NodeKit: The Shared Sequencer L1

At NodeKit, we believe the current UX of appchains leaves a lot to be desired. While they do offer performance and sovereignty, it leaves application developers feeling like they are stuck on an island, struggling to have interoperability that they would have as a smart contract on Ethereum or other platforms. Our goal is to seamlessly enable decentralization and interoperability without sacrificing user experience. 

Currently, centralized sequencers require users to rely on one centralized system for censorship resistance and liveness. There have been multiple accounts of L2s going down in the past couple years which is unacceptable if we want L2s to scale to support major financial systems. Having every rollup run their own decentralized sequencer isn’t a better solution either because it complicates the amount of things a single rollup needs to run, increasing cost and complexity for newer projects.

NodeKit is building a shared sequencer L1 called SEQ. SEQ helps rollups decentralize their sequencing, leading to higher uptime and censorship resistance. We have built out Go and Rust SDKs allowing rollups to easily integrate with SEQ. It uses the Snowman++ consensus algorithm which enables high performance while also having the reliability of a heavily tested consensus algorithm. Enabling rollups to be connected to each other creates unity in the blockchain ecosystem, and allows builders to worry less about which rollup to build upon, as there is greater access to liquidity on all rollups in the network. This interoperability is enabled because SEQ orders blocks for multiple rollups, allowing for atomic inclusion using atomic bundles within the same block. 

Rollups can utilize soft pre-confirmations from SEQ to provide their users with faster block confirmations, similar to centralized sequencers. SEQ is a lazy shared sequencer which means it can support multiple rollups on one shared sequencer which allows for lower costs for all rollups involved. 

SEQ has the unique advantage of being horizontally scalable as well which allows for deployment in both permissioned and permissionless environments which we believe can help build the next 1000 rollups in a way which is both accessible and understandable for regular users. We believe the future of crypto is decentralized to its core with a better user experience than traditional finance. 

We are proud to announce Borderless Capital has led our pre-seed round of $1.2M with participation by Blizzard Fund, Polygon Ventures, and Wormhole Cross-Chain Ecosystem Fund. Angels who participated include Anurag from Avail, Xavier from Chorus One, Brian and Graham from Republic, and @hn_avax from BENQI. If you are interested in building with us, please check out our job board to help us build the next generation of rollups.