Blockchain's iPhone moment? Sui veteran launches next-generation development platform Rialo

By Karen Z, Foresight News

While cryptocurrencies are gaining traction on Wall Street and among retail investors, a difficult reality persists: existing public blockchains are mostly trapped within the closed loop of the cryptosphere, disconnected from real-world services, data, and user habits, making it difficult for blockchain to integrate into everyday life. Developers also want to focus on business logic rather than expending significant effort on integrating with oracles, maintaining nodes, or processing off-chain data.

In this context, the real-world blockchain Rialo aims to break down the barriers between blockchain and the real world, enabling teams to deliver production-ready applications as easily as Web2 development, allowing blockchain to be seamlessly embedded in the operating logic of the real world, just like a smartphone.

What is Rialo?

Rialo is a blockchain developed by Subzero Labs specifically for the real world, but its positioning breaks away from the previous Layer 1, Layer 2 or Layer 3 framework. Its full name is "Rialo isn't a layer 1".

Subzero Labs co-founder Ade Adepoju put it this way in Fortune magazine: "It's like the evolution from the iPod to the iPhone—we don't need another device that's just for listening to music, we need an all-in-one tool that integrates a camera, the internet, and GPS."

Rialo's core goal is to lower the barrier to entry for blockchain users, allowing developers outside the crypto space to easily build applications. Its most notable feature is its native real-world connection. For example, developers can directly access web information (such as FICO credit scores) within smart contracts without relying on third-party oracles. Users can also log in using familiar identities like social media accounts and email addresses, eliminating the need to learn wallet operations from scratch.

Explaining its investment in Rialo, Fabric Ventures stated that Rialo shifts the focus of blockchain Layer 1 by embedding the core functionality required by real-world developers into the protocol itself. Calls, data flows, timers, and cross-chain operations are all natively executed, rather than relying on external calls. Oracles, cross-chain bridges, indexers, and other "traditional" infrastructure may no longer be necessary.

Team and financing background

In early August, Subzero Labs announced the completion of a $20 million seed round of funding, led by Pantera Capital. In addition to Sui developer Mysten Labs, the investors also included Variant, Hashed, Fabric Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Mirana Ventures, Susquehanna, Edge Ventures, and Flowdesk. According to Fortune magazine, CEO Ade Adepoju stated that the funding, which was completed in the first quarter of this year, involved both equity and token warrants.

Subzero Labs team members have worked for companies or projects such as Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, TikTok, Citadel, Mysten Labs, Solana, and have extensive experience in blockchain, artificial intelligence, distributed systems, and hardware.

• Co-founder and CEO Ade Adepoju: 30 years old, living in New York City, he previously worked at chipmaker AMD and later as an engineer at Dell and Netflix. In late 2021, Ade Adepoju joined Mysten Labs as a founding engineer (as of February 2024).

• Co-founder and CTO Lu Zhang: Former engineer at Mysten Labs.

How does Rialo work?

Although Rialo has not yet disclosed its blockchain architecture, its brief introduction shows that its operating logic revolves around "combining RISC-V and Solana VM compatibility", "reducing friction" and "native integration". This can be understood from several aspects:

• Combining RISC-V and Solana VM compatibility : Rialo is committed to reducing the need for middleware such as cross-chain bridges and oracles, and combining RISC-V smart contracts and Solana VM compatibility.

Notably, in April of this year, Vitalik Buterin proposed on the Ethereum Magicians forum that Ethereum's EVM be replaced with the open-source instruction set architecture RISC-V to improve scalability. Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake's "Lean Ethereum" vision for Ethereum over the next decade, released in August, outlines major upgrades to the consensus, data, and execution layers, potentially building EVM 2.0 based on the open-source RISC-V instruction set. Vitalik Buterin explained that replacing the ZK-EVM with RISC-V would significantly improve the efficiency of Ethereum's execution layer, addressing one of its primary scaling bottlenecks and significantly enhancing its simplicity.

• Developer-Friendly Technical Architecture : Unlike traditional public chains, Rialo is designed with real-world interaction capabilities embedded in its design. For example, a single HTTPS call within a smart contract can extract real-time data to any location, and any off-chain API within the smart contract can be seamlessly integrated. Rialo also optimizes the smart contract programming experience, introducing mechanisms such as "event-driven" and "asynchronous processing" similar to traditional software development, allowing developers to write concise logic like standard code.

• De-blockchaining the user experience : Rialo aims to reimagine the identity system, allowing users to log in using email, SMS, or existing social media identities as their Web3 passports. Furthermore, Rialo will support encrypted messaging. Rialo boasts sub-second transaction confirmations and stable, predictable fees, avoiding issues like gas fee inflation and sandwich attacks that plague traditional public chains. Rialo also supports familiar Web2 features like 2FA and timed transactions.

• Ecosystem synergy breaks down barriers between on-chain and off-chain : Rialo's underlying protocol will support direct interaction with various real-world services, such as payment systems and weather. This "native integration" capability enables applications on Rialo to cover a wider range of scenarios.

summary

Only when the application is simple enough and the scenario is common enough, can encryption technology truly break out of its "small circle".

Of course, Rialo still faces challenges: How to maintain decentralization while connecting to the real world? How to balance decentralization and regulatory compliance? And how to balance data openness and privacy protection?