Altius Pit Stop #1 AMA Recap: Behind the Build — Your Questions, Our Vision

On March 26, 2025, we hosted our first-ever Altius Pit Stop AMA — a community-facing series we’ll be running monthly to share what we’re building, answer your questions, and bring you along for the ride.

Moderated by Ivan Paskar, Head of Growth & Community, the session featured co-founders Annabelle Huang (CEO) and Anit Chakraborty (CTO), and was joined by early partners from Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Archetype.

This is your in-depth recap of everything that was shared — from deep technical vision to what makes Altius different, and why projects, chains, and developers are keeping us on their radar.
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🎙INTRODUCTION

Why Now? Why Altius?

Annabelle opened the session with a clear message: the infrastructure gap in Web3 is real — and it’s the biggest thing holding us back from true adoption.

“With Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, liquidity is entering the space — but there are still infrastructure gaps preventing more of that activity from actually moving on-chain. That’s exactly why Altius was born.”

Meet the Team Driving the Engine

Anit, co-founder and CTO, came from over a decade of building low-latency distributed systems in high-frequency trading. “A lot of the techniques we used there — distributed caching, low-latency compute, and efficient parallelism — can be applied to blockchain. The time is right to bring those to Web3.”

What Is Altius — Actually?

Some people confuse Altius with being a new L1 or L2 — and we get it. There’s been a lot of noise in the space. Annabelle explained it clearly:

“What we’re building is modular — we focus only on execution. We’ve decoupled execution from consensus. We don’t reinvent consensus. We optimize how transactions are executed and how state is updated. That’s it.”

She compared it to AWS:

“In the early days, startups had to build their own physical data centers. Now they spin up on AWS and go. That’s how we see Altius for L1s, L2s, and appchains.”

Ivan added:

“Every car has an engine under the hood. Altius is the engine — we make your chain go faster, no matter what color the car is.”

💡THESIS FROM INVESTORS

Bridget Harris, Founders Fund

“There aren’t that many second-time founders in crypto building something deeply technical, highly integrable, and truly ethical. Annabelle is one of them. We’ve backed her before and we’re bullish again.”

“We love their vision of being a modular execution layer, not just another general-purpose chain. The execution layer is massively underexplored — and extremely performance-critical.”

“The Altius team has the rare combo of business clarity and technical talent — that’s very hard to find in crypto.”

Nihal Maunder, Pantera Capital

“As soon as we met Annabelle and Anit, it was clear they were a few standard deviations ahead of most founders. That’s a big part of why we got excited.”

“The long-term vision — helping other chains abstract away execution entirely — is where this space is headed. Founders shouldn’t need to rebuild infra just to scale.”

“Whether it’s RWA, asset tokenization, or perp DEXes — those teams should focus on product. Altius helps with everything under the hood.”

Danny Sursock, Archetype

“Crypto is at a structural inflection point. Institutions are here, AI is enabling new types of creators, and UX is improving fast. The last missing piece is performance.”

“Altius brings that performance layer — it gives founders the chance to compete not just in crypto, but globally.”

“Annabelle embodies the intersection between grassroots building and institutional maturity. And Anit’s background is unique — they’ve actually built performant systems at real scale, not just in theory.”

🤝 STATUS UPDATE & MILESTONES

Tech Deep Dive
Anit shared what’s already been accomplished — and where we’re headed:

• 100% performance improvement just from initial integration and DB-level optimizations

• An additional 2–3x expected from full caching and parallel execution

• Architecture is EVM-compatible now, but VM-agnostic by design

• Long-term goal: shared execution layer powering multiple chains dynamically

“We’re not trying to replace consensus. We sit inside the VM — and bring raw performance. If you’re running into state bloat or throughput ceilings, Altius lets you scale just by adding nodes.”

“We’re aiming for gigagas-level throughput. That’s my personal benchmark.”

Company Culture & Hiring

Annabelle shared how the team is structured and what they value:

“We’re still lean — most of the team you saw on the AMA is the core team. We’re building with people we’ve worked with before. It’s very organic, and very mission-driven.”

“We’re selectively expanding — looking for people who are curious, comfortable building in ambiguity, and want to leave a mark on the industry.”

Partnerships

“Now that the EVM version of our stack is close to being polished, we’re more aggressively speaking with L1s, L2s, appchains, and also tooling providers,” said Annabelle.

“We’re also listening. For node operators, state bloat and hardware cost are major concerns. Appchains want customizability and faster time-to-market. We’re building to solve those problems.”

🙋 COMMUNITY QUESTIONS

Are developers your main target audience?

Annabelle: “Right now yes — we’re working with builders. But we’re also building for the end-users. They’re the ones who will ultimately benefit. That’s why our ambassador program and monthly AMAs matter. We want to hear from everyone.”

What is the Altius Ambassador Program?

Ivan: “It’s our way of recognizing early supporters. We’re designing mechanics to reward meaningful actions — not random engagement. We’ll be launching a separate AMA in Discord soon to explain everything.”

Will there be a token?

Annabelle: “There’s no specific plan for now. We’re taking our time. A token should have a real value model and business case — not just exist because it’s expected.”

Is there a testnet?

Annabelle: “We’re not launching a chain, so the idea of a ‘testnet’ doesn’t apply the same way. But we’ll be publishing a public benchmarking tool soon, along with a GitHub repo — so developers can test performance gains firsthand.”

How hard is it to integrate Altius?

Annabelle: “For most chains, especially newer modular ones, it should take days. For more legacy setups — maybe a few weeks.”

Anit: “If it’s a stack we’ve already worked with, the integration is basically free.”

Will Altius run validators?

Yes, this is part of the longer-term roadmap. We’ll share validator participation options as we move closer to launch.

How do you handle security?

Anit: “Security isn’t our layer. We don’t touch consensus. We run inside the execution environment. That’s by design — we want chains to keep their own security model. We just give them speed.”
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🏁 CLOSING REMARKS

We’re still early — but we’ve started the engine.

What’s next:

• Public benchmark suite launching in the coming weeks

• Full Discord AMA for the Ambassador Program

• First partnerships already in the pipeline

• Hiring is open — see the website

• Monthly Pit Stop AMAs on Twitter (X) to continue bringing insights directly to you

If you’re building an L1, L2, or appchain — or if you simply believe that Web3 should be faster, more scalable, and more accessible — we’re here to help.

You build the car. We build the engine.

Follow us on Twitter, reach out via DM for partnerships, or check out open roles on the website. See you at the next Pit Stop.

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