Acceleration is upon us.

Please give a warm welcome to @0xPortola.

He’ll be spearheading the next wave of apps for the Interwoven Economy and leading Initia’s institutional push. https://t.co/1frfJOjyP8

It’s time for acceleration.

Now that it has been ~1 month since I’ve joined @initia and I’ve returned from an energizing offsite with the business team, I thought it would be a good time to share some reflections, as well as some of the things that excite me about Initia and the future:

The Initia thesis is that all apps will eventually be chains, that chains should keep all the value that they generate, and that Initia is the best place for apps to build.

The paths are different, but the destination is the same. @Uniswap, @HyperliquidX, @JupiterExchange, @dYdX. Some apps reach a scale where it does not make sense to continue paying rent to an L1. For others, there are performance considerations that can only be made by owning more of their stack.

What has been tried before?

I’ve been building in @cosmos for the better half of a decade. The app chain vision has largely been proven out, with many of the largest L1s today built on Cosmos infra including Sei, Celestia, Bera, dydx, Osmosis, Injective, Axelar, Ondo, etc. Most recently, Ripple announced its EVM side-chain would be built as a cosmos chain. Billions of dollars of value have been created from and built as app chains on Cosmos infra.

While the infra has been successful, teams go out of their way to disassociate with the Cosmos ecosystem. Part of the problem has been the lack of alignment + coordination, investor staked tokens being unlocked on day 1 (which Initia does differently), as well as overhead costs from running your own chain which most developers are simply not well-suited, nor well-capitalized to handle (curating + incentivizing validators).

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At Initia, we believe in a world with millions of chains, but where alignment between the core team, rollups, and users results in the sum > than the individual parts. And a world where app builders can focus on what they do best… build apps that users actually want! Initia takes care of the rest.

I’ve known @sinitias and @ItsAlwaysZonny for a long time. I’ve seen how they work, how they think, how they treat others, how they’ve grown as teammates and leaders. Pace (https://t.co/wGdq7e7zZ0) is a core tenant of the team, the team is big brain, ships fast, and builds for customers first.

So when they called, it didn’t take long to decide to cut my sabbatical short and take my talents to lead BD(SM) at Initia. I’m excited to contribute to making Initia into something godly.