# Try Cool Crypto - Initia By [Untitled](https://paragraph.com/@0x22801e53e7d815f465718f5947cd9febf0734d14) ยท 2025-04-28 --- Intro ----- Today I'm taking a quick look at Initia -- with the emphasis on quick. I had hoped to be back to writing as normal this week after a few weeks break, but unfortunately, I've been pretty busy and haven't had as much time to focus on this as I'd hoped. Still, I wanted to get something out (even if it is a day later than planned), so here it is. Anyway, that's probably enough waffle for now, let's get to the focus of this post: Initia. People have been trying to take a modular approach to crypto for years now. Cosmos were arguably the pioneers, hoping to create an ecosystem of individual appchains that could communicate with each other. They created a bunch of incredibly useful and important tools to enable this (many of which are used by Initia today) but they failed to capture value from them. Then Ethereum had a go. The Ethereum ecosystem is home to an ever-growing number of rollups like Base, Optimism, and Arbitrum, but again the main chain has failed to capture much value from the L2s it supports. Worse still, the proliferation of multiple different chains caused a UX nightmare and fractured liquidity across the ecosystem in both cases. This is the problem that Initia has been designed to address. In many ways, it feels like a more sophisticated, thought-through version of Cosmos or Ethereum. We'll see how it works below. ![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/fb88f85e8b379b3c32fe67349ae7c7768c233892d78d55f9ab476d6f60c28b8c.png) I enjoyed [this episode of The Gwart Show featuring Haseeb and Tarun](https://overcast.fm/+ABGR1c9WAiA). And Indexed had a [good episode about Ethereum's next update, Pectra](https://overcast.fm/+ABG1D3qIQpk). Try --- ![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/b3a05560788a4fd6075dc0bf90d9e4bc8f54c99c4c1c9314a9757821a59d38b6.png) ### What Is Initia & Why Is It Cool? Initia is a newly launched project intent on creating the ideal modular, multi-chain ecosystem consisting of many interconnected app-chains. At the heart of it all is the main Initia chain. You can think of it as being a bit like Ethereum, in that it's an L1 acting as a foundational layer for many rollups to build on top of, meaning it will be a settlement and security layer for those L2s. However, it differs from Ethereum in many ways. For example, the Initia chain is built on the Cosmos SDK, it uses MoveVM instead of the EVM, and it has a much faster, sub-second block time with single slot finality. It has also been built from the ground up with rollups in mind. Therefore, it's specifically designed to address liquidity fragmentation: the key issue that has so far blighted the modular approach to scaling blockchains. We'll come back to this in a bit. Initia is much more than a single chain. It also provides the Interwoven Stack: a framework for launching new L2s on top of the main Initia chain, dubbed "Minitias". Developers can use the Interwoven Stack to quickly and easily spin up their own chains tailored to their specific needs, with many customisable features. For instance, they can choose between 3 different virtual machines: EVM, MoveVM, or CosmWasm; they can change the chain's gas token; and they can decide how the chain handles MEV. While it remains flexible, the Interwoven Stack is really about standardising and simplifying many elements of L2 design, minimising the effort required to make the chains work and communicate effectively. Everything from the canonical bridge to the block explorer to the DA solution is provided by Initia in their Stack. This means appchain developers have relatively little to think about when launching their chain, even when compared to using other Rollup-As-A-Service platforms. As a result, they can focus the majority of their efforts on producing the best product for end users -- which is really how things should be. On top of this, Minitia app chains can all tap into the liquidity that sits on the main Initia chain, preventing fragmentation and improving cross-chain transfers. Essentially, Initia acts as a liquidity layer in addition to a security and settlement layer. Of course, this is only useful if Initia has deep liquidity to offer. That's why they are actively trying to incentivise users to make funds useful and available through a mechanism called "Enshrined Liquidity". With Enshrined Liquidity, users can deposit funds into whitelisted pools in the chain's native DEX, InitiaDEX, and then stake the resultant LP tokens to help secure the network. As a result, they earn both LP rewards and staking rewards -- plus they gain some voting power to take part in the chain's governance. Compare this to traditional, native-asset staking (which is also possible on Initia). From the user's perspective, the rewards would be less because they would be missing out on the LP rewards. From the chain's perspective, there would be less liquidity available because some portion of INIT would be locked up and out of action. It's a rather clever solution that is not dissimilar to re-staking protocols on Ethereum. At the end of the day, it's about adding additional functionality to staked assets so they can be more useful to the ecosystem. There's a lot more I could say about Initia here -- for instance, I haven't even touched on the chain's second DEX, Minitswap, which facilitates rapid withdrawals from the L2s. However, I have run out of time so I will leave it there for now. Overall, I think Initia have produced a very interesting ecosystem that should solve many problems in the modular world. I'll be keeping an eye on them to see how they progress into the future. --- *Originally published on [Untitled](https://paragraph.com/@0x22801e53e7d815f465718f5947cd9febf0734d14/try-cool-crypto-initia)*