Pivoting and building the only bridge for altVMs
Why Catalyst going 100% on altVMs
For the entire month of September, Catalyst did $350,000 in volume, and had $450,000 in TVL.
For context, Stargate did $1 billion in volume with $400 million of TVL in the same time period.
That would make Catalyst dead last in bridging. But since the numbers are so low, it’s not even included in the rankings.
I’d laugh if it weren’t so embarrassing.
Of course — there’s a number of excuses that I can point to: Catalyst only supports three chains, it doesn’t incentivise volume, poor market conditions, etc, etc, etc.
But it doesn’t change the reality of it. Nobody wants the thing that my team and I built.
The (somewhat) silver lining is that 80% of bridge teams are in the same spot as me.
Did you know that there are 24 different options to bridge from Arbitrum to Optimism?
(This includes all potential options that someone could use—things that technically aren’t competitors—like wallets and native bridges—but nonetheless compete for a person’s attention.)
Every time someone wants to bridge from Arbitrum to Optimism, they have 24 different options to choose from.
Imagine having to choose among 24 cars to drive to work every day.
Decision paralysis. You’d probably just end up picking the closest one to you (analogy only applies to my fellow Americans).
With aggregators like LiFi and Bungee, bridging has become somewhat of a commodity. People just want to get from chain A to chain B, and they want to get there the fastest or cheapest way possible.
So if you’re not number #1, you’re last.
Or in Catalyst’s case, if you’re last, you’re… also last.
It really begs the question: why are there 24 options to bridge from Arbitrum to Optimism? And more broadly, why are there so many teams in interop in general?
Not a week goes by where someone (even Vitalik!) doesn’t mention the UX problems that the multi-chain world causes, the liquidity fragmentation of rollups, or how we’re all working together to solve this through ✨Chain Abstraction✨.
They all want to crack the biggest problem in crypto right now: connecting the ever-growing number of new chains that we’ve created (53 rollups and more than 250 chain and counting!).
The smartest and most driven individuals—all of whom I deeply admire—have assembled world-class teams to work day-and-night to tackle this issue.
And they’ve done some pretty amazing things.
OneBalance and Socket are building best-in-class chain abstracted experiences. Everclear is democratising solving. LiFi has become my personal springboard to every chain imaginable.
Across invented intents, and Relay pushed the concept to its limits, and brought the cost and speed of bridging down to half a cent in 2 seconds from Arbitrum to Optimism.
With all this going on the background, I have to ask myself: am I cut out to be an interop builder? Am I good enough to be associated with these people? Am I as smart as VC? Am I as clever as Arjun? As articulate as Hart? As passionate as Angus?
I’ll never forget this moment: I was asked to be on a panel at ETHcc. It had all the big interop builders on it, with projects processing billions of dollars in volume.
I declined.
I felt like I didn’t deserve to be there.
Talking to my first user
Confidence at an all-time-low, I started to re-read some old books I bought in college: The Lean Startup, Zero to One, How Google Works.
Trying to remember why I wanted to be a founder in the first place, and to find some inspiration to get me out of my mental rut.
“Talk to users” they said. And kept saying. Over and over again.
Oh, shit.
The number one thing that every entrepreneurship book, podcast, and YouTube video under the sun says about building a company is “please talk to some users PLEASE”.
And for some reason, I didn’t do that.
Why?
I guess I thought that it was “web2 advice” that had no place in my life because “crypto was different”.
I had too much ego.
I genuinely thought the thing that was going to solve interop was another AMM (b-but this AMM was different! It broke the constant product formula into two halves so that it could be messaged asynchronously, allowing for two disparate liquidity pools to perform cross-chain swaps with imperfect information!!)
I thought I knew everything, and I was proven so so wrong.
So I started talking to people: bridge users, traders, rollup teams, literally anyone that would spare the time to talk about interop (you know who you are — THANK YOU!!).
I asked them:
What do you hate about interop right now?
What do you like?
Why would you use a DEX over a CEX?
Why would you go onchain instead of using something like Coinbase MagicSpend?
What’s your favourite bridge and why?
What’s your favourite chain and why?
Dozens of calls. Hundreds of hours spent interviewing, summarising, and reflecting.
My takeaways are this:
(1) Bridging within EVM chains has found its winners.
Stargate, Across, CCTP, and Orbiter do 90% of all bridge volume. Every other project fights for the scraps.
(2) There is no more innovation left in EVM bridging.
We’ve hit the point of “good enough” in the eyes of users — with 2 second, half-cent transactions using intent-based bridges.
(3) The vibes in EVM are off.
“It’s too PvP these days,” people would say.
Yes, interop in EVM is crowded, but everything in EVM is crowded.
20+ general-purpose EVM rollups, 10+ wallets, 5 rollup-as-a-service (RaaS) projects, 8 rollup frameworks, 7 data availability layers, and more AMMs and lending protocols than users.
We were promised sovereign money. We were promised the world computer, the future of finance, unstoppable apps.
Instead, we got empty promises and the same copy-paste primitive again and again—ad nauseam until the next big narrative springs up.
People are fed up, burnt out, and jaded.
(4) In contrast, altVMs are bringing a new wave of hope and excitement.
