Founded in 2023 by Grigore Roșu, Pi Squared addresses the growing issues of fragmentation within blockchain infrastructure. The company rounds this out by emphasizing the importance of trust to address existing barriers. Roșu, the founder of Runtime Verification and a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois, has a classic contrarian entrepreneur’s vision. He describes a world in which liquidity can smoothly move between all chains, and smart contracts are verified chain agnostically. His other work addresses the developer experience issues created by the increasing tentacled proliferation of Layer 2s and app-specific chains. These events further fractured liquidity and created serious issues of confidence.

Roșu’s deep experience in formal verification and programming language semantics makes him well-suited to address these problems. No more dreaming, time to build! He is a former NASA aerospace engineer. He developed the K Framework, an open-source tool that he calls the “Rosetta Stone” for programming language semantics. This framework continues to influence his work today at Pi Squared. His ambition is to provide an open and verifiable settlement layer that various blockchain ecosystems can plug into.

The Vision Behind Pi Squared

Grigore Roșu hopes to Pi Squared can address some of the issues in today’s web3 environment. He hopes to extend beyond its shortcomings and open up new horizons. Layer 2 solutions & application-specific chains are in full boom mode and while they have certainly introduced an enormous amount of scalability and customization, they have introduced serious liquidity fragmentation. This creates barriers to effectively deploy capital across multiple ecosystems. More importantly, it brings up questions regarding the trust assumption and security of cross-chain interactions.

As one of Pi Squared’s key goals, liquidity from one chain should be able to be deployed across them all without losing integrity. Users could then seamlessly use different DeFi protocols or applications, no matter which blockchain they are built on. Such cross-chain operability would catalyze new avenues of innovation and economic growth, spurring adoption across all entities in the web3 ecosystem.

Roșu envisions an equally thrilling future. In this optimistic future, smart contracts authored in one programming language can seamlessly and automatically be verified, audited, and invoked by another chain’s execution environment. This will unlock a development paradigm for developers to “verified once, use everywhere." It will make the development process more efficient and increase the security of decentralized applications.

Addressing Web3's Key Challenges

For this reason, Roșu addresses the web3 ecosystem’s fragmentation and trust restrictions directly. This purposefully and directly addresses some of the most critical challenges facing our country right now. Today’s dependency on bridges and other cross-chain solutions adds unnecessary complexity and complexities are a common source of mistakes and potential hacking vulnerabilities. What Pi Squared hopes to create, though, is one verifiable settlement layer, working to mitigate these risks. It would provide a safe, verifiable way for information to pass between chains.

Creating this final, global, and verifiable settlement layer would be transformative for many different use cases. Such capabilities make it quick and easy to conduct Ethereum transactions. It powers smart contract execution on Solana and facilitates AI model inference on a Solana-based Layer 3 network. At Pi Squared, our mission is to help unleash the full potential of web3. It does this by creating a single standard for ensuring and running code consistently across chains.

Moving Beyond Total Value Locked

Over the past few years, the web3 debate has been heavily focused on the metric of Total Value Locked (TVL). While TVL provides an immediate snapshot of cash flow within a given protocol or ecosystem, it’s a lagging indicator. That’s deceptive because it doesn’t capture the real value or promise of the underlying technology and is easily gamed. Roșu’s creations at Pi Squared represent a new frontier for evaluating web3 projects in particular. He argues for an approach that is holistic, with interoperability, security and user experience as key pillars. Pi Squared makes connecting easily between chains a flawless experience. This increases the reliability of decentralized apps and fosters a stronger, more sustainable web3 environment.