From Web2 to Web3: How Rialo is Redefining What a Blockchain Actually Means

The crypto industry has a billion-dollar problem nobody talks about: blockchain remains trapped in a bubble. For everyday developers and users, the entry barriers feel insurmountable—wallet management, oracle dependency, gas fees, complex architectures. Meanwhile, Wall Street institutions flood in, but the technology they’re investing in struggles to touch the real world.

This is where Rialo enters the picture. Built by Subzero Labs, it’s not trying to be another Layer 1, Layer 2, or Layer 3. Instead, it’s attempting something more radical: making blockchain as simple and integrated as your smartphone.

The Vision: “It’s Not a Layer 1”

Co-founder Ade Adepoju framed the philosophy perfectly for Fortune magazine: “We don’t need another device designed only for listening to music. We need an all-in-one tool that combines a camera, internet connectivity, and GPS.”

Rialo strips away the unnecessary complexity. Instead of forcing developers to manually integrate oracles, maintain nodes, and wrangle off-chain data, the platform embeds these functions directly into its core protocol. Want to pull real-time FICO credit scores into your smart contract? Done natively. Need weather data from an external API? Build it like you would in traditional software development.

The real innovation lies in its architecture: combining RISC-V instruction sets with Solana VM compatibility. This dual approach reduces middleware friction and allows developers to write smart contracts using familiar programming patterns—event-driven architecture, asynchronous processing—similar to conventional Web2 development.

Rethinking User Experience

Rialo challenges another crypto sacred cow: the wallet. Instead of forcing users to master seed phrases and private key management, Rialo lets people log in via email, SMS, or existing social media accounts. Your social media identity becomes your Web3 passport.

The platform also promises sub-second transaction confirmations and predictable fees, sidestepping the gas fee volatility that plagues networks like Ethereum. Security features like 2FA and timed transactions—standard in Web2—become native to the blockchain layer.

The Backing and the Team

In early August, Subzero Labs announced a $20 million seed funding round led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Variant, Hashed, Fabric Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and others. Notably, Mysten Labs (the team behind Sui) also invested, signaling confidence from within the Sui ecosystem.

The team brings heavyweight credentials. CEO Ade Adepoju, 30, previously engineered at AMD, Dell, and Netflix before joining Mysten Labs as a founding engineer in late 2021. Co-founder and CTO Lu Zhang also comes from Mysten Labs. Other team members have experience at Meta, Apple, Amazon, Google, TikTok, and Citadel—a blend of traditional tech and blockchain expertise.

The Technical Architecture Decoded

Rialo’s operating logic centers on three pillars:

Native Real-World Integration: Any off-chain API can be called directly from smart contracts without oracles. This means applications can natively connect to payment systems, weather services, and other external data streams—lowering infrastructure complexity drastically.

Developer-Centric Design: The smart contract experience mirrors traditional software development. No more wrestling with blockchain-specific abstractions. Write logic, deploy, iterate—just like building Web2 applications.

De-Blockchaining User Experience: By removing jargon and complexity from the user-facing layer, Rialo makes blockchain invisible. Users interact with applications, not with “blockchain technology.”

The Unsolved Questions

Of course, challenges remain. Connecting deeply to the real world while maintaining decentralization is a tightrope walk. How does Rialo prevent becoming a centralized data aggregator? How will it balance regulatory compliance with permissionlessness? And critically: can you truly protect privacy while enabling native integration with external services?

These aren’t unique to Rialo—they’re fundamental tensions in building production-grade real-world blockchains. But they’re also the tests that will determine whether platforms like Rialo actually achieve mainstream adoption or remain niche developer tools.

The smartphone moment for blockchain might finally be within reach. But only if these architectural innovations can be paired with genuine solutions to decentralization, privacy, and trust.