I didn’t believe this initially. So I had to see with my own eyes.
I entered the Movement Discord. I browsed through the Superteam Earn website. I talked to team and community members of Fluent, Fuel, Eclipse, and other altVM projects.
It’s true. Something was different there.
They were motivated. Optimistic about the future.
They stood for something. Believed in something.
These new faces injected life into crypto again.
New VMs and execution environments bring with them new technologies that allow teams to reimagine what’s possible onchain.
Solana paved the way with quick block times, fast finality, parallel execution and local fee markets. With SVM, developers were able to make high frequency trading applications, low-latency DeFi protocols, and micropayments.
With Blinks, onchain actions can be embedded to any link — meeting people where they are and reinventing what onchain experiences could look like.
With Move chains like Sui, Aptos, and now Movement, the room for creativity is even greater—without compromising on security.
zkLogin makes easy Web2-like onboarding native to the chain. NFTs can be created with automatic royalty payments, and composable token standards that can be combined — like video game items and skins.
Onchain games can run in real-time with fast finality guarantees and high throughput from parallel execution, and DePIN networks can benefit from real-time (even gasless) data feeds.
MoveVM’s resource-oriented approach eliminates reentrancy vulnerabilities, makes it easier to manage tokens onchain, allows developers to mathematically prove that their code behaves as expected. This allows traditional financial institutions like Franklin Templeton to issue RWAs on Aptos with peace of mind.
For the first time in a long while, my old, jaded heart felt something that I hadn’t felt since DeFi Summer.
I actually wanted to play these apps. Because they were fun.
Only one problem stood in my way: getting on to these chains. Which leads me to my last takeaway.
(5) People want access to altVMs. But they are hard as shit to get to.
Everyone knows that altVMs are the next big thing, but they can’t get in on the action because the barrier to entry is too high.
This was my experience getting onto Aptos:
Stumble around on Google to find a bridge.
Do a cursory check that it is somewhat reputable and legit.
Research the best wallet.
Create said wallet with a new seed phrase to store.
Initiate the bridge transaction.
Pray that it actually worked and I didn’t just lose my funds to a scam.
Wait ~10 minutes.
And the best for last — buying the gas token on Coinbase and sending it to my new wallet.
It felt like I was in 2021 again, playing with the Avalanche bridge.
“The UX is terrible, there’s no good options for bridging, but I know I need to be on there”.
Then it dawned on me.
altVMs are a time machine.
They take us back to a time when crypto had boundless potential. An open field, waiting for crops to be planted.
But they also take us back to a time when interop was in the dark ages. Connecting chains with branches and tree sap.
In contrast, interoperability in EVM is in the modern era — air conditioning and electric cars. But it’s a world that is stagnating and dying, with cost-of-living crises and rising temperatures.
The harsh truth is that EVM’s dominance is waning.
Today, 3 of the top 10 most used chains in crypto are altVMs.
With Movement, Fluent, Eclipse, Soon, and Fuel set to launch in the next two quarters — more altVMs will soon break into that list.
In my mind, the story is clear.
altVMs will create a whole new design space.
A whole new design space will welcome the next generation of developers to come and build never-before-seen applications (e.g., memefied social, onchain card games, TEE data marketplace, mobile minigames, mobile phone infrastructure).
Never-before-seen applications will bring in millions of new mainstream users.
Millions of new mainstream users will result in billions of dollars of new tokens and yield.
Only one thing stands in our way: how do we get there?
I’m glad you asked.
Purpose built for altVMs
New Catalyst is the only bridge built for altVMs.
Movement, Solana, TON, Fuel, Miden, Starknet, even Bitcoin — our mission is to make accessing them even easier than accessing Arbitrum or Optimism today.
Why has no one done this before?
Because it’s hard.
It’s hard as shit to connect different virtual machines together and make sure they all understand each other.
It’s like trying to get a Persian, Chinese, English, and Argentinian person to all have a cogent conversation together by only using common words that all four of their natives languages share.
So it wasn’t enough to just refactor Catalyst AMM. We took our learnings from the AMM, and we’re building Catalyst from scratch.
Catalyst AMM was simple, but we needed something even simpler to connect all altVMs together. New Catalyst’s minimal implementation is only 650 nSOLC (i.e., lines of code), and can be written, implemented, and audited in less than 2 months.
That means that we can easily translate and port New Catalyst to new altVMs as they pop up.
In EVM Land, maybe I’m just a yapper. Maybe I’m a failure. Maybe I’m a larp who thought that the world needed another AMM.
But in altVM Land? I have the freedom to choose whoever I want to be.
And I choose to not give up.
More details next week.
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Huge thanks to Andy, Arjun, Rushi, Emily and Dino for reading drafts of this.
honestly it was saddened to see it go like this. But reading the stuff kind of bring a firm surety in JIM. and it was good to see you guys taking the approach to building the chain abstracted vision in such an early phase where, there's not many of those that exists rn.
I always love the founders who build in public, and it really builds up the nuance with us people(consumer). good luck will be following closely fam.
Against the backdrop of a frank article, I personally have confidence in the founder. + trust that the project will begin construction.
Even though the idea of farming EVM bridge points here failed, the founder clearly saddled himself with an idea that appeals to me.