Words fly out of Noah Pravecek’s mouth like bullets from a machine gun. He speaks in short, quick bursts that barely give the listener time to comprehend before the next salvo arrives. “My brain goes a mile a minute. I think I’ve trained my mouth to move at the same speed,” Noah explains. His patterns of speech strongly mirror the approach he and his team have taken to scaling his startup, NodeKit. NodeKit is building pioneering interoperability infrastructure for blockchains, and as its CEO and Co-Founder, Noah has needed to move fast to succeed in a landscape shifting daily. He and his team ship updates at breakneck pace and rapidly iterate on new products to address the most pressing needs of the market. “We’re trying to move as fast as possible with NodeKit. I guess I’m just trying to keep up with my mouth.”
The oldest of three siblings, Noah grew up in the small, 30,000 person town of Park Ridge, Illinois. “If you’ve ever flown into O’Hare Airport, you’ve gone over Park Ridge,” he quips. With limited options for entertainment in his hometown, Noah spent much of his childhood in his family’s basement working on computers. “I carved out a little space for myself in the basement where I would mess around with computers. I was trying to run Linux, Docker, and set up my own media server.”
While his parents were not engineers themselves, his dad, an investment banker, did bring an entrepreneurial spirit into Noah’s life. “My dad was always working with early stage companies and he taught me how different industries rise and fall over time, how cyclical entrepreneurship is. I loved learning how varied and different startups can be.”
Noah’s interests in computers and entrepreneurship collided when COVID hit during his junior year of high school. With lockdowns forcing the country to spend more time indoors, demand for gaming PCs saw a massive spike as individuals were looking for entertainment at home. Noah saw opportunity given his familiarity tinkering with hardware. “So, I essentially built one of the largest refurbished gaming PC businesses during COVID,” he states.
Noah realized he could use the skills he had developed tinkering with computers in his basement to start his own business. At first, he was throwing together parts that he already had lying around the house to make simple machines for friends and family in his small town. However, as word got around that there was a kid in the area with the expertise to build gaming rigs from scratch, demand skyrocketed. In short time, Noah had partnered with several different component suppliers, launched his own website, and was spending all of his time outside of remote classes building and delivering gaming PCs.
With the money from his PC business, Noah was quick to move onto his next entrepreneurial endeavor - EliteSeat. EliteSeat was a ticketing app that allowed users to sell their tickets to concerts or sporting events right before or during the event. “It started as a class project that I decided to pursue in earnest.” Noah and a classmate stood up their own servers and were able to get some early adopters, but like most first startups, interest didn’t fully pan out. “EliteSeat didn’t do so hot but it taught me a lot about startups. It reinforced in me this notion that, it doesn’t matter if you have a star studded team or have raised capital – what matters most is just going out and building something. Perseverance will bring rewards over time.”
After his experience building and shutting down EliteSeat, Noah was getting ready to head to college. Nationwide lockdowns had just been lifted as he was going through the college applications and the lingering uncertainty surrounding the pandemic weighed on him throughout the process. “Initially, I wanted to move away from home but then I realized that I really didn’t know if there would be massive lockdowns again. What if I moved across the country and couldn’t get back to my family?” He only looked at a few schools close to home, and the one he fell in love with was Iowa State, where he ultimately matriculated. “I don’t know why I loved it when I visited. It was terrible weather, slush everywhere. But I just loved the school from day one.” Not only did Iowa State end up being a great fit for Noah academically, but it is also the place where he would meet one of his co-founders, found NodeKit and ultimately drop out to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams full time.
At college, Noah was able to pursue many of his passions that he had cultivated earlier in his life. He was part of the entrepreneurship center, pitch competitions and the algorithmic trading club. And while Noah did enjoy the academic experience at Iowa State, he couldn’t help himself from trying to build companies while he was a student. The first was a company that he called AnomalyFi. AnomalyFi was a data analytics company that indexed different blockchains and provided onchain insights.
