Archetype Invests in Essential
We have an unwavering conviction that decentralized infrastructure is destined to reach parity with today’s centralized web. And when it does, it will bring about a major step function in scale, security, and performance.
Underpinning this evolution are advancements in new modular architectures, cryptographic primitives, and reimagined execution environments. Essential is now pushing this evolution even further by asking a bold question: what if blockchains didn’t require execution at all?
Essential views the UX hurdles that many blockchains face as a byproduct of their execution-based nature—a problem that can only be addressed by rethinking the underlying architecture level.
Their solution is the Essential Protocol: an intent-centric L2.
The Essential Protocol leverages intents, or constraints, as the sole mechanism for carrying out user requests and updating the chain’s state. Users don’t need to supply their own sets of instructions—they just tell Essential what they want and a network of solvers takes care of the rest. We’ve been seeing intents implemented in other apps and ecosystems for a while now, but this is the first time intents are completely replacing transactions as the core primitive for an entire blockchain.
Under the hood, this is all made possible by Essential’s Constraint Engine and programming language, Pint. Shorthand for “programmable intents,” Pint is a constraint-based language for application development, intent submission, and solving within the protocol. Leveraging Pint allows developers to describe their app’s business logic and leave the computational logic to the dedicated solver network, eliminating much of the friction and idiosyncrasies that usually come with learning a new blockchain’s VM.
Essential’s decision to strictly utilize intents is a bold one, but a choice that can improve how we interact with blockchains at the most fundamental level. The end result is a unique protocol that improves both user experience and scalability while maintaining decentralization.
We are extremely excited to lead Essential’s $11M Series A round and support Liesl, Simon, and the Essential team as they accelerate the next step function in UX and bring net new, user-centric applications onchain.
To get started with Essential, developers can deploy and test declarative applications on the Essential pre-alpha devnet, check out the Pint GitHub repo, and dig into Essential’s developers docs. You can also learn more about Essential below: