Fabric Ventures: Why We Invest in the Real World Public Chain Rialo

Source: Fabric Ventures; Translated by Jinse Finance

So far, successful Layer 1 blockchains have mainly been self-contained state machines, focusing on assets defined solely by that blockchain. The most successful applications of this period focused on enhancing the experience of issuing and trading assets in a self-contained state: issuing tokens on Solana (pump.fun), trading tokens on Ethereum (uniswap), and borrowing against tokens as collateral (aave), among others.

At the infrastructure layer, we have not seen many attempts to go beyond this paradigm. Since Ethereum, most Layer-1 innovations have focused on enhancing this self-sufficient experience; by increasing the speed of the blockchain, higher throughput, and providing developers with stronger security features.

We firmly believe that underlying technology is applicable to many industries beyond speculative games involving cryptocurrency tokens. Real-world assets, prediction markets, stablecoins—all of these require interaction between blockchain and the external world, where on-chain triggers and rules are driven by off-chain events.

This is a major growth area today, led by stablecoin participants like bridge.xyz and hifi, prediction markets like polymarket, and RWA participants like securitize, and driven by regulatory changes such as the Genius Act and MiCA.

In order to provide the appropriate functionality, builders have created temporary solutions to interact with the outside world, namely oracles or bridges, while seeking to maintain the core attributes of classic blockchains (trustlessness, guaranteed by decentralization) to attract users and builders.

However, these solutions are fundamentally not suitable for mainstream large-scale adoption. Many people will realize the oracle issues of Polymarket, as well as the potential manipulation of the Uma token that ultimately manages payments, or the governance issues of platforms like Chainlink that ostensibly secure billions of dollars. For example, in the prediction on Polymarket "Did Zelensky wear a suit?", why would a market with an investment of $170 million rely on a token holder with a market cap of only $125 million?

What we need is an L1 blockchain that addresses these issues from first principles, built from the ground up to interact with off-chain data in a seamless and developer-friendly manner.

Rialo changes the focus of blockchain L1 by embedding the core functionalities required by real-world developers into the protocol itself. Web calls, data streams, timers, and cross-chain operations become native instructions instead of external dependencies. Oracles, bridges, indexers, and other "traditional" infrastructure are not only no longer necessary but are also completely eliminated.

This has some great features for developers.

• Reduce hop costs, as there are fewer final confirmations and trust assumptions for applications using bridges/oracles.
• Better developer experience, as cross-chain or real-world data natively exists in a single environment, eliminating the need for bridging scripts or external observers.
• The security model of core infrastructure is consistent and unaffected by the protocol or underlying L1.

Rialo's tech stack easily evokes a new generation of applications focused on practical functionality. Want to transfer money as easily as sending a text message? Rialo can turn any phone number or email into a payment terminal without any mnemonic phrases or wallets. How to handle revenue assets that automatically settle after certain conditions are met? Rialo utilizes a novel mechanism to securely handle network requests, allowing prices to update automatically. So what about the previously mentioned prediction market issues? Rialo validators can monitor any available data (tweets, headlines, any public information or events), which are predefined, treating each piece of data as a programmable trigger that automatically pays out upon resolution.

To achieve this goal, they formed an excellent technical team. Founders Ade and Lu have extensive experience in blockchain, artificial intelligence, distributed systems, and hardware. As early engineers at Mysten Labs, they have worked at Netflix, Dell EMC, AMD, Meta (Diem), and Google. They have also recruited a group of talents from both the web2 and web3 fields; the engineering and leadership team comes from companies such as Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, TikTok, Citadel, and Solana.

We believe that Rialo offers a truly native stack for developers who wish to interact with the outside world. We are excited to announce that as Rialo matures and approaches its mainnet launch, we will be investing in it.