Most people treats consensus protocols as boring and impenetrable. That’s a mistake.

Under the hood, there’s an intense race to design faster, higher-throughput, and adversary-resilient consensus protocols. That work directly determines retail UX and explains why Ethereum, Solana, and other L1s obsess over consensus.

For Episode 1 of The Coordinate, I sat down with Kartik Nayak, one of the world’s leading consensus researchers, to pull consensus out of the black box and build a first-principles mental model: how consensus actually works, how it evolved over last 50 years, how today’s sprawling protocol families fit together, and what the next frontier of consensus research looks like.

This is Episode 1 of The Coordinate. Hope you enjoy it.