In 2018, breakthrough consensus research was quietly reshaping the future of blockchain. Ted Yin, a Cornell PhD student, was collaborating with distributed systems researcher Dahlia Malkhi on HotStuff during his VMware internship. HotStuff wasn't built for profit: it was pure research driven by the belief that simplifying consensus protocols would provide a cleaner foundation for the entire blockchain industry. The impact was immediate: when Facebook announced Libra (later renamed Diem) in 2019, they adopted HotStuff for their global currency vision, with Dahlia joining the project.

Simultaneously, Ted was driving research on something entirely different. His Avalanche protocol used statistical properties to achieve consensus, specializing in node scalability. Ted built the first prototype proving thousands of real transactions per second across thousands of full-fledged validators, then co-founded Ava Labs and implemented its mainnet C-Chain that would handle billions in DeFi transactions during the pandemic boom.

When regulatory challenges eventually led to Diem's shutdown, the technical work lived on. The Diem engineering team founded Mysten Labs (Sui) and Aptos, carrying forward HotStuff's influence. Today, the protocol powers multiple high-performance blockchains: Flow, Espresso, Monad, and others processing significant daily volumes.

Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, a new infrastructure revolution was quietly unfolding. Lizan Zhou, a founding engineer at startups led by his former Google Cloud mentors, was helping to build the invisible backbone of modern cloud computing. As a core maintainer of the open-source projects Envoy Proxy and Istio, he played a pivotal role in developing service mesh technologies that now handle trillions of requests for companies like Google, Netflix, Uber, and countless others powering the critical systems behind today's digital experiences.

Hao Hao, Ted's close collaborator on experimental, cutting-edge projects like Firewood as a former colleague at Ava Labs, was looking for the next insightful and exciting initiative.

The convergence came through a shared realization. From the cloud world, we saw that next-generation computation needed to be more open-access and loosely organized, closer to blockchain's promise of permissionless participation and self-service deployment. From the blockchain world, we recognized that not everything needs to be on-chain, and the technology's capabilities needed dramatic improvement. The common ground we identified: service-centric, cloud-native decentralized infrastructure where nodes run services rather than chains, enables both the openness of blockchain platforms and the performance of modern cloud systems.

Each brought unique expertise to this vision. Ted contributed deep experience in optimizing and redesigning the entire blockchain infrastructure stack, from consensus to storage systems, and execution layers. Lizan brought extensive service mesh and cloud infrastructure expertise, having worked at Google Cloud on security and networking for Istio and Cloud Endpoints before becoming a founding engineer at Tetrate, where he leads traffic management as a senior maintainer of Envoy and core contributor to Istio. Dahlia, having collaborated with Ted at Chainlink Labs, joined as the Advisor to contribute decades of pioneering research and industry experience in distributed computing and blockchains, including leadership roles at Microsoft, VMware, and as CTO of Diem Association. Hao brought experience from Apache and Coinbase's production blockchain systems, and became the Founding Engineer of this new journey.

Together with PhD researchers Hongbo Zhang, who focuses on blockchain storage systems at Cornell, and Haoyu Gu, specializing in networks and operating systems at University of Waterloo, we're building Lyquor.

We're not here to work around blockchain limitations, but to move past them.