Following the mainnet launch of our web3 automation service on Ethereum, I’d like to share the story of Ava Protocol’s evolution from its roots as OAK Network. This is my account of our path, driven by persistence, vision, and a dedication to advancing web3 automation.
2014 - 2021: Prologue
In 2014, I attended my first Bitcoin meetup at Stanford University. The discussions, particularly around the complexity of building mining facilities in the U.S., were perplexing. I was a software developer working on distributed systems at Microsoft at the time, and blockchain didn’t seem revolutionary. But the Ethereum whitepaper changed everything for me in 2017. My initial experience with ETH trading sparked a deeper interest in the technology behind it, which led me to leave Microsoft and dive into this new frontier.
My early experience coding Ethereum smart contracts was frustrating due to the ecosystem’s immaturity. I joined a promising startup in San Francisco that was building a prediction market (like PolyMarket) on Ethereum, but it didn’t survive the 2018-2020 bear market. I led a small team as a developer and entrepreneur during that period, contributing to various Ethereum components, including the web3.js SDK, gas station smart contracts, and the Truffle suite. Despite the tough times, I stayed committed to crypto, and the DeFi summer of 2020 validated my confidence.
2021: The Starting Point
In 2021, inspired by the Polkadot Network’s launch and its multi-chain architecture, I met Polkadot founder (and Ethereum co-founder) Gavin Wood at the mainnet event in New York City. With his encouragement, my team and I began building an autonomous transaction protocol, aiming to create a super-transaction that could auto-trigger based on time, price, and smart contract events. Though many are under the impression that web3 has already achieved these automated functions, from the perspective of a developer or user, it hasn’t yet delivered an experience as smooth as web2 payment services like Stripe.
This marked the beginning of OAK, which stood for Onchain Autonomous Kernel. We chose Polkadot for its advanced technology, particularly its smart wallets and the XCM cross-chain messaging protocol, which allowed us to automate transactions for users on Moonbeam and Astar. Before long, we raised a $5.5M Seed round led by Electric Capital, Greylock, and Foundation Capital, with Sandeep Naiwal from Polygon joining as a top angel investor. This funding allowed us to embark on our journey with great enthusiasm.
Early 2022: Initial Success on Polkadot
With fresh funding, we quickly expanded to 15 people and launched a successful Kusama crowdloan campaign, securing a parachain slot for our Turing Network testnet with oversubscribed participation.
Later in the year, we won the Polkadot parachain auction, selling out all crowdloan rewards within four hours. Everything seemed to be on the right track, prompting us to start another fundraising round at a higher valuation.
2022 - 2023: The Bear and the Churn
Unfortunately, the industry was hit by a series of events in 2022, including the collapse of Luna, Three Arrows Capital, and FTX. I recognized the signs of another bear market, and we had to make tough decisions, including letting go of half our team to stay sustainable. Delivering that news remains one of my most difficult experiences to date.
I also started another round of fundraising. Raising funds in a bear market is incredibly challenging, but we completed an additional $4.5M Seed+ round with the support of Electric Capital and new investors like Taisu Ventures and BloccelerateVC, bringing our total raised to $10M.
I’m deeply grateful to the team members who stayed with us during these tough times when it seemed as though the industry was collapsing. Their resilience reflects the true spirit of web3.
2023 - 2024: Just Build Through It
With the Seed+ round secured, we just focused on building. We delivered more than our roadmap promised over the two years of the bear market, launching cross-chain tools and a developer-friendly SDK. Our key products included:
• Time Automation: Launched in 2022 on our Kusama parachain, Turing Network.
• Dynamic Dispatch: an innovative improvement introduced a few months later.
• LP Auto-Compound Cross-Chain Product: Developed by ecosystem developers.
• Price Automation: Released in 2023.
• Cross-Chain Product Demo: Built with the ArthSwap team on Astar.
• Data Insights: Created a transaction scheduling dashboard and API to assist ecosystem developers.
• Automation Hub: Launched in late 2023, featuring auto-staking, auto-bridge, and cross-chain auto-pay capabilities.
• Visual Drag-and-Drop Tool: Developed by Bagpipe, a grant recipient and ecosystem developer.
These consumer-facing products are just the beginning. We dedicated most of our time to enhancing our infrastructure, streamlining developer experiences. Today, complex permissionless automation can be implemented with just three lines of code using our JavaScript/TypeScript SDK. As seasoned developers, we understand what makes a developer’s life easier.
2024: A New Opportunity
Going into 2024, we knew that it was time to launch our mainnet. Meeting Sreeram Kannan and reading the EigenLayer whitepaper revealed an exciting opportunity. It included event-driven activation as one of EigenLayer’s core use cases, aligning perfectly with what we’d been building. The value of deploying an Actively Validated Service (AVS) on EigenLayer was clear.
As we prepared our AVS launch this year, we rebranded from OAK Network to Ava Protocol to mark our expansion from Polkadot to Ethereum and beyond. We also acquired Openstory, a data streaming platform for on-chain data and analytics that boosts Ava Protocol’s ability to provide precise insights into EVM chain activities, and started growing the team again.
On July 18, we launched our EigenLayer AVS on the Ethereum mainnet, empowering developers and users to create seamless, private, and composable automation for any smart contract function without needing to write code. Within two weeks of launching, Ava Protocol’s operator TVL spiked to over $1.7B worth of ETH and counting.
EigenLayer’s modular off-chain computation will be a game-changer, addressing Ethereum’s liquidity fragmentation. As first movers in the automation track, we feel responsible for delivering mature products for Ethereum, Polkadot, and beyond, enabling seamless user experiences.
The Team
I want to acknowledge our incredible team. Vinh and Charles have led our engineering efforts, earning over 100 stars on our GitHub and attracting more than 20 contributors. As core contributors to Polkadot, we’ve been involved across various aspects of its core code, including browser wallets, blockchain infrastructure, data infrastructure, and developer tools.
Sam and Scott have recently joined to drive our marketing efforts, and their strategic plan across both established channels and new channels like Farcaster gives me confidence that we will grow our community exponentially in the coming months.
Future plans include preparing the token generation event for the AP utility token, as well as the release of a demo app to showcase Ava Protocol’s automation capabilities.
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Thank you for being a part of Ava Protocol’s journey. It’s been a wild ride, but we’re just getting started. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us on Discord.
Onward!
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About Chris Li
Chris Li (LinkedIn) is the founder and CEO of Ava Protocol. Prior to establishing Ava Protocol, Chris gained valuable experience as a Messaging Protocol Engineer at Microsoft and as a successful serial entrepreneur. He is also a long-term EVM smart contract developer, Web3 Foundation grant recipient, and Polkadot core contributor.
