evan.sui

🚀 Remora 🦈 🐟 🐟🐟🐟 has been accepted to VLDB 2026 (Very Large Data Bases), one of the world's premier conferences for databases, distributed systems, and large-scale data infrastructure. It all started with a simple question: What if a blockchain validator wasn't a single server, but an entire cluster? That idea became Pilotfish, our first exploration of deterministic scale-out execution. The challenge wasn't simply parallelism, it was preserving determinism: every validator, regardless of how many machines it uses, must compute exactly the same result. Once that became possible, another realization emerged: many of the most expensive parts of transaction execution are stateless. Signature verification (including post-quantum cryptography), ZK proof verification, hashing, parsing, bytecode validation, and increasingly AI inference and AI-powered smart contracts, consume enormous compute without immediately depending on blockchain state. Consensus got fast. Execution didn't, until now. As crypto workloads become increasingly compute-intensive, even perfect parallelism on a single machine eventually hits a ceiling. The future isn't just bigger servers, it's smarter clusters. Remora is the next step. It introduces distributed execution with a novel separation of stateless and stateful computation, workload-aware scheduling, deep pipelining, and elastic scaling. Added compute resources translate directly into higher throughput while maintaining low latency, deterministic execution, and robust failure recovery. Built on state-of-the-art distributed systems research and blockchain-specific insights, Remora enables validators to scale with the growing demands of modern cryptography, zero-knowledge systems, post-quantum security, and AI. To sum up: Pilotfish proved that validators can become clusters. Remora shows how those clusters can behave like one incredibly powerful computer. Huge congratulations to all of the great authors from @imperialcollege, @ucl, @Mysten_Labs & @SuiNetwork behind this work! Github: github.com/remora-sys/remora Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2607.02817