TheCoordinate by Soubhik Deb

Payments are the electricity of the economy and Stripe’s annual letter even called out Tempo as part of where payments are going.In Episode 5 of The Coordinate, I sat with Mallesh Pai, Researcher at Tempo and The Lay Family Professor in Department of Economics at Rice University to discuss why Tempo is building a payments-first blockchain:TIP-20 (opinionated ERC-20) w/ policies + RBAC + transfer memosPasskeys/WebAuthn + native AA via TempoTransactionsFees paid in stablecoinsPayment lanes so payroll & bills don’t break during congestionSub-second finality

Ethereum is starting from the endgame.Episode 4 of TheCoordinate is a deep dive into Lean Ethereum: a clean-slate rethink of consensus, execution, and data availability.I sat down with Justin Drake from Ethereum Foundation to unpack:need for the rewrite,rewrite items: post-quantum security + fast finality,endgame finality (3-slot -> 2-slot -> maybe 1-slot),slot anatomy, networking constraints, and the "SOL slots" meme,real-time ZK proving changing the execution roadmap,censorship resistance with FOSSIL,role of L2s in the world of Lean Ethereum,incentives across proposer, builder, prover, includer, attester.If you’re building on Ethereum or trying to understand where the base layer is headed, this one is for you.

Solana is rewriting its core.Episode 3 of TheCoordinate is about one of the most ambitious protocol upgrades in crypto right now: AlpenGlow, a redesign of Solana's consensus + data propagation stack.I sat down with Roger Wattenhofer, Kobi and Quentin Kniep from Anza Labs to break down:what was structurally limited in TowerBFT + PoH?how AlpenGlow works end-to-end: Rotor (erasure-coded dissemination via relays) + Voter (a dance of fast and slow paths)why they are optimizing for a 20% Byzantine + 20% crash-fault model?what changes for validators + RPCs when votes move off-chain (VAT/fee mechanics, different cost structure, and a smaller ledger footprint)?what 100s-of-ms finality means in practice for MEV, remote validators, and upcoming multi-proposer designs?If you’re building or operating on Solana, this is one of those quiet-but-fundamental stack shifts and you may wanna listen to this episode to learn how this upgrade touches you.This is Episode 3 of TheCoordinate. Hope you enjoy it.

What does state-of-the-art blockchain engineering look like in 2026?In Episode 2 of TheCoordinate podcast, I sat down with Patrick O’Grady & Brendan Chou (Commonware) to unpack their Anti-Framework philosophy: build chains by composing optimized primitives—not inheriting a monolithic stack.We go deep on:how Commonware is designed in practice (and how to use it)who it’s for vs Cosmos-style frameworkshow their newest consensus protocol Minimit works (arguably the hottest kid in the consensus neighborhood)what’s coming with ExoWareThis is Episode 2 of TheCoordinate. Hope you enjoy it.

Most people treats consensus protocols as boring and impenetrable. That’s a mistake. Under the hood, there’s an intense race to design faster, higher-throughput, and adversary-resilient consensus protocols. That work directly determines retail UX and explains why Ethereum, Solana, and other L1s obsess over consensus. For Episode 1 of The Coordinate, I sat down with Kartik Nayak, one of the world’s leading consensus researchers, to pull consensus out of the black box and build a first-principles mental model: how consensus actually works, how it evolved over last 50 years, how today’s sprawling protocol families fit together, and what the next frontier of consensus research looks like.This is Episode 1 of The Coordinate. Hope you enjoy it.