What does state-of-the-art blockchain engineering look like in 2026?

In Episode 2 of TheCoordinate podcast, I sat down with Patrick O’Grady & Brendan Chou (Commonware) to unpack their Anti-Framework philosophy: build chains by composing optimized primitives—not inheriting a monolithic stack.

We go deep on:

• how Commonware is designed in practice (and how to use it)
• who it’s for vs Cosmos-style frameworks
• how their newest consensus protocol Minimit works (arguably the hottest kid in the consensus neighborhood)
• what’s coming with ExoWare

This is Episode 2 of TheCoordinate. Hope you enjoy it.

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.