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About commonware
commonware is a Rust library of blockchain primitives — consensus, peer-to-peer networking, cryptography and storage — that teams compose themselves into chains and execution environments. It targets the over-prescription of existing frameworks: Cosmos and Substrate-style stacks bundle in the state machine and governance, so changing consensus or networking means touching the whole stack.
The idea is an anti-framework: each primitive stands alone and teams combine what they need, with the Simplex consensus producing blocks in about 200 ms and finality in 300 ms. On May 12 it advanced the Route 66 cross-chain effort together with Coinbase, and in July it published research including Multimmit. The project is early, its APIs are unstable and open issues are plentiful — a fit for teams with engineering depth rather than those wanting something turnkey. Its users are teams building their own chains rather than end-user products.
Commonware was founded in 2024 by Patrick O'Grady, former VP of engineering at Ava Labs and the force behind Coinbase's Rosetta standard, on an "anti-framework" thesis: consensus, networking, storage and runtime broken into swappable open-source primitives.
In late 2024 Commonware closed a $9 million seed co-led by Haun Ventures and Dragonfly Capital, with angels including Avalanche's Kevin Sekniqi, Cosmos's Zaki Manian and Helius's Mert Mumtaz.
Commonware used a minimal test chain, Alto, to prove the assembly: roughly 200 ms blocks, 300 ms finality and 65% lower CPU use, showing that stripping framework overhead can approach payment-grade throughput.
In November 2025 Tempo, the payments L1 incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, made a $25 million strategic investment in Commonware, its first external bet, and integrated the library's consensus components into its network.
Tempo's mainnet produced its first block on January 16, 2026 and opened publicly on March 18; its Simplex BFT consensus and the CertifiableBlock added in the T4 upgrade both come from Commonware, proving a primitives library can underpin a production payment chain.
The deal turned Commonware from an audit-friendly toolkit into the consensus base of a stablecoin settlement chain, while exposing its concentration risk: one customer, one payment use case, defining the technical roadmap.
On May 12 Commonware co-launched the "Route 66" initiative with Coinbase to reduce the cost and complexity of integrating new blockchains into wallets, exchanges, custodians and data providers; Coinbase Ventures made a strategic investment in Commonware at the same time. The company had previously raised $9 million co-led by Haun Ventures and Dragonfly Capital and has released primitives including Simplex Consensus, p2p communication and a deterministic runtime.
Route 66 makes integrability a competitive dimension for new chains: commonware argues that very few chains each year are fully integrated by wallets, exchanges, custodians and data providers not for lack of demand but because integration cost exceeds the payoff, so it front-loads adaptation to hard forks, precompiles and new cryptographic algorithms into shared standards and toolchains. Coinbase Ventures' strategic investment ties that standard to Coinbase's listing, custody and wallet rails, and an adopted standard becomes a distribution moat. For commonware, influence comes from being the default integration layer rather than selling node software for any single chain.
Patrick O'Grady, founder. He graduated in computer science from Stanford University and began his career in software engineering, working at Coinbase from 2019 to 2021 as a crypto engineer and leading the creation of the Rosetta blockchain integration standard. He then joined Ava Labs, serving as senior engineer and later vice president of engineering while leading development of the HyperSDK framework. He founded Commonware in 2024 around an anti-framework thesis of composable primitives replacing monolithic frameworks.
Roberto Bayardo, distinguished engineer. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he spent nineteen years at Google before joining Coinbase, where as a distinguished engineer he led the overall architecture design of the Base network. At Commonware he implements underlying primitives covering storage, Merkle databases and peer-to-peer networking, and is the second-largest code contributor after the founder.
Brendan Chou, core engineer. A graduate of Princeton University who previously worked at Google and Bloomberg, he became the first engineering hire and chief architect of the decentralized derivatives protocol dYdX, building its perpetuals trading system from scratch, and now contributes to Commonware's consensus and cryptography modules.
Ben Clabby, software engineer. He began his career at OP Labs, the Optimism development team, where he led construction of Optimism's fault proof system, and later joined Commonware to work on composable primitives for networking and consensus.
Andre Silva, core developer. He started at Parity Technologies and spent years working on protocol development for the Polkadot and Substrate clients, and at Commonware handles the cryptography and runtime modules in the Rust primitives library.
Commonware, a Rust-based blockchain framework, has recently welcomed a new team member.\n\nLeonardo Yvens Schwarzstein joined in July 2026 as a Software Engineer. He previously served as a software engineer at Edge & Node and The Graph, with experience in blockchain data platforms and stream processing, including work on Amp, a blockchain-native data platform. His addition is expected to strengthen Commonware's capabilities in data engineering and blockchain infrastructure.