“I’d been into crypto since I was very young,” Noah recounts. “I got kicked off of Coinbase because I was using their platform before they had age verification. When they added it they shut down my account.” With AnomalyFi, Noah was pursuing his interests in crypto and finance by building analytics tools for traders. After working on the initial idea, he quickly recruited his first co-founder to join him.
Ricardo Tavarez was a student at the University of Wisconsin who had attended high school with Noah. “I met Ricardo through a friend of a friend in high school but we were never that close,” Noah explains. However, they reconnected at a party during winter break of their freshman year and immediately bonded over a shared interest in entrepreneurship.
“Ricardo told me, ‘I remember you were the kid that started that computer business in high school and then EliteSeat. Whenever you start your next company, I don’t care what it is, I want to be involved.’” Little did Ricardo know, Noah was already working on AnomalyFi. They started hashing out visions for the company together and Ricardo was immediately in.
AnomalyFi’s third co-founder came through a connection on campus at Iowa State. Later in his freshman year, Noah was wanting to see if he could leverage the analytics engine he had built for AnomalyFi to power onchain trading. Naturally, he hit up Iowa State’s algorithmic trading club to see if he could recruit some additional talent.
“I messaged the club’s Discord server to see if anyone would meet with me in person to talk about the idea,” While the quant trading club was not very big, one brave individual did respond to the message. Nick Prezler, a sophomore studying statistics, said he’d be open to sharing ideas about quant trading and crypto. Noah laughs when telling me about setting up his meeting with Nick, “He thought I was just wanting to share ideas, but I was going into that meeting trying to recruit a co-founder.” The plan was to meet up after math class and walk back to their dorms for a chat.
“The day we met was the worst downpour that I had ever experienced on campus, but we still met up after class. Nick’s dorm was a mile in the opposite direction from where I was trying to go, but we got so engrossed in our conversation that we didn’t really notice. We got completely soaked, but by the end of our walk, Nick had decided to join the team.”
With the founding team assembled, AnomalyFi was off to the races… or so they thought. Noah, Ricardo, and Nick did make solid, initial progress scaling AnomalyFi; they entered in several different pitch competitions, received early interest from universities to leverage their analytics tools, and even set up some initial meetings with investors. However, over time, Noah and team realized that the analytics market was extremely crowded, and they were going to have difficulty carving out their own niche within the space. It was time to explore a different path for AnomalyFi.
A key innovation that Noah had arrived at with AnomalyFi was achieving sub second latency to process transactions from the myriad L2s building on top of Ethereum. This was work that directly exposed them to the mess of countless rollups building on top of Ethereum, and they only saw this mess increasing with the rollup-as-a-service market heating up.
“Initially, we thought we could just service these rollups with our data analytics platform,” Noah recounts. “But then, at a more fundamental level, we understood that rollup-as-a-service platforms are inherently centralizing. If we could build a decentralized network to allow them to decentralize more simply, that could be a great product. And that’s kind of where NodeKit started and it all snowballed from there.”
And snowball it did. With a new name for the company and a revised vision, Ricardo, Noah, and Nick spent their next summer working remotely and building out NodeKit in the free time they had during their respective summer internships.
“Nick was over in Philadelphia working in trading, Ricardo was stuck on campus in Wisconsin, and I was in the middle of nowhere back home,” Noah tells me. But everyday after work (and sometimes during) they would hop online and hack on NodeKit together. With time, NodeKit grew into more than just a shared sequencer. The product as it stands today is building key infrastructure to connect all of web3.
The first product NodeKit built was called SEQ, a shared sequencer. SEQ offers two key advantages for Layer 2 blockchains (L2s): improved decentralization and partial composability between chains. For most L2 solutions, building independent decentralized sequencers is complex and resource-intensive. Shared sequencers address this challenge by providing a more scalable and cost-effective solution, effectively decentralizing transaction ordering across multiple chains simultaneously.
However, despite their benefits in improving decentralization, shared sequencers face limitations when it comes to achieving true cross-chain composability. The core issue lies in their ability to guarantee only atomic inclusion rather than atomic execution. This means that while transactions can be bundled across different chains (inclusion), there is no guarantee they will succeed in unison (execution).
