What is Pod Network?

Pod Network is a decentralized protocol simplifying Web3 application development through modular and cross-chain technology. It features no blocks, no leaders, and a relaxed approach to total transaction ordering.

The project was created to address a key challenge in Web3: the complexity of blockchain application development and the high operational costs. By enabling resource sharing and seamless data interoperability between blockchains, Pod Network provides developers with an efficient, secure, and scalable solution.

Project Background

The Pod Network team comprises engineers and developers with extensive experience in blockchain technology and the industry. Team members from top global companies such as a16z, Google, Amazon, and Twitter bring deep technical expertise and innovation capabilities.

Shresth Agrawal is the co-founder and CEO of Pod Network and also serves as an advisor at Common Prefix. Haris Karavasilis, co-founder and COO, previously worked at Amazon. Dionysis Zindros, the Chief Strategy Officer, has prior experience at Google and Twitter. Kelly Buzby, a core member of Pod Network, previously worked at Bloomberg and a16z.

In January 2025, Pod Network completed a $10 million seed round, led by a16z Crypto CSX and 1kx Network. Participation came from Flashbots, Blockchain Builders Fund, Protagonist, Nick White, Sergey Gorbunov, David Tse, Waikit Lau, and other well-known venture capital firms and angel investors. Even before the seed round, Pod Network had already secured support from strategic investors and angel backers, ensuring funding for early-stage research and development.

Partially Ordered Data Sets

The core design of the Pod Network system is extremely simple: transactions are streamed to a set of validators, who verify and timestamp them—without blocks, a blockchain, complex consensus protocols, or cryptographic algorithms.

Pod acts as a Layer 1 primitive designed to take transactions as input and produce a log (a sequential list of transactions) as output. Unlike traditional blockchains that enforce strict total ordering of transactions, Pod introduces a weak consensus protocol where transactions are only partially ordered. This means that while transactions follow a sequence, their exact positions may slightly shift over time—a concept often referred to as “sway space.”

“Sway Space” Illustration (Source: pod.network)

By leveraging the flexibility of “sway space,” Pod achieves optimal latency and throughput performance. It eliminates the need for communication between validators, allowing clients to submit transactions directly to the network. Transactions are then ordered efficiently and scalable. This design makes Pod a powerful backend for decentralized applications, providing high-speed, verifiable data without being constrained by traditional consensus bottlenecks.

pod-core

Pod Network introduces pod-core, a new consensus concept designed to achieve physically optimal latency. Transactions can be written and read with just one network round trip, meaning confirmation occurs within approximately 200 milliseconds. This optimized latency allows throughput to match the physical capacity of the network, reaching speeds comparable to Google Search.

TPS data comparison reference

Note: The above figures are approximate. Actual performance may vary depending on network conditions and system configurations.

The flowchart below illustrates how transactions move from the client to a set of validator nodes and back to the client, completing in a single network round trip. The entire process is straightforward, with the infrastructure consisting of an active set of validators responsible for recording transactions. Validators do not communicate directly with each other, which is the key reason behind Pod’s high speed.

Clients know the active validator set. They connect to these validators and send transactions, which are eventually confirmed. Clients can then query the validator logs to discover confirmed transactions and their associated “sway range.”

Transaction Flow (Source: pod.network)

Design Advantages

Latency Optimization: Transactions are confirmed within a single network round trip (approximately 200 milliseconds). This achieves a speed close to the physical limits of light, making Web3 as fast and simple as Google Search.

Streaming-Based Architecture: Every aspect of the Pod system is push-based rather than pull-based, eliminating the need for blocks. Traditional blockchains require users to wait for a new block to be created before confirming transactions, introducing artificial delays. Pod’s streaming-based design allows users to confirm transactions immediately after receiving enough signatures.

Simplicity: pod-core employs a minimalistic design, making auditing and formal analysis straightforward. Its consensus mechanism consists of only a few hundred lines of Rust code, avoiding complex cryptographic techniques such as zero-knowledge proofs or multiparty computation. While Pod leverages advanced cryptographic methods for enhanced functionality, its core structure remains simple.

Modularity and Flexibility: Despite its simplicity, Pod is a feature-rich system. To maintain this balance, each component is designed independently with clear interfaces for interoperability. This highly modular architecture allows developers to customize and build application components according to their needs, improving development efficiency.

Scalability: Inspired by traditional relational database management systems (DBMS), Pod applies proven scalability techniques to reach internet-scale performance. These include separating write and read validators (master-slave architecture), efficient caching and indexing, load balancing, and hot-swapping. Additionally, Pod incorporates Certificate Transparency (CT), a foundational security mechanism behind X.509/HTTPS, enabling it to handle internet-scale transaction throughput.

Censorship Resistance: While Pod guarantees high-performance transaction confirmations, it also enforces censorship resistance within the same short confirmation time frame. This ensures that honest transactions cannot be selectively censored—any censorship attack would have to either stall the entire system or allow all honest transactions to be confirmed. Since Pod operates without leaders or blocks, system-wide stalling never occurs, ensuring both liveness and censorship resistance.

Traceability: Every validator’s statements within Pod are fully traceable, from individual transaction confirmations to lightweight client queries about smart contracts, and even full ledger reports for full nodes. This accountability mechanism allows misbehaving validators to be penalized, ensuring strong economic security.

