Our Investment in delta

When we first met Ole, delta’s solo founder, in April 2023, the project was still in its infancy. At the time, it was tentatively named “repyh” — hyper spelled backwards. Ole was just beginning to articulate his vision, a concept brimming with ambition. In our initial call, which ran well beyond the planned time, we quickly identified what makes Ole an extraordinary founder. He stood out as someone motivated to challenge the status quo in crypto, aiming to build something that could overcome the pressing limitations of Ethereum and other existing rollup models. His drive, clarity of purpose, and boldness captured our attention and compelled us to take a deeper look at the possibilities delta could unlock.

Ole saw early-on what few others had. He identified crucial limitations within Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap: from fragmentation and censorship risks to a lack of flexibility in app-specific design. delta was born from his vision to solve those challenges with an architecture built to address them, combining sovereignty with seamless interoperability. Ole aimed to redesign rollups from the ground up via a new L1 that offers applications the freedom to scale without compromising performance or user experience.

delta’s Principles: The Foundations of a New Blockchain Paradigm

From the outset, delta’s mission was clear: create a future where blockchain applications operate in a truly interoperable, distributed, and accessible environment. delta’s L1 architecture is rooted in these three core principles:

• Distribution: On delta, attracting users and liquidity is a collaborative effort, with all applications sharing equal access to onboarded users and assets. Unlike existing app-chains, where applications operate in silos, delta’s ecosystem supports shared distribution, making user and asset accessibility positive-sum across all domains.
• Composability: delta’s shared global state model removes the need for intermediaries, allowing users to move seamlessly between “domains” (akin to rollups) without added friction.
• Frictionless Deployment: With lightweight domains, delta removes dependencies on an active validator set and long dispute periods. This makes delta accessible to a broader range of developers and use cases, drastically reducing the technical barriers to entry faced by app-chain developers today.

Our Conviction in Ole and delta: Making Our First Lead Investment

The more we understood Ole’s vision and recognized his talent, the more clear it became that delta’s potential stemmed not only from its unique approach to blockchain infrastructure but also from Ole himself. delta’s success would depend on a visionary like Ole — a founder capable of driving delta from ideation to actualization. The combination of Ole’s insight, delta’s disruptive architecture, and the significant market opportunity compelled us to take a step we had not taken before as a fund.

We committed to delta as our first-ever lead investment, co-leading the pre-seed round alongside Maven11. For us, this represented more than a commitment of capital; it embodied our confidence that delta could become a cornerstone of blockchain infrastructure and a catalyst for crypto’s next chapter.

Building delta’s Foundations: A Journey from Vision to Execution

Since our investment, we’ve watched Ole’s vision for delta take shape, piece by piece. He quickly began assembling delta’s core team, attracting industry-leading engineers and operators whose expertise and drive matched delta’s ambition. Each new team member brought a unique and invaluable skill set. delta could now take major steps forward.

With their core engineering team in place, focus shifted to the technical architecture necessary to support delta’s fundamental values. Ole and his team implemented a CRDT-based (Conflict-free Replicated Data Type) state model, paired with an innovative “order-less” consensus protocol to support high-performance domains free from typical bottlenecks. This architecture maximizes both speed and flexibility, ensuring that each domain can scale while preserving its unique properties and user experience.

The Catalyst: How Ethereum’s Challenges Open the Door for delta

As delta continued to build, Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap continued to expose many of the critical issues Ole had identified earlier. Fragmentation became increasingly problematic as more rollups operated as independent silos, spawning complexity and limiting asset interoperability. Centralized sequencers on Ethereum’s L2s raised censorship concerns, while bridging and cross-rollup interactions remained costly and inefficient. Questions concerning Ethereum’s architectural rigidity and whether Ethereum is too big today for major changes at this stage in its development continue to pervade.

These limitations inspired the need for a new model that could address these trade-offs through foundational design rather than retrofitted solutions. As the market’s preferences began shifting toward more integrated architectures, demonstrated by Solana’s smooth inter-app experiences, Ole’s foresight positioned delta to leverage this opportunity. delta combines Solana’s integrated user experience benefits with Ethereum’s modular programmability, positioning it as a new, compelling solution for application developers and ecosystem builders alike.

The Future of Blockchain: Why We Believe in delta’s Vision

delta’s architecture stands to transform the blockchain landscape by making rollups accessible and appealing to developers of all levels of familiarity with blockchain infrastructure. Through application-specific “domains” that can host any type of custom logic and environment, delta offers the best of both worlds — a seamless, interoperable framework with global access and local control.

These domains offer developers a flexible canvas to build with that can enable applications ranging from a simple cloud function running in a hosted environment to a fully permissionless rollup. Despite such differences in their local designs, they maintain equal access to a unified global state of assets and accounts, unlocking seamless interoperability and global distribution. delta effectively addresses the fragmentation and inefficiencies that have challenged modular ecosystems while providing the scalability and user experience found in integrated solutions like Solana.

For us, delta is not just an investment but a partnership with a visionary founder and an exceptional team. Their unique blend of technical brilliance, market foresight, and industry experience has set the stage for the next generation of blockchain infrastructure. Looking toward the future, we are confident that delta will play a defining role in shaping the next era of crypto, where applications and rollups are natively interoperable, accessible, and built to scale. We are proud to support delta as early investors and look forward to reimagining how a L1 blockchain scales infinitely.