Former Ava Labs engineering lead raises $9 million to build 'anti-framework' blockchain developer tools

Haun Ventures and Dragonfly Capital have co-led a $9 million funding round for Commonware, a startup building “state-of-the-art” blockchain primitives that enable developers to fine-tune their networks to their exact specifications.

Founded by former Ava Labs executive Patrick O’Grady, Commonware provides developers with an “anti-framework” — essentially all the building blocks to build a blockchain — in a bid to move past the era of standardized, general-purpose software kits. 

“Today, if you want to launch your own chain you deploy a rollup, an app chain, or maybe an avs [Avalanche subnet] using one of a handful of blockchain frameworks,” Haun’s Breck Stodghill wrote in a blog. “But the most widely used frameworks are old, riddled with tech debt, and not feasibly tuned to your application’s bespoke needs.”

Commonware’s “primitives” are designed to fit together but also to be swapped in and out as needed, O’Grady wrote in an X post. The hope is that a better developer experience will also lead to better outcomes for users.

“This stack has no explicit layers. No specific security assumption,” O’Grady said.”There is no hardcoded block type, state layout, finality definition, mempool policy, execution rules, or fee metering. It is neither monolithic nor modular but could be used to build towards either.”

While there are existing crypto toolkits that can be customized, O’Grady argued that frameworks like Cosmos’ software development kit and Ethereum scaling layers like OP Stack or Arbitrum Orbit are arranged in such a way that developers end up building themselves into a corner. For reference, Cosmos is the most forked blockchain stack today.

The tool, Simplex Consensus, stylized as consensus::simplex, is the first of many upcoming “consensus dialects,” O’Grady said. It follows the launch of the communication tool p2p::authenticated in August, the optimization tool runtime::deterministic in September and other releases. 

Before founding Commonware, O’Grady served as vice president of engineering at Ava Labs and launched Rosetta (now known as the Coinbase Mesh API) while working at Coinbase. 

Commonware is looking to onboard three teams “to leverage commonware to build applications across a variety of security assumptions (L0, L1, L2, AVS, external DA, or somewhere between)."