From the Founder - Introducing Artela

Welcome to the Artela blog, a space where we will share our journey, insights, and stories from the heart of our operation. As the founder of Artela, I wanted to create a platform where we can connect with you, our valued community, on a more personal level.

Here, we'll delve into the intricacies of our work, the challenges we've faced, our victories, and our vision for the future. We hope that through these shared experiences, we can foster a deeper understanding and appreciation for the web3 world and the role Artela plays within it.

The Name

The name Artela gets inspiration from the famous Steve Jobs quote "technology alone is not enough—it's technology married with liberal arts that yields us the results that make our heart sing." So from Liberal Arts, and Technology come the word Artela.

Not only an inspirational quote, it was personal to me as Jobs said it during a product launch that I worked on as a tech lead while with Apple. It resonated with me then and I hope that's what Artela aspires to do.

The Team

Team Artela is a group of technologists hailing from some major global technology companies, particularly in fintech and consumer mobile internet fields. We are also some of the early crypto enthusiasts and adopters. The founding team have worked together since 2018, focusing on blockchain technology development while shipping products and services to millions of users.

The Mission

Artela’s mission is to accelerate web3 adoption in the world. We believe in a future where decentralized technology solves many of the inherent problems with today’s internet, such as user sovereignty, data privacy, platform monopoly. Web3 as an industry is still in its infancy but has shown a lot of promises. Imagine a future where you don’t need to jump through multiple hoops just to hope your financial transactions make through, where content creators get their fair share of the economics and their livelihood don’t rely on arbitrary policy of centralized platforms, where users truly owns their digital identity and valuable asset. Not everything will need to be decentralized nor should all the data be stored on a blockchain. But for majority of the “internet of values”, the web3 transition is inevitable and almost imminent.

The Tech

To realize the benefits of web3’s promises, we need a solid technological foundation to foster innovations. The fundamental technology of web3 is public blockchain, which was first introduced to the world by Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin network then later on greatly expanded in terms of capabilities by smart contract platforms such as Ethereum.

Some people view blockchain as decentralized data network, i.e distributed ledger technology. In reality it is so much more than just data level. We view it as a whole new type of computing platform, on which possibilities are endless. It will enable the next wave of internet innovations. It is live, decentralized and keeps getting better.

So a blockchain is more like a computer than a ledger or database. The challenge for us is how to design a better computer. Web3’s version of quest for a better mousetrap is a better blockchain. That’s what Artela sets out to do.

Where do we begin? How do you even define a better blockchain? Should there be multiple chains for different applications or should there be one chain to rule them all? The trilemma of decentralization, security and scalability seems unavoidable for any implementation. Newer development takes the modular approach in design, giving developers more flexibility in tools and architectural selection.

We believe in modularity and we can take it steps further. Artela’s version of a better blockchain composes a robust consensus engine, an interoperable base chain, and application specific on-chain extensions.

First, Artela blockchain is built on top of Cosmos SDK with many improvements on the engine level. We can achieve state of art performance such as high throughput and quick finality while maintaining interchain compatibility.

Second, Artela is EVM compatible. Most of today’s smart contracts are EVM based and we want to be able to support them with minimum effort.

Third but not the least, the biggest innovation of Artela is to introduce Aspect Programming to enable on-chain extensions. Along with EVM, a second WASM based VM is added to support multiple programing languages(assembly script, rust, C, C++) and enable access to more on chain resources. Compared to EVM’s general computing environment, Aspect VM can be 10x to 100x more efficient in specific tasks optimized for memory usage and computation. So EVM is for general purpose smart contract and Aspect VM is for application specific extensions. Combined together Artela blockchain is the best platform to create innovative dApps for mass adoption.

The Journey

Artela was officially founded at the end of 2022. We have been busy building ever since. We have completed most of the foundational work going into public testnet in January 2024 and will launch mainnet in middle of 2024. We are grateful to our investors, most of whom are highly reputable web3 professional investors from North America and Asia and share our values and put trust in our team to create something special.

Throughout the year, we also traveled many places around the world, attending conferences, meeting with developers and communities. From Denver, to Hong Kong, to Paris, to Palo Alto, to Singapore, to Istanbul, we see enthusiasm in so many people everywhere we go. Technology can do good. Technology alone is not enough. Through technical innovations and community engagement, Web3 has the unique opportunity to bring humanity together and forward to a better place. We gained so much more faith in our mission and the direction we are taking. Artela can do so much more than building a better computer, a better blockchain. The future has never been more clear.

Web3 is inevitable. Join us on this journey by following us on Twitter and joining our Discord community! We’ll be sharing a LOT more soon, and our team (including myself) will be hosting twitter spaces and discord stages in the near future - so looking forward to see you!

Jerry@Artela