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Welcome to the inaugural edition of the GenLayer Product Update! We’re taking you on a tour of the GenLayer platform, an AI-powered distributed ledger and digital decision-maker that enables trustless agreements and resolutions for smart contracts, AI agents, and organizations. GenLayer can be seen as a synthetic jurisdiction that can resolve contracts in minutes. This article is a deep dive “under the hood” of GenLayer, revealing the various technologies that make it work and our vision going forward.
Blockchains, by design, crave certainty. With traditional smart contracts, feeding the same inputs always produces the same outputs. That’s great for enforcing rules and preventing fraud, but it’s ill-suited for real-time, real-world information. Traditional blockchains can’t parse ambiguous data, interpret web content, or reason about subtle nuances. They run code - yet they can’t “think.”
GenLayer is changing that. We’re building what we call an “Intelligent Blockchain,” where smart contracts evolve into Intelligent Contracts, capable of reading real-world data, reasoning with natural language models, and making decisions beyond static code.
At GenLayer, Intelligent Contracts go a step further than typical smart contracts. They still run on-chain, remain self-enforcing and verifiable - but with AI-native capabilities:
The heart of GenLayer is GenVM, our WASM-based virtual machine designed to handle non-deterministic operations while maintaining a decentralized ledger. Unlike other VMs that run purely deterministic code (like the EVM), GenVM has the following capabilities:
In short, GenVM seamlessly merges standard on-chain execution with the power of AI—opening up entirely new use cases unthinkable on traditional blockchains.
Running probabilistic or AI-driven code in a decentralized network raises a critical question: How do hundreds of nodes agree on a result if that result can be different each time?
This approach gives us the best of both worlds. Simple, uncontested decisions finalize quickly and cheaply, while complex or high-value decisions can involve more validators - ensuring fairness, trust, and security.
Our consensus is implemented in Solidity and runs on top of a ZKSync ZK Chain, part of the Elastic Network.
Leveraging the battle-tested ZKSync stack enables us to achieve high scalability and security and deliver great interoperability to our developers out of the gate. GenLayer can be called from and send messages to any other platform in the broader crypto ecosystem.
Traditional blockchains demand exact matches: the output has to be identical for every node. But the real world is not black and white. Web pages constantly change every time you look at them. LLMs produce different answers to the same question - sometimes accurate, sometimes a hallucination.
The Equivalence Principle is a core part of how the Optimistic Democracy consensus functions, and lets developers define how the various validators in the network can check each other’s work. For instance, there are infinitely many ways to summarize an article. The Equivalence Principle ensures that an on-chain consensus forms around what really matters, the validity of the answer, not its exact string representation.
The GenLayer network consists of hundreds of validators, each connected to a potentially different LLM or even multiple LLMs. The GenLayer Node is the piece of software responsible for executing and validating Intelligent Contract transactions in the network.
It enables validators to stake, contribute to the network security, and earn rewards. The software maintains synchronization with the network, stores a database of the network state, and executes consensus duties such as proposing or validating transactions by connecting to the GenVM and ensuring its smooth execution.
The Node can also operate in syncing/archival mode, in which case it is not an active participant in transaction validation. It provides a JSON-RPC that dApp developers can use to query the state of any account on the network, simulate transactions, and estimate gas costs.
GenLayer is secured through a Delegated Proof of Stake (dPoS) model. Anyone holding GEN tokens can stake (delegate) to a validator, earning rewards if that validator successfully processes transactions. Because those transactions may involve multiple LLM calls and real-time web data:
Beyond our core technology, we’re building a set of developer tools and applications that enable developers to easily and seamlessly build trustless applications that take advantage of GenLayer’s unique capabilities.
The quickest way to get started is GenLayer Studio, a browser-based environment for coding, deploying, and testing your Intelligent Contracts.
If you’ve ever wanted to explore GenLayer, the Studio is a quick way to start building your first Intelligent Contract: no local node setup or complicated dev environment required.
The GenLayer Command Line Interface (CLI) is built for developers who prefer terminal workflows. It offers a streamlined way to create GenLayer projects and interact with the GenLayer network, whether you’re compiling contracts, deploying them, or sending transactions.
It also enables you to run a local version of the GenLayer Studio, where you can control your own validator setup, run advanced tests, or even use it to host production applications before the mainnet.
It’s ideal for automating your development pipeline, managing deployments, and integrating GenLayer into existing backend systems.
For any TypeScript or JavaScript developers, either on the front end or the back end, the GenLayer JavaScript Library brings everything you need to interface with the network directly into your dApp.
Whether you're fetching contract states, submitting transactions, or building interfaces around AI-powered decisions, the JS library offers a smooth, developer-friendly API. It bridges the gap between the blockchain and user experience. These tools ensure that developers, regardless of their stack or environment, can interact with GenLayer in the way that suits them best.
As we push toward a mainnet release, we’ll keep implementing and testing the various components that make up the GenLayer platform, ensuring it stays fast for routine tasks while robust enough for high-stakes decisions. We’re also actively onboarding developers to ensure GenLayer goes live with a vibrant ecosystem of novel applications.
GenLayer represents the next evolution in the blockchain: an AI-native, web-connected, non-deterministic system designed to handle the complexities of real-world data and subjective agreements. With Intelligent Contracts, we’re bringing autonomy, flexibility, and trust to every layer of decentralized AI.
Thank you for reading our first GenLayer Monthly Product Update! We hope this overview sparks your imagination about what’s possible when AI and blockchain truly converge. Stay tuned for more deep dives, announcements, and developer resources in next month’s edition.
Together, let’s shape the future of AI-native blockchains—one Intelligent Contract at a time.
Edgars Nemše is a technologist with over a decade of experience building and scaling software products across several industries, including AI, EdTech, and Crypto. He holds a Bachelor's degree in AI from The University of Edinburgh, was the CTO and Co-founder of StakeHound, product manager at RadixDLT, and analyst at a $8B Quant Hedge Fund.