell.

There are tons of blockchain developers eager to build applications with a seamless user experience (UX) to solve real problems. Maybe that’s you. But there’s a massive burden in the current infrastructure: It is slow, expensive, and breaks down whenever hit with real traffic. You can’t build on top of this.

The next generation of democratic internet doesn’t have to be slow and complex.

Welcome pod: a novel stake-based programmable layer one, built from first principles to bring optimal latency to decentralized systems and enable developers to build real products.

To make this vision a reality, we have raised a $10M seed round from a16z crypto CSX, 1kx, BBF, and leading angels in the space.

How?

At its core, our system has a radically simple design: transactions are streamed to a set of validators who attest and timestamp them. No blocks. No chains. No complex consensus protocols or moon-math cryptography.

The system delivers optimal latency by confirming transactions in just one network round trip (~200ms), with throughput matching the physical network's capacity. Yes—that's as fast as a Google search!

We are building EVMx, a backward-compatible extension of EVM. We love the Ethereum developer community. EVM is here to stay—it's the JavaScript of the blockchain world. With EVMx, developers can continue using their go-to Solidity toolchains while taking advantage of pod's fast finality and execution.

Not just another infra!

We will build the complete stack: from infra to products and back.

We're creating products tightly integrated with our infra and with a sleek UX. Users shouldn't need to know there's a decentralized network behind the scenes—they should love using the products because they provide value. That's it.

Until now, infrastructure limitations have dictated the UX of Web3 products. We're inverting this with UX-driven infrastructure—UX requirements of products govern the updates that go into the infra layer.

We are excited about global payments, decentralized social networks, e-voting, liquid democracy, fully on-chain games, and real-time marketplaces for block space, intents, proofs, and AI agent queries.

Our success

Our mission is to onboard the next billion users to Web3, without them even knowing.

Our squad

We spun out of Common Prefix.

We are builders with experience in taking cutting-edge research to production for top Web3 companies.

We are crypto natives. We are opinionated.

We believe in challenging the norms, reasoning from first principles, building fast and simple, and being honest about our tech and adoption.

Is this you?

Are you building a killer product, and existing infra solutions don’t fit your UX requirements?
Are you a builder who just got nerd-sniped, doesn’t believe in our bold claims, and wants to play with our tech?
Did the above message resonate with you? Do you want to join our cracked team of scientists and engineers reshaping the new Internet?

We want to hear from you. Find us at the links below.