When an existing network cannot give you the economics, governance, or performance you need, we build the chain itself: consensus, runtime, validators, tooling, and the path to mainnet.
A layer 1 is a blockchain that settles its own transactions: it runs its own consensus, its own validator set, and its own economic rules, rather than renting security from someone else. Building one is the right call when block space costs, throughput limits, governance, or compliance requirements make a general-purpose network the wrong home for your product.
We engineer layer 1 networks end to end: the state machine and its modules, the consensus and staking parameters, the token model, the genesis ceremony, the validator onboarding programme, and the explorers, indexers, and wallets that make the chain usable on day one. Most of our work starts from the Polkadot SDK (Substrate) or the Cosmos SDK, because a battle-tested base saves a year of protocol work and an entire class of consensus bugs.
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Everything between a whitepaper and a network that other people can build on.
The decisions that are expensive to change later: consensus, block times, state model, fee market, and upgrade strategy.
The state machine itself, built from custom pallets or Cosmos SDK modules that encode your product rules at the protocol layer.
A token model that keeps validators honest and the network solvent, simulated before it reaches the genesis file.
The operational side of running a network: reference deployments, monitoring, key management, and upgrade drills.
A staged rollout: incentivised testnet, genesis coordination, and a mainnet launch with people on call.
A chain nobody can inspect is a chain nobody trusts. We ship the tooling that makes yours legible.
Framework, language, and operations choices we make when the deliverable is a network rather than an application.
The SDKs we build sovereign layer 1 chains and appchains with.
Node clients, runtimes, and consensus code are systems software, and we treat them that way.
Contract layers we bolt onto a new chain, from EVM compatibility to native Wasm.
Running a network is an operations problem long after the code is written.
Working with something else? Our teams pick up new tools quickly. Tell us about your stack.
The engineering that separates a chain that launches from a chain that survives.
Finality guarantees, fork-choice behaviour, and equivocation handling reviewed against the failure cases that have taken other networks down.
On-chain runtime upgrades and migration handlers, so shipping a protocol change does not require every validator to coordinate a hard fork.
Staking yields, inflation, and fee revenue simulated across adoption scenarios before the parameters are locked into genesis.
Block production, state growth, and transaction throughput measured on real hardware, not estimated from a whitepaper.
A realistic plan for moving from a founding validator set to an open one, with governance that can carry the decisions.
Bridges, IBC, or XCM connectivity designed in from the start, because an isolated chain has no liquidity and no users.
The situations where an application chain beats deploying on someone else’s network.
Permissioned validators, identity at the protocol layer, and jurisdictional control over who can produce blocks.
One product, one chain, with no competing for block space and no fee spikes caused by unrelated activity.
Shared infrastructure between competing organisations, with governance that no single member controls.
Gaming, IoT, and payment workloads whose transaction volume is simply uneconomic on a general-purpose chain.
A staged path from protocol design to a network with independent validators.
We start by challenging the premise, because often an existing chain or a rollup is the better answer, and we will say so. If a sovereign chain is right, we choose between the Polkadot SDK, the Cosmos SDK, and an EVM-based stack, and document why.
Consensus, block parameters, state model, token economics, governance, and upgrade strategy are written up as a specification your team, your auditors, and your investors can all review before implementation starts.
We build the state machine in sprints, covering custom modules, execution environment, and staking and governance logic, with a running devnet from the first weeks so behaviour can be inspected rather than imagined.
A public testnet with external validators, chaos testing, upgrade rehearsals, and a bug bounty. This is where consensus and economic assumptions meet people who did not write the code.
Third-party audit of the runtime and economics, remediation, then genesis file assembly, validator key ceremonies, and full dry runs of the launch sequence.
We run the launch window with you, then stay on for monitoring, runtime upgrades, validator support, and the protocol roadmap that follows the first release.
What founders and enterprise teams ask before commissioning their own network.
Usually not, and we will tell you when that is the case. Most products ship faster and cheaper as contracts on an established chain or as a rollup. A sovereign layer 1 earns its cost when you need control over block space and fees, a validator set you can define, protocol-level compliance rules, or economics that no general-purpose chain will give you. We run that assessment first and put the recommendation in writing, including when the recommendation is not to build one.
Cosmos SDK chains are written in Go, reach instant finality through CometBFT, and connect natively over IBC to a large ecosystem of chains. Substrate chains are written in Rust, support forkless runtime upgrades, and can inherit shared security from Polkadot rather than bootstrapping their own validator set. If sovereignty and interchain liquidity matter most, Cosmos usually wins. If you want shared security, upgradeability, and a Rust codebase, Substrate usually does.
A focused application chain built on an established SDK with modest custom logic typically runs 5 to 8 months from specification to mainnet. Networks with novel consensus, heavy custom modules, or an incentivised testnet programme run 9 to 18 months. The launch date is usually set by audit and testnet duration rather than by implementation speed.
Yes. Both ecosystems have mature EVM compatibility layers (Frontier for Substrate chains and Ethermint-style modules for Cosmos SDK chains), so existing Solidity contracts and Ethereum tooling like MetaMask, Hardhat, and Foundry work against your network. We often pair an EVM environment with a native Wasm one so teams can choose per contract.
We plan it as a programme, not an event. That normally means a founding set of known operators at genesis, a documented onboarding path and hardware specification, an incentivised testnet that gives candidate validators real operating experience, and a governance-controlled schedule for expanding the active set and reducing any founding-entity control over time.
A network is an operational commitment. We stay involved for runtime upgrades and migrations, validator support and incident response, protocol parameter tuning based on real usage, and the ecosystem tooling (SDKs, documentation, explorers) that other teams need in order to build on you.
The frameworks and chains behind our layer 1 and application work.
Tell us what your chain has to do that existing networks cannot, and we will come back with an architecture, a framework recommendation, and a realistic path to mainnet.