Liam Heeger and Unto: A New Blockchain Adventure

Liam Heeger spent two years as a core engineer for Firedancer, the high-performance Solana client being written from scratch by Jump. In January, Heeger announced he had left Jump to create his own layer-1 blockchain called Unto.

The next day, news broke that Jump was suing Heeger for violating his non-compete agreement by working on a new high-performance blockchain.

Jump and Heeger settled the case in late February, allowing me to catch up with Heeger and gain more details on Unto. In short, the layer-1 will architect a new virtual machine to try and improve on Solana’s performance by an order of magnitude.

> “We tend to agree with Multicoin Capital managing partner Kyle Samani. Incremental performance improvements don’t matter,” said Unto co-founder Will Yoo. “So we’re gonna need a 10x to be relevant.”

Heeger agreed but added that he’s “not making any promises.”

Heeger helped push Solana’s virtual machine closer to its limits with Firedancer, but he isn’t building on the SVM partly because Solana “made a lot of design choices that they pivoted on really quickly.” Unto plans to invest a lot of time in designing the blockchain before beginning the coding process to avoid similar forced pivots.

For that, Unto will likely have to raise more cash at some point. The San Francisco-based startup raised $2.5 million in seed funding from Framework Ventures. Jump’s lawsuit claims this raise came at a $50 million valuation.

Heeger didn’t get too specific on how Unto’s new VM might look but mentioned it won’t use traditional proof-of-work or proof-of-stake for consensus. The chain will have a globally distributed validator set, appearing similar to PoS— which is what Ethereum and Solana use for consensus— but Heeger aims to establish something distinct.

> “The key issue with proof-of-stake is that it incentivizes operators purely on increasing and maintaining their stake rather than the performance of the network and being an effective operator,” Heeger explained.

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