To address this limitation, the NodeKit team started to develop their next offering, Javelin. Javelin is a Superbuilder, a revolutionary approach to block production. Superbuilders function as specialized block producers that simultaneously build blocks for multiple chains. Similar to how applications on Ethereum achieve composability through a shared state-aware block producer, chains utilizing Javelin become composable by sharing block production across multiple networks. This enables seamless and atomic execution of cross-chain transactions, ensuring that transactions are not only included but also executed simultaneously—a crucial feature for numerous cross-chain applications.
The implementation of Superbuilders effectively transforms decentralized applications (dApps) into multi-chain entities, allowing them to access users and liquidity across various chains concurrently. From a user perspective, this creates a unified experience comparable to traditional banking, where one account serves multiple purposes without requiring separate balances for different merchants. These simplifications, made possible through cross-chain composability, are essential for achieving a seamless "it just works" user experience that will drive broader adoption of blockchain technology.
After settling on the new direction for NodeKit, Noah and team were quickly forced into the realities of balancing university life and building a fast-growing startup.
“We got identified by LBank to join their Summer Bootcamp for crypto startups. We were the only people from the Midwest, or even a state school there. It took place in Cabo at the end of August and so I actually had to miss the first week of school for it. I had to come late to all of my classes and explain to my professors why I hadn’t shown up to any of the classes. I don’t think they were surprised when I told them I was dropping out two months later.”
Dropping out became the clear decision for all three of the NodeKit team after seeing the immediate traction their startup was achieving. They were crowned winners of the LBank Bootcamp and immediately started attracting interest from investors, ultimately closing their pre-seed with Borderless Capital, a16z’s CSX, and Symbolic Capital in the round.
“We’ve had a lot of interesting experiences being young founders in the space,” Noah reflects when I ask him about building NodeKit as a college dropout. “It’s not that we're often the only dropouts in the room at conferences or pitch competitions, but we’re also likely the only ones from state schools.” In a space that highly values credentials and brand, Noah has carved his own path to success by exhibiting a relentless commitment to shipping high quality product.
“We’ve proven time and time again that it doesn’t matter if you have a PhD from Stanford or you’re a professor at Yale. At the end of the day, if you build great products and provide a great customer experience, that’s the only thing people care about.”
With Javelin announced, NodeKit is well on their way to building a more composable future for Ethereum. They recently graduated from a16z’s CSX program and Beacon. They announced their pre-seed round led by Borderless Capital. And most importantly, the Ethereum roadmap has only proved the need for the critical infrastructure they’re providing.
Now, NodeKit’s testnet is just around the corner and the team knows they have a big few months ahead. “We want to bring composability to all chains. We want to supercharge DeFi, consumer apps, everything,” states Noah.
It’s certainly a big vision, but we know Noah is well equipped to pull it off. And in a callback to the beginning of our conversation, Noah again illustrates just how fast he and his team are executing. He gives me an update on NodeKit’s recent development progress. “Our engineering team was shipping so fast that we realized we needed to move up the date of our testnet. If that’s not bullish I don’t know what is.”✦
Words fly out of Noah Pravecek’s mouth like bullets from a machine gun. He speaks in short, quick bursts that barely give the listener time to comprehend before the next salvo arrives. “My brain goes a mile a minute. I think I’ve trained my mouth to move at the same speed,” Noah explains. His patterns of speech strongly mirror the approach he and his team have taken to scaling his startup, NodeKit. NodeKit is building pioneering interoperability infrastructure for blockchains, and as its CEO and Co-Founder, Noah has needed to move fast to succeed in a landscape shifting daily. He and his team ship updates at breakneck pace and rapidly iterate on new products to address the most pressing needs of the market. “We’re trying to move as fast as possible with NodeKit. I guess I’m just trying to keep up with my mouth.”
The oldest of three siblings, Noah grew up in the small, 30,000 person town of Park Ridge, Illinois. “If you’ve ever flown into O’Hare Airport, you’ve gone over Park Ridge,” he quips. With limited options for entertainment in his hometown, Noah spent much of his childhood in his family’s basement working on computers. “I carved out a little space for myself in the basement where I would mess around with computers. I was trying to run Linux, Docker, and set up my own media server.”
