Former Meta engineer builds low-latency, highly scalable blockchain Linera, with a $6 million investment led by a16z

Layer1 blockchain Linera, built by former Meta infrastructure engineer Mathieu Baudet, announced on the 29th that it has completed a $6 million financing round led by a16z. Its goal is to create the first low-latency blockchain that can scale as easily as web2 applications.

Introduction to Linera Blockchain

"More and more applications require low latency, meaning the ability to respond to user actions within a predictable short confirmation time. Unfortunately, due to the demands of the memory pool and the complex collaboration between verification nodes, the fastest confirmation time in existing blockchains still takes several seconds," Mathieu said.

According to the official article from Linera, Mathieu was involved in academic research on two protocols, FastPay and Zef, during his time at Meta and Novi. These two protocols aim to improve blockchain scalability, and the research results indicate that by completely removing the memory pool and minimizing the mutual influence between verification nodes, the speed of simple operations like payments can be significantly accelerated.

The goal of the Linera blockchain is to promote this approach and apply it, allowing operations for the majority of accounts to be confirmed within a fraction of a second.

In addition to low latency, scalability is also a goal that Linera pursues.

Mathieu believes that emulating the "linear expansion" of web2 applications, which involves doubling the number of machines to double system capacity, can greatly enhance blockchain scalability. Linera is currently developing and promoting a new execution model suitable for linear expansion, where increasing the execution scale is as simple as adding new processing units to verification nodes.

"So far, blockchains have primarily adopted a sequential execution model, allowing user accounts and smart contracts to interact arbitrarily in a series of transactions, like Lightning Loans. Unfortunately, sequential execution conflicts with linear expansion," Mathieu said.

Linera Secures $6 Million in Funding

Linera recently secured a $6 million funding round led by a16z, with participation from investors including Cygni Capital, Kima Ventures, and Tribe Capital. Linera plans to use this funding to hire engineers and team members to develop the protocol.

"This funding round will allow us to bring web2 performance and trust into the web3 world," Mathieu said.