Blockchain ecosystems are fractured, with siloed networks blocking seamless app and protocol interactions and reliance on fragile bridges, centralized systems, or unprovable logic eroding trust in Web3. As the crypto market surges toward $3 trillion in 2025, these barriers continue to choke innovation and hinder mass adoption. Grigore Rosu founder and CEO of Pi Squared shares valuable insights into these obstacles in this interview with Olayimika Oyebanji. Drawing from his journey launching Pi Squared in 2023 and the Verifiable Settlement Layer Devnet in June 2025, he sheds light on the need for a verifiable, interoperable infrastructure to empower Web3 developers and enterprises. Why are blockchain ecosystems still siloed in 2025? I would say the main barrier is a lack of shared execution and trust standards. Despite the conveyor belt of interoperability protocols, chains use incompatible logic, languages, and consensus assumptions, while cross-chain bridges often just patch gaps with opaque trust models. This is the key motive behind launching Verifiable Settlement Layer, which addresses this problem by enabling verifiable, programmable execution across domains, from Ethereum and Bitcoin to AI agents, via mirrored state and cross-chain composability. By embedding verifiability into infrastructure, it enables a scalable, secure path to true interoperability without compromising trust. Why do trust issues in cross-chain operations persist and what innovations are needed? For one, the reason why trust issues persist is because the current cross-chain systems often rely on third-party validators, which introduces attack surfaces. What’s really needed is a universal verifiability layer where logic can be formally specified, verified and enforced. This can achieved by combining programmable settlement with trusted execution environments and mirrored blockchain state, allowing developers to build cross-chain applications where execution is provable, not assumed. How can the Web3 industry achieve fast, verifiable computation across blockchains while maintaining scalability and security? I firmly believe that can be achieved through parallel, provable execution, which VSL enables by separating computation from settlement while preserving cryptographic guarantees. Developers can run fast, domain-specific computations, whether AI pipelines or financial logic, on trusted environments with TEE attestations, then settle across chains using mirrored state and composable primitives. This architecture scales by design and sidesteps the bottlenecks of monolithic chains, while ensuring each interaction is transparent, verifiable, and secure, meeting the high-performance demands of decentralized apps in 2025 and well beyond. How can a universal trust layer eliminate risks in cross-chain transactions and transform DeFi or AI? Unprovable logic has always been a silent and omnipresent risk in cross-chain systems. A universal trust layer mitigates this risk by enforcing formally specified, verifiable execution across all domains. For DeFi, this means atomic, cross-chain trades with transparent settlement. For AI, it enables agent actions to be cryptographically verified, not just inferred. The result is an ecosystem where correctness is guaranteed upfront, reducing attack vectors and unlocking new composable models that span finance, computation, and intelligent agents. How can modular Web3 maintain reliability while eliminating fragmentation? Modularity alone isn't enough, it needs a cohesive trust fabric. There is a need for enterprise-grade reliability through formally verifiable infrastructure, while preserving decentralization via mirrored state and validator coordination. Developers get building blocks with built-in correctness, reducing the integration risks of fragmented systems. This moves us past siloed chains to a unified, programmable layer where apps interoperate seamlessly and securely, offering a production-grade foundation for both enterprise adoption and grassroots innovation. What inspired you to found Pi Squared, and how did your blockchain background help? My work on the K Framework at NASA and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) exposed a fundamental gap: software systems, especially in blockchain, lacked formal semantics and verifiability. That inspired me to start Pi Squared. We set out to embed correctness from the ground up, using the K Framework to create a platform where logic, language, and execution are provable by design. Besides formal semantics and blockchain, I also do research and teach concurrency and distributed systems at UIUC, which are instrumental to the design of our new protocol that will power our decentralized network. What challenge did you face during the VSL Devnet launch? There were of course a lot of last minute updates and tweaks to the VSL and demos right up until the launch, but we were able to ship our Devnet on time and have received very positive feedback from developers so far. What global scaling lessons are guiding Pi Squared’s 2025 strategy? Global scale requires abstraction and standardization. We have learned that developers want powerful primitives that abstract away complexity but retain control and verifiability. That’s why VSL emphasizes modular, domain-agnostic infrastructure, usable by AI agents, DeFi protocols, or cross-chain bridges alike. How did the $12.5M seed round  impact Pi Squared’s growth? Our $12.5 million round last year led by Polychain gave us the foundation to prove VSL’s core thesis: that verifiability can scale. It enabled us to attract world-class talent, run mirrored blockchain infrastructure, and ship the Devnet. The current strategic raise we’re working on is focused on expanding validator coverage, multi-chain integration, and performance optimization. Any parting words? I would add that the future of decentralized computing won’t be defined by who scales first, but by who verifies best. At Pi Squared, we’re building the infrastructure where logic is provable, not assumed, across chains, languages, and agents. The VSL Devnet is your invitation to shape that future. If you care about performance, security, and correctness in a unified Web3, now is the time to get involved.

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Pi Squared Founder Grigore Rosu On Blockchain’s Fragmentation And Trust Crisis

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