Sui veteran's new venture: What is Rialo, the real-world blockchain?
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Sui veteran's new venture: What is Rialo, the real-world blockchain?
Rialo is a blockchain developed by Subzero Labs specifically for the real world, but its positioning goes beyond traditional Layer1, Layer2, or Layer3 frameworks.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy KarenZ, Foresight News
Despite growing interest in crypto from both Wall Street and retail investors, an awkward reality persists: most existing blockchains remain trapped within a closed "crypto bubble," disconnected from real-world services, data, and user behaviors, making it difficult for blockchain to integrate into everyday life. At the same time, developers want to focus on business logic rather than spending significant effort integrating oracles, maintaining nodes, or handling off-chain data.
In this context, the real-world blockchain Rialo aims to break down the barriers between blockchain and the real world, enabling teams to deliver production-ready applications as easily as Web2 development, allowing blockchain to seamlessly embed into the operational logic of the real world—just like smartphones.
What is Rialo?
Rialo is a blockchain developed by Subzero Labs specifically for real-world applications. However, its positioning moves beyond traditional Layer1, Layer2, or Layer3 frameworks. Its full name is "Rialo isn't a layer 1."
As Ade Adepoju, co-founder of Subzero Labs, explained in Fortune magazine: "It's like the evolution from iPod to iPhone—we don't need another device that only plays music, but a versatile tool that integrates camera, internet, GPS, and more."
Rialo’s core goal is to lower the barrier to using blockchain so that developers outside the crypto space can easily build applications. Its most distinctive feature is "natively connecting to the real world": for example, developers can directly call web data (such as FICO credit scores) within smart contracts without relying on third-party oracles; users can log in using familiar identities like social accounts or email, eliminating the need to learn wallet operations from scratch.
Fabric Ventures explained its investment in Rialo by noting that Rialo shifts the focus of blockchain L1s by embedding core functionalities needed by real-world developers directly into the protocol. Calls, data flows, timers, and cross-chain operations become native instructions rather than relying on external calls. Oracles, bridges, indexers, and other "traditional" infrastructure may no longer be necessary.
Team and Funding Background
In early August, Subzero Labs announced a $20 million seed round led by Pantera Capital. Participants included Mysten Labs (developer of Sui), Variant, Hashed, Fabric Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Mirana Ventures, Susquehanna, Edge Ventures, and Flowdesk. According to Fortune, CEO Ade Adepoju said the funding was completed in Q1 of this year and involved equity and token warrants.
Subzero Labs team members have previously worked at Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, TikTok, Citadel, Mysten Labs, and Solana, bringing extensive experience in blockchain, artificial intelligence, distributed systems, and hardware.
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Co-founder and CEO Ade Adepoju: 30 years old, based in New York City. He began his career at chipmaker AMD, then served as an engineer at Dell and Netflix. At the end of 2021, Ade Adepoju entered the crypto space as a founding engineer at Mysten Labs (until February 2024).
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Co-founder and CTO Lu Zhang: Former engineer at Mysten Labs.
How Does Rialo Work?
Although Rialo has not yet disclosed its blockchain architecture, its operational logic appears to center around “integrating RISC-V and Solana VM compatibility,” “reducing friction,” and “native integration.” This can be understood across several dimensions:
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Integration of RISC-V and Solana VM Compatibility: Rialo aims to minimize the need for middleware such as bridges and oracles by incorporating RISC-V smart contracts and Solana VM compatibility.
Notably, in April this year, Vitalik Buterin proposed on the Ethereum Magicians forum replacing Ethereum’s EVM with the open-source instruction set architecture RISC-V to improve scalability. In a vision for Ethereum’s “lean Ethereum” roadmap over the next decade published by Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake in August, he outlined major upgrades to Ethereum’s consensus, data, and execution layers, potentially building EVM 2.0 on the open-source RISC-V instruction set. Vitalik Buterin explained that replacing ZK-EVM with RISC-V could significantly boost efficiency in Ethereum’s execution layer, address one of the main scalability bottlenecks, and greatly simplify the execution layer.
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Developer-Friendly Technical Architecture: Unlike traditional blockchains, Rialo is designed with built-in capabilities for real-world interaction. For instance, a single HTTPS call in a smart contract can pull real-time data anywhere, and any off-chain API can be seamlessly integrated into smart contracts. Additionally, Rialo enhances the programming experience for smart contracts by introducing mechanisms common in traditional software development, such as "event-driven" and "asynchronous processing," enabling developers to write clean, straightforward logic just like regular code.
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User Experience "De-blockchainized": Rialo aims to redesign identity systems so users can log in using email, SMS, or existing social identities as a Web3 passport. Moreover, Rialo will support sending encrypted messages. Rialo claims sub-second transaction confirmation speeds with stable and predictable fees, avoiding issues like "gas fee spikes" and "sandwich attacks" common on traditional blockchains. It also supports 2FA, scheduled transactions, and other Web2-familiar features.
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Ecosystem Synergy: Breaking Down On-Chain/Off-Chain Barriers: Rialo’s underlying protocol will support direct interaction with various real-world services such as payment systems and weather data. This "native integration" capability enables applications on Rialo to cover a broader range of use cases.
Summary
Only when applications are simple enough and scenarios commonplace enough can crypto technology truly move beyond its "niche" origins.
Of course, Rialo still faces challenges: how to maintain decentralization while connecting to the real world? How to balance decentralization with compliance? And how to reconcile data openness with privacy protection?
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