Satsuma Engineering

Building a live Solidity Layer-1, in the open.

Deep-dives, comparisons, and updates from building Satsuma — on performance, architecture, and the developer experience.

Why Satsuma Has 2-Second Blocks

Block time is the one performance setting a chain can't change after it launches. Here's why Satsuma's is two seconds — and why faster blocks don't actually make a faster chain.

Inside Satsuma's Performance Benchmarks

A look at what the benchmarks measured, and how. What a 'transaction' even means, Satsuma's numbers next to a chain everyone knows, and a plain decode of the '143,000 TPS' headline you've probably seen.

Introduction to Satsuma

A live, sovereign Solidity Layer-1 — Ethereum-compatible, final in seconds, public to read and permissioned to write. A visual tour of what Satsuma is and the choices that shape it.

ISMP Bridging with Satsuma

We ran two independent satsuma chains — different genesis, different validators — and moved value between them with no multisig, no custodian, no middleman. Each chain verifies the other's GRANDPA finality on-chain, then verifies a state proof. 4 seconds end to end.

A Trustless zk Re-Genesis

The trust-minimized restart still leaned on an honest two-thirds of validators to sign. This time we replace the signatures with a zero-knowledge validity proof — anyone verifies it in milliseconds, and no coalition of validators can forge it.

The Limit of Sub-Second Blocks Is Geography, Not Speed

We built a testbed to push Satsuma's block time below one second and find where it breaks. Compute wasn't the wall. The speed of light was.

Tokenomics

All studies →

Launch Autopsy #2: Filecoin and the SAFT

The 2017 sale that inverted every choice Ethereum made: accredited-only, lawyer-built, fully vested — a record raise closed three days after China banned ICOs, for a network that was three years away. The SAFT era, in one launch.

Launch Autopsy #1: Ethereum's ICO

The sale that wrote the token-launch playbook: 42 days, ~31,500 BTC, 60 million ETH — priced in a currency that then halved. What the first great token launch got right, what it got away with, and what only worked because it was 2014.

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ISMP Bridging with Satsuma

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The Limit of Sub-Second Blocks Is Geography, Not Speed

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Introduction to Satsuma