Co-founder of N1. He scrapped a chain, kept his team, and started over - aiming at a market that never sleeps.
David Cao runs the part of a startup nobody puts on a slide: the getting-it-done part. At N1, the finance-first blockchain he co-founded, his official title is Chief Get Shit Done Officer. It reads like a joke until you notice the company is trying to push 100,000 transactions through a chain every second.
N1 is a Layer 1 blockchain built for one thing - moving markets onchain without the wait. Sub-millisecond latency. Ultra-high throughput. Every application in its own dedicated lane so a busy app can't congest the rest. And, in a quiet act of heresy against crypto convention, you can write its smart contracts in TypeScript, with Python on the way. No new chain-specific language to learn before you build.
Cao co-founded the company with Dima Romanov, a Morgan Stanley alum who once built a fully on-chain order book on Solana, and Sheheryar Parvaz. The three of them have been at this longer than the brand name suggests. N1 is not their first attempt. It is their first attempt at the whole stack.
Start with the thing that didn't work, because that's where the story actually lives. Years ago, Cao and his co-founders set out to build the best derivatives platform on Solana. They called it 01 - zero one. Romanov's on-chain order book reportedly moved more than $500 million in volume. They believed in fully on-chain, high-performance trading when most of the industry was still treating that as a contradiction in terms.
Then the market did what markets do. Solana stumbled through a stretch of frequent outages. The crypto winter arrived. 01 went on indefinite hiatus. In the team's own words, what they hadn't anticipated was how much the world - and the industry - would change underneath them.
Most founders would have quit, or pivoted to whatever was hot. Cao's team did something stranger. They kept their heads down and kept building, but they aimed lower in the stack. If the chains kept choking, maybe the problem was never the product. Maybe it was the road. So they decided to pave their own.
That detour became Layer N - first pitched as a high-performance scaling layer for Ethereum. And in December 2024, Layer N shed even its name. It relaunched as N1, a Layer 1 blockchain built from the ground up for finance. The company that began as 01 had compressed itself into a single character.
The first step from web2 to web3 is to solve the infrastructure scalability problem - to let applications run on truly fast and scalable blockchains.
A blockchain that wants onchain trading to feel like it isn't onchain at all.
Sub-millisecond latency and a target north of 100,000 transactions per second. On a mainnet demo, the team says it sustained around 50,000 - the kind of number markets, not memes, need.
Each application runs in its own dedicated environment with what N1 calls zero state congestion. One app having a busy day doesn't slow everyone else down.
Smart contracts in TypeScript, with Python on the way. A deliberate jab at the convention that says you must learn a niche language to ship onchain.
The team's "two-chain thesis": one layer for settlement and financial integrity, another for unrestricted, congestion-free execution. Separate concerns, separate lanes.
01, the team's original perpetuals DEX, relaunched as N1's flagship app - this time with a native Solana bridge, riding on the chain its founders built.
N1 Studios incubates and funds onchain apps - perp DEXs, prediction markets, gamified trading - turning a protocol into an ecosystem.
Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and dao5 co-led the seed. Then, ahead of mainnet, two names appeared on the revised cap table that crypto people read like tea leaves: Multicoin Capital and Arthur Hayes, the co-founder of BitMEX. When the patron saint of perpetual swaps backs your perpetuals chain, the bet has a certain symmetry.
The bars below are illustrative of relative profile, not exact ownership - the full cap table runs deeper than any one round.
His title isn't ironic. "Chief Get Shit Done Officer" is a job description in a world fond of inventing C-suite poetry. The work is the point.
On X he's @davidfucius and signs off "n/acc" - the accelerationist's badge. He builds like someone who thinks the future is late.
When the chains kept failing, he didn't switch products. He went a layer deeper and rebuilt the road. Stubbornness, pointed downward.
The company's name kept shrinking - 01, then Layer N, then N1. A founder editing his own story down to one character.
TypeScript smart contracts are a philosophy in disguise: meet developers where they already are, instead of demanding they meet you.
He kept the same co-founders across three identities of the same company. Teams that survive their own pivots tend to mean it.
There's a version of this story that's just another crypto founder chasing throughput numbers. That version misses the point. What's interesting about David Cao isn't the 100,000 TPS headline - it's that he and his co-founders held one belief steady while everything around it changed names, markets and cycles.
The belief: that fully onchain, high-performance finance is possible, and that the only thing standing in the way is infrastructure that can actually keep up. They tested it as an exchange. The market said not yet. They tested it as a scaling layer. Then they tested it as an entire Layer 1. Same thesis, three blast radii.
His aspiration is unglamorous and specific: make onchain finance fast enough, congestion-free enough, and developer-friendly enough that it stops feeling like a compromise. A chain where a trade settles before you've finished doubting it. Where building a financial app doesn't begin with a tutorial on a language no employer has ever asked for.
Whether N1 hits its numbers is a question for the mainnet and the order books. But the more durable thing on display here is a temperament. Cao is the person on the team whose entire job is to close the gap between the pitch and the product. In an industry that runs on promises, that's a useful person to be. And a rare one to brag about being.