Author: Zen, PANews

As stablecoin settlement, cross-border payments, and enterprise-level on-chain reconciliation become new growth points, the competitive focus has shifted from "how fast a single chain can run" to "whether it can quickly and cost-effectively assemble a chain stack that fits the scenario using pluggable consensus, networks, and runtime primitives. Only by achieving this can prototypes be transformed into scalable products, and one-time tuning be solidified into a maintainable engineering system.

Commonware is precisely targeting the upstream of this supply curve—by using "anti-framework" primitive design to break down the challenge of "chain creation" into combinable components, allowing payments, public chains, layer two, and industry-specific chains to be assembled and iterated quickly as needed.

Former Avalanche Engineering VP Starts New Venture, Accumulates $34 Million in Funding in One Year

By the end of 2024, the newly established Commonware received support from well-known blockchain figures and investment institutions—its seed round financing was co-led by Haun Ventures (founded by former a16z partner Katie Haun) and Dragonfly Capital, raising $9 million. Other angel investors included Avalanche co-founder Kevin Sekniqi, Berachain co-founder Smokey the Bera, early Cosmos contributor Zaki Manian, and Helius co-founder and CEO Mert Mumtaz.

Investment has always been about people, and the deep involvement of these well-known investors and public chain project participants is largely due to Commonware's founder, Patrick O’Grady. Patrick previously served as the engineering VP at Ava Labs, the development company behind the Avalanche public chain, and led the launch of the blockchain integration standard Rosetta at Coinbase. This background laid a solid foundation for Commonware's underlying technology and industry vision.

Commonware Founder Patrick O'Grady

In early November 2025, Commonware announced a strategic investment from the Tempo public chain. Tempo is a new payment public chain project co-incubated by payment giant Stripe and renowned crypto venture capital firm Paradigm, focusing on stablecoin settlement and cross-border payment scenarios. According to reports from media outlets like Fortune, it was previously valued at around $5 billion in earlier funding rounds. This investment in Commonware marks Tempo's first external strategic bet since its establishment, amounting to $25 million.

Tempo chose to invest heavily in Commonware for its "blockchain born for payments," which needs to achieve extreme speed and scalability, and Commonware provides the key technological capabilities to achieve this goal.

Commonware: Breaking Down Blockchain Systems into "LEGO Blocks"

As an open-source library aimed at modular blockchain primitives, Commonware's core architecture discards the inherent layers and limitations of traditional frameworks. Its design philosophy is to decompose blockchain systems into independent modules based on functionality, allowing developers to freely combine them as needed. These primitives cover core blockchain elements such as network communication, data storage, consensus mechanisms, and execution environments.

For example, the components already launched by Commonware include consensus algorithm modules, network communication modules, and runtime optimization modules. All primitives can operate independently and combine with each other to form a customized blockchain "stack." This "modular assembly" approach has led to Commonware being referred to as an "anti-framework." It does not impose a specific architecture and has no hard-coded assumptions about block formats, state layouts, finality rules, or fee measurement methods.

Therefore, developers can use it to build systems similar to single chains or support multi-layer separated modular chain structures. The framework is no longer a limitation but becomes a box of flexible LEGO blocks.

Commonware's modular architecture brings significant flexibility and performance advantages. First, due to the absence of fixed layers, development teams can select the optimal combination of components for specific application scenarios, thus avoiding paying for unnecessary features. This means that applications pursuing extreme performance can eliminate excess overhead and achieve higher efficiency.

The Commonware team has built a minimalist and high-speed experimental chain called "Alto" based on this library to demonstrate the performance potential of its primitive library. According to a report released by Commonware, Alto has optimized its block time to about 200ms, a 20% reduction, and shortened finality time to about 300ms, also a 20% reduction, while achieving an overall 65% decrease in CPU usage.

Moreover, the modular design allows the Commonware library to adapt to different levels of blockchain applications—whether it is a Layer0 data availability layer, an independent Layer1 public chain, or a Layer2 protocol attached to other networks, all can utilize the foundational components provided by Commonware to build, avoiding the inherent limitations often encountered when using existing suites like Cosmos SDK or OP Stack.

Empowering Underlying Infrastructure

In the blockchain technology ecosystem, Commonware plays a role in empowering infrastructure. It is not a public chain directly aimed at end users but rather a foundational development tool layer that provides building blocks for other chains and applications. This positioning makes it an important complement or even alternative to traditional development frameworks, addressing many of their pain points.

In the past, developers using frameworks like Cosmos SDK had to accept certain built-in assumptions and features of these frameworks, even if they were not suitable for their applications, and may have had to go to great lengths to meet special requirements. Commonware removes these constraints through its "anti-framework" concept, allowing developers to build their ideal chains from scratch based on their needs.

Haun Ventures mentioned in an article that many popular frameworks struggle to support optimizations for specific applications due to historical baggage. The emergence of Commonware's modular primitives effectively alleviates the burden on developers regarding infrastructure, enabling them to focus their energy on business logic and differentiated innovation.

Thus, Commonware can enhance the development experience, ultimately improving user experience. Development teams have greater room for creativity, allowing them to attempt innovative designs that previous frameworks did not permit, which will foster a richer variety of blockchain applications. For project teams, this means they can create differentiated advantages, customizing blockchains in terms of performance, security, and functionality, allowing their products to stand out in competition.

At the same time, Commonware is open-source and free, making chain creation no longer a high-cost project that only giants can afford. Small and medium-sized innovative teams can also quickly build their dedicated chain prototypes using these ready-made high-performance primitives, thus accelerating the technological evolution of the entire ecosystem.

Tempo Team to Act as Core Contributor

With the above analysis, it is easy to understand Tempo's significant investment in Commonware.

According to details released by both parties, Tempo will fully integrate Commonware's primitive library, including consensus, network, storage, and other modules, and become one of the core code contributors to this open-source project. With Commonware, Tempo's engineering team does not need to develop underlying consensus or network mechanisms from scratch; they can directly utilize existing high-performance components, allowing them to focus on building differentiated payment features and user experiences.

In addition to performance considerations, Tempo chose Commonware also because of the alignment of their philosophies. Georgios Konstantopoulos, partner at Paradigm and technical lead for the Tempo project, stated that he was impressed by the Commonware team's unique approach to implementing consensus algorithms as reusable libraries; their progress on cutting-edge issues in distributed systems has continued to earn their admiration.

He emphasized that this collaboration is a long-term starting point, and both parties will co-create around faster, simpler, and more open infrastructure. O’Grady vividly described the division of labor between the two: "Tempo focuses on developing new mechanisms to unlock differentiated payment experiences, while Commonware provides the most advanced primitives for everything else."

In other words, Tempo values the modular capabilities provided by Commonware, filling all foundational layer technical gaps for Tempo. At the same time, Tempo's participation as a core contributor in the co-construction of the Commonware open-source library means that Commonware will gain real-time data and feedback from Tempo's actual production environment to refine and enhance the reliability of its components in demanding payment scenarios.

For an emerging infrastructure project, having such large-scale real-world testing and financial support will undoubtedly accelerate its implementation and maturity.

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