Predicate: Transaction Prerequisites for App Expressivity

We have been thinking about transaction semantics for years. Today, we are happy to announce our investment in Predicate, a network working to simplify transaction pre-conditions, enhancing expressivity, accessibility, and security. 

We believe Predicate’s prerequisites and the policies formed by stacking pre-transaction rules represent the next step for blockchain apps and mass adoption. Here’s why.

Betting on Predicate

Blockchains like Ethereum are deterministic and open—they run one way and provide users with global, censorship resistant access to stored state. However, chain sovereignty comes with costs and complexity. Hacks are common and protocols warehouse risk without discrimination.

Today, protocols remain underserved by the limited expressivity encapsulated in typical EVM transactions. With Predicate, developers and communities of applications can define additional logic and layer it together to form policies (which are aggregate arguments of Boolean outputs). These policies link applications to greater onchain and offchain data, such as flow-of-funds and dynamic allowlists, which helps them control vulnerabilities, rate limit transactions, perform collateral verification, and generally enhance app and user experience.  

Policies are fully owned by the individual, org, or DAO. Predicate’s operator set and policies are verifiable and integrated into Ethereum using restaking, meaning network neutrality is both stewarded and enhanced without introducing vectors of centralization onto Ethereum.

Predicate is co-founded by Nikhil Raghuveera and Jesse Sawa, two close friends who worked together at Celo before mixing the former’s experience with policy at the Atlantic Council with the latter's heavy experience in engineering. Since investing in Predicate’s pre-seed round, we’ve seen immense progress in the founding team’s vision, progress, and hiring. 

To say the least, we are deeply excited about the ability of Predicate, and its policy infrastructure to open the blockchain design space and augment Ethereum without affecting sovereignty. If you are a developer or working at a protocol, consider reaching out to the team here.