Get Your Blocks on Route 66

Today, we’re announcing Route 66, a new initiative we’re co-leading with Coinbase to make it faster and cheaper to connect to specialized blockchains, and a strategic investment from Coinbase Ventures.

Blockchains look and feel less like blockchains each month (and that’s a good thing).

To better compete with the web services people use every day, the latest cohort of onchain products is increasingly blurring the line between blockchain and blockchain application. Whether it be offering cheaper and faster payments with stablecoins and dedicated blockspace, tighter spreads with custom execution rules and encrypted mempools, or provably fair games with secure randomness, applications are twisting and tweaking the blockchains they run on more than ever.

A dream coming true for users is a brewing nightmare for wallets, exchanges, custodians, and data providers. With frequent hard forks to add new features, novel cryptography that rarely runs in HSMs, complex transactions that touch indecipherable precompiles, and sub-second blocks carrying tens of thousands of transactions per second, these new stacks are time-consuming to integrate and expensive to maintain.

The result? Only a handful of new blockchains are widely integrated each year, often with only minimal support (just transfers). At Commonware, we believe this is a “dollars and sense” problem. Make novel blockchains cheaper to integrate and we’ll see more of them. Lower the barrier to experiment and we’ll see more exciting uses of blockspace. Fortunately, Coinbase sees things the same way.

Today, Commonware and Coinbase are launching a new initiative to “pave the road” for a new era of onchain applications. Via standards, common libraries, and shared tools, we will lay a highway that new blockchains can leverage to reduce cost and time to market (regardless of their model and make). A blockchain Route 66.

Want to get your blocks on Route 66? Help pave the road at [email protected]!