TheCoordinate by Soubhik Deb

What should an ideal digital identity system look like? In this episode of Coordinate, Soubhik sits down with dcbbuilder, Research Engineer at World Foundation, to unpack the architecture of digital identity from first principles. We start with the core mental model: credentials, issuers, roots of trust, attestations, and relying parties. From there, we dive into the properties of a strong identit...

With Episode 6 of The Coordinate, we are taking the podcast to a whole new level by kicking off a series on post-AGI economics. Recently, there has been a sharp rise in discussions around agents engaging in commercial activity, with some even projecting that agentic commerce could eventually eclipse the human-based commerce we know today. But many of these conversations stop short of exploring the...

Payments are the electricity of the economy and Stripe’s annual letter even called out Tempo as part of where payments are going. In Episode 5 of The Coordinate, I sat with Mallesh Pai, Researcher at Tempo and The Lay Family Professor in Department of Economics at Rice University to discuss why Tempo is building a payments-first blockchain: TIP-20 (opinionated ERC-20) w/ policies + RBAC + transfer...

Ethereum is starting from the endgame. Episode 4 of TheCoordinate is a deep dive into Lean Ethereum : a clean-slate rethink of consensus, execution, and data availability. I sat down with Justin Drake from Ethereum Foundation to unpack: need for the rewrite, rewrite items: post-quantum security + fast finality, endgame finality (3-slot -> 2-slot -> maybe 1-slot), slot anatomy, networking con...

Solana is rewriting its core. Episode 3 of TheCoordinate is about one of the most ambitious protocol upgrades in crypto right now: AlpenGlow, a redesign of Solana's consensus + data propagation stack. I sat down with Roger Wattenhofer, Kobi and Quentin Kniep from Anza Labs to break down: what was structurally limited in TowerBFT + PoH? how AlpenGlow works end-to-end: Rotor (erasure-coded dissemina...

What does state-of-the-art blockchain engineering look like in 2026? In Episode 2 of TheCoordinate podcast, I sat down with Patrick O’Grady & Brendan Chou (Commonware) to unpack their Anti-Framework philosophy: build chains by composing optimized primitives—not inheriting a monolithic stack. We go deep on: how Commonware is designed in practice (and how to use it) who it’s for vs Cosmos-style...

Most people treats consensus protocols as boring and impenetrable. That’s a mistake. Under the hood, there’s an intense race to design faster, higher-throughput, and adversary-resilient consensus protocols. That work directly determines retail UX and explains why Ethereum, Solana, and other L1s obsess over consensus. For Episode 1 of The Coordinate, I sat down with Kartik Nayak, one of the world’s...