This week, Grove went through significant personnel changes leading to a realignment of the team and priorities.
First, we let go of 12 people, which is just over half the company. We have 11 people left at Grove, which includes myself. The rest of the team is composed of Arthur, backend engineers, infra engineers, and protocol engineers.
Second, Daniel Olshansky has been promoted to CTO to help with realigning and focusing the team fully around building Shannon and tooling around enabling gateways for Shannon.
Third, in the event that PIP-38 passes, I will have 30 days to step down as CEO of Grove. If that is indeed the outcome, Arthur Sabinstev will be promoted to CEO, and I will move to become the Chairman of the Board at Grove.
Finally, next month, I will inject the remaining capital I promised in our previous fundraising round, to Grove. With that capital, Grove’s remaining runway, and provided that PNF pays for the protocol team, Grove will have runway until Q1 2026, assuming Grove generates no revenue.
The reason for these changes is that the spend of the team and the rate of growth in revenue from blockchain RPC traffic and new chain integrations is not large enough to raise a meaningful amount of capital to sustain the project and team.
At this point, Grove will pause proactively driving new demand into the network. Existing demand will continue to be supported through Grove’s Portal. We do not want to meaningfully reduce the traffic on the network and let our customers and the node runners down. We have considered giving the traffic to other gateways on the network, but the fact is most gateways only support less than 8 networks, while Grove supports 60. If the downsized team finds that it is not able to support existing demand customers, Grove will work with other gateways to transfer existing contracts.
We plan on evaluating the long tail of networks we support and the customers that use them. As we do the cost-benefit analysis on that part of the business revenue, we may decide to take that small portion of traffic off the network in an effort to reduce our cloud spend and extend our runway.
By reducing the team to 10 individuals, pausing all development on the Portal, and removing the burden of driving new revenue, the team can focus on what really matters:
Moving forward, Grove’s core mission is to enable gateways.
Grove will constantly ask, “Does this enable gateways? If not, don’t work on it.” This is done through two directives:
- Permissionless gateways, enabled by Shannon
- Tooling and infrastructure for gateways, enabled by merging parts of Grove’s Portal with other gateway frameworks
While we have already been heading in this direction, this reduction of headcount forces us to focus on enabling gateways with the same level of quality of service dependent on Pocket Network much more quickly. The main reason why non-Grove gateways have not been able to settle traffic on the network is because tooling wasn’t designed with external customers as a first class citizen.
Grove has spent the last 18 months building what I believe is critical to the success of the network - real customers depending on a company that runs no nodes, providing a service with SLAs, while being fully dependent on a permissionless supply side network. Grove’s goal is to enable this for anyone with open source tooling.
We have line of sight for Shannon, permissionless gateways, and we have existing gateway providers that are working to drive traffic to the network; these are the users we will work alongside with and learn from by shipping Shannon and Grove building services for other Gateways, we can materially increase the traffic on the network and start iterating on the tooling from non-Grove gateways before Shannon.
The team is pumped and ready for this next chapter in their journey. I believe this finally aligns Grove with Pocket Network and will ultimately result in an acceleration of growth for the entire ecosystem.
Thanks,
Michael