In 2018, BTC dropped from $20k to $3,000, and the ICO bubble burst.

That year, Uniswap was founded.
In 2022, Terra collapsed, Three Arrows Capital went bankrupt, and FTX shut down.
That year, Hyperliquid began building.
Many truly industry-changing things are created during the coldest market times.
Now, a new opportunity may be emerging:
a16z + 1kx lead investment
The founder previously participated in the design of decentralized auctions for Flashbots and CoW Swap
The goal is to reconstruct on-chain trading infrastructure
This project is @poddotnetwork
▌What does Hyperliquid prove?
Before talking about Pod Network, we must first discuss Hyperliquid.
Because Hyperliquid’s success has already proven a few very important things.
First, a dedicated L1 route is feasible.
Second, there is real demand for on-chain traditional financial assets.
And finally, most importantly, on-chain order books are not a fantasy.
Hyperliquid demonstrated that on-chain trading can reach daily volumes of billions of dollars.
The market is there, users are there, demand is there.
But Hyperliquid is not the end; it is not the final form of on-chain trading.
The emergence of Pod is precisely an attempt to fill this last piece of the puzzle.
Hyperliquid is fast, but each trade still requires nodes to reach consensus and be packaged into blocks.
Pod has done something extremely bold: completely abandoning “consensus” and “blocks.”
Its architecture is called streaming consensus-less. Each validator independently receives transactions, verifies them independently, timestamps independently, and signs proofs independently.
Validators do not communicate or coordinate.
Clients collect n-f proofs, and the transaction is finalized.
Hyperliquid relies on speed to combat MEV, while Pod relies on mathematical fairness.
As participants in the architecture design of Flashbots and CoW Swap, Pod founder Shresth Agrawal knows better than anyone that as long as there is ordering rights, there is room for “front-running.”
To address this, Pod introduces a batch auction mechanism, with a 10-millisecond window.
Within this window, whether you are a whale or a retail investor, no matter how many milliseconds faster you are, everyone’s transaction price is exactly the same.
CoW Swap proved that batch auctions are feasible in small-scale scenarios.
But Pod is the first to implement it at the protocol layer.
Not just patching at the application layer, but starting from the consensus architecture, removing speed advantages from market structure.
▌Who is doing this? Why them?
CEO Shresth Agrawal, former Paradigm scholar project participant, previously worked at ParaSwap and Common Prefix.
Pod’s architecture directly stems from his research back then.
CTO Alex Brezas, with over ten years of full-stack engineering experience, also comes from Common Prefix.
In terms of funding, Pod has completed a $10 million seed round, led by a16z and 1kx, with participation from Lemniscap, BBF, and others.
▌What’s the current status?
Pod is entering a phase of simultaneous product deployment and ecosystem building.
Waitlist is now live. The mechanism is simple:
Deposit USDC on Arbitrum (on-chain custody, withdrawable at any time, no lock-up period)
Deposit amount + referral count determines ranking
Higher rank means earlier access to testnet and mainnet early access
After mainnet launch, USDC on Arbitrum will be directly migrated to Pod network for use
Participation link: