What Happens When You Ditch Global Consensus? With Shresth Agrawal

Consensus is slow by design.

In crypto, we’ve accepted the tradeoff: robustness at the cost of speed. Whether it’s proof-of-work or proof-of-stake, every node reprocesses every transaction, every time. It’s secure and reliable... but often overkill for most of what we actually do.

What if we stopped treating every transaction like a global event? What if the base layer didn’t have to decide who bought a coffee first, especially when those transactions have nothing to do with each other?

Pod Network offers an alternative closer to a network of local agreements, where state can move fast, stay composable, and only invoke ordering when absolutely necessary.

We sat down with Shresth Agarwal at ETHDenver to talk about rethinking onchain design. If you’ve ever thought about the limits of blockspace, MEV, or how far we can push latency while keeping decentralization intact, this conversation is going to give you something new to think about.

The Rollup