0G Labs Achieves 70% Throughput Increase with Galileo Testnet

Michael Heinrich, the co-founder of 0G Labs, has a unique journey that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and has led him to the forefront of connecting the worlds of AI and blockchain technology. Born in Ukraine and raised in East Berlin, Heinrich's early life was deeply influenced by the physical and metaphorical walls that divided his city and his family.

Heinrich's family lived just 100 meters away from the Berlin Wall, a barrier that separated friends and family in the German capital. The night the wall fell, November 9th, 1989, Heinrich was too young to understand the historical significance of the event. He recalls waking up to loud noises and seeing his parents celebrating with champagne glasses, unaware of the monumental change happening around him.

Two decades later, Heinrich found himself working for Bridgewater Associates, an asset firm founded by Ray Dalio, during the 2008 financial crisis. By this time, his family had relocated to the US, and Heinrich had transitioned from speaking fluent German to fluent English, having attended an American school and Berkeley, where he excelled in engineering. His internships with Microsoft and JP Morgan further solidified his place in the tech industry.

As Satoshi Nakamoto was crafting Bitcoin, Heinrich was immersed in the financial industry it was designed to disrupt. He was part of Wall Street, working as an engineer, and it didn't take him long to heed the call of the emerging cryptocurrency world. By 2013, he had bought his first bitcoin and was running a small mining operation with his brother, becoming an early adopter of the technology.

Heinrich's journey into blockchain technology was not straightforward. He enrolled in a Master’s program at Stanford on engineering and business management before founding the corporate wellness company Garten. The company's success was evident, with Apple as a client and $100M in annual recurring revenue by 2019. However, the COVID pandemic decimated the startup’s revenue, forcing the company to tighten its belt and survive the downturn.

This experience proved invaluable as Heinrich was ready for a fresh challenge. Stanford classmate Thomas Yao was seeking a co-founder to join him and MIT PhD Fan Long, a two-time Olympic gold medal winner in informatics and professor at the University of Toronto, and Ming Wu, an 11-year Microsoft Research veteran and Computer Architecture PhD. Their idea was to create a web3 startup focused on data availability, and it wasn’t long before they had a game plan and a name: 0G Labs.

At the same time, AI was emerging as a force onchain, with web3 developers recognizing the potential for merging artificial intelligence with blockchain. However, this marriage brought significant challenges, particularly in storage requirements for large language models (LLMs) and enabling onchain data verification without compromising scalability and security. 0G Labs has made early success in connecting centralized databases with decentralized nodes, achieving 10 MB/s per node for data delivery, at least 8x faster than incumbent solutions. Their recent V3 testnet Galileo delivers a 70% throughput increase over the previous testnet and can process up to 2,500 TPS using an optimized CometBFT consensus.

Heinrich's journey has been marked by significant moves, both geographically and professionally. In the blockchain industry, he seems to have found his forever home at the helm of 0G Labs. His mission is to demolish the final walls that separate AI between web2 and web3, a challenge he is determined to overcome.