Minimmit, Multimmit and the New Consensus Frontier with Patrick O'Grady

This week, Anna and Guillermo are joined by Patrick O'Grady, founder of Commonware. They discuss his journey from Coinbase and Avalanche to building Commonware, a Rust library of composable primitives for blockchain development. They explore Commonware's "anti-framework" philosophy, why it gives developers control over every layer of the stack, and how its modular approach differs from traditional blockchain SDKs.   The conversation then turns to consensus research, examining how changing assumptions around Byzantine fault tolerance have unlocked faster consensus designs. Patrick explains the motivation behind Commonware's new protocols, Minimmit and Multimmit, discusses the influence of Simplex and Solana's Alpenglow, and shares how Commonware combines engineering, research, and cryptography to build the next generation of blockchain infrastructure.   Related Links

• Commonware
• Minimmit: Fast Finality with Even Faster Blocks
• Commonware blog post announcing Minimmit
• Simplex Consensus: A Simple and Fast Consensus Protocol
• Commonware docs - Simplex Consensus
• Patrick O’Grady’s X Post on Multimmit (July 2026)
• Multimmit: Extending Blocks for Faster Finality (draft)
• Alpenglow GitHub Progress Updates
• Golden: Lightweight Non-Interactive Distributed Key Generation

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