On Execution

In blockchain systems, confirmed transactions are arranged sequentially, and the final state is derived by applying each transaction individually. This process is known as state machine replication. In Pod, however, the system can process non-conflicting transactions more efficiently. Each transaction locks only the part of the state it affects, rather than applying a global lock on the entire state machine as in traditional systems. This means that transactions do not have to wait for previous ones to be fully executed before being processed. In simple terms, if two or more transactions do not have a strict execution order and can be swapped (i.e., their effects on the system state remain the same regardless of the order in which they are confirmed), they can be executed simultaneously.

For applications that require strict ordering, Pod allows developers to build custom ordering tools that inherit Pod’s security guarantees. This enables MEV-sensitive applications to control how ordering is managed while still benefiting from the underlying system’s speed and composability.

Pod supports EVMx, an extended version of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). With EVMx, developers can continue using their familiar Solidity toolchain while benefiting from Pod’s fast finality and execution speed. EVMx is designed to minimize the development effort needed to leverage Pod’s high-speed execution capabilities.

On Scalability

Building on pod-core, Pod Network optimizes and enhances multiple scalability features using cryptographic techniques. These enhancements follow the trust-minimization principle, meaning that the security of Pod Network relies solely on pod-core’s security.

Secondary Nodes

Pod separates write-processing nodes from read-processing nodes. Secondary nodes are non-trusted, read-only nodes designed to reduce the workload of validators, which handle only write operations. Each validator signs and forwards new transactions to secondary nodes. These secondary nodes cache signed updates and relay them to relevant subscriber nodes, offloading frequent read requests from validators and preventing validator overload.

Since secondary nodes do not sign responses, they do not require additional trust. If a secondary node stops responding, users can simply switch to another secondary node of the same validator. Validators can scale read operations efficiently by adding multiple secondary nodes as needed.

Secondary Node Flow Diagram (Source: pod.network)

Lightweight Validators

Pod does not require active validators to store past logs to further enhance network decentralization, significantly reducing their storage requirements. This is achieved through the Merkle Mountain Range (MMR), where each leaf node in the tree represents a transaction paired with its corresponding timestamp.

Validators only need to maintain the latest peaks of the MMR instead of storing the full historical log. When a validator adds a new transaction to the log, it updates the MMR accordingly and sends out the updated secondary node certification root and timestamp. Validators only need to keep the rightmost slope of the MMR, and each time a new transaction arrives, the existing slope is sufficient to compute the new MMR slope and its root.

Merkle Tree Illustration (Source: pod.network)

Lightweight Clients

Pod has built-in support for lightweight clients, utilizing a simple and efficient data structure called the Merkle Segment Mountain Range (MSMR). MSMR combines Merkle trees with segment trees, enabling a traceable lightweight client.

Lightweight clients can verifiably retrieve smart contract information of interest while ensuring no data is omitted. This structure allows lightweight clients to function without needing to trust intermediary servers, ensuring efficiency and security.

Security Analysis

In the security analysis of pod-core, two key parameters are considered:

Quorum threshold (α): The minimum number of validators required to maintain system liveness.

Security recovery threshold (β): The minimum number of validators required to ensure system security.

In traditional consensus systems, these parameters are typically set at 1/3, but in Pod, they can be adjusted as needed, providing greater flexibility in balancing security and efficiency.

Traceable Liveness

Pod ensures that honest transactions will eventually be confirmed. When a client sees at least α validators sign a transaction, it takes the median of these timestamps as the confirmation time. If the network delay is δ, the transaction will be confirmed within 2δ. If a validator fails to confirm a transaction in time, adversaries controlling fewer than n - α validators will be held accountable.

Traceable Security

Pod guarantees transaction immutability by ensuring that once an honest validator confirms a transaction, all other validators will provide the same timestamp range. Regardless of what malicious validators attempt, they cannot alter the timestamp. If an attacker modifies timestamps and controls more than β validators, they will be held accountable. This guarantees that even in the presence of malicious validators, the transaction confirmation time remains consistent and tamper-proof.

Future Development & Conclusion

Pod, a new programmable Layer 1 blockchain network utilizing an innovative Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanism, is designed to optimize the latency performance of decentralized systems at a fundamental level. It provides developers with a platform to build real-world applications while addressing the inherent high-latency issues in blockchain technology and the low scalability challenges of traditional consensus protocols. With the rapid growth of the Web3 ecosystem, market demand for Pod is increasing. According to official information released by Pod, a developer network is expected to launch in the coming weeks, providing developers with additional tools and technical support. The project will introduce a developer toolkit that includes smart contract templates, SDKs, and API interfaces, enabling developers to build and deploy applications quickly. Additionally, Pod will offer compatibility solutions to ensure seamless integration with existing Web2 systems. The testnet is scheduled to go live in Q3 2025, with the mainnet launch planned for Q1 2026.

In summary, Pod Network provides developers with a powerful and scalable decentralized application platform through its innovative design and flexible protocol architecture. As the technology continues to evolve, Pod Network is poised to secure a significant position in the Web3 space and become a key driving force in advancing decentralized applications.