While his parents were not engineers themselves, his dad, an investment banker, did bring an entrepreneurial spirit into Noah’s life. “My dad was always working with early stage companies and he taught me how different industries rise and fall over time, how cyclical entrepreneurship is. I loved learning how varied and different startups can be.”
Noah’s interests in computers and entrepreneurship collided when COVID hit during his junior year of high school. With lockdowns forcing the country to spend more time indoors, demand for gaming PCs saw a massive spike as individuals were looking for entertainment at home. Noah saw opportunity given his familiarity tinkering with hardware. “So, I essentially built one of the largest refurbished gaming PC businesses during COVID,” he states.
Noah realized he could use the skills he had developed tinkering with computers in his basement to start his own business. At first, he was throwing together parts that he already had lying around the house to make simple machines for friends and family in his small town. However, as word got around that there was a kid in the area with the expertise to build gaming rigs from scratch, demand skyrocketed. In short time, Noah had partnered with several different component suppliers, launched his own website, and was spending all of his time outside of remote classes building and delivering gaming PCs.
With the money from his PC business, Noah was quick to move onto his next entrepreneurial endeavor - EliteSeat. EliteSeat was a ticketing app that allowed users to sell their tickets to concerts or sporting events right before or during the event. “It started as a class project that I decided to pursue in earnest.” Noah and a classmate stood up their own servers and were able to get some early adopters, but like most first startups, interest didn’t fully pan out. “EliteSeat didn’t do so hot but it taught me a lot about startups. It reinforced in me this notion that, it doesn’t matter if you have a star studded team or have raised capital – what matters most is just going out and building something. Perseverance will bring rewards over time.”
After his experience building and shutting down EliteSeat, Noah was getting ready to head to college. Nationwide lockdowns had just been lifted as he was going through the college applications and the lingering uncertainty surrounding the pandemic weighed on him throughout the process. “Initially, I wanted to move away from home but then I realized that I really didn’t know if there would be massive lockdowns again. What if I moved across the country and couldn’t get back to my family?” He only looked at a few schools close to home, and the one he fell in love with was Iowa State, where he ultimately matriculated. “I don’t know why I loved it when I visited. It was terrible weather, slush everywhere. But I just loved the school from day one.” Not only did Iowa State end up being a great fit for Noah academically, but it is also the place where he would meet one of his co-founders, found NodeKit and ultimately drop out to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams full time.
At college, Noah was able to pursue many of his passions that he had cultivated earlier in his life. He was part of the entrepreneurship center, pitch competitions and the algorithmic trading club. And while Noah did enjoy the academic experience at Iowa State, he couldn’t help himself from trying to build companies while he was a student. The first was a company that he called AnomalyFi. AnomalyFi was a data analytics company that indexed different blockchains and provided onchain insights.
“I’d been into crypto since I was very young,” Noah recounts. “I got kicked off of Coinbase because I was using their platform before they had age verification. When they added it they shut down my account.” With AnomalyFi, Noah was pursuing his interests in crypto and finance by building analytics tools for traders. After working on the initial idea, he quickly recruited his first co-founder to join him.
Ricardo Tavarez was a student at the University of Wisconsin who had attended high school with Noah. “I met Ricardo through a friend of a friend in high school but we were never that close,” Noah explains. However, they reconnected at a party during winter break of their freshman year and immediately bonded over a shared interest in entrepreneurship.
“Ricardo told me, ‘I remember you were the kid that started that computer business in high school and then EliteSeat. Whenever you start your next company, I don’t care what it is, I want to be involved.’” Little did Ricardo know, Noah was already working on AnomalyFi. They started hashing out visions for the company together and Ricardo was immediately in.
AnomalyFi’s third co-founder came through a connection on campus at Iowa State. Later in his freshman year, Noah was wanting to see if he could leverage the analytics engine he had built for AnomalyFi to power onchain trading. Naturally, he hit up Iowa State’s algorithmic trading club to see if he could recruit some additional talent.
“I messaged the club’s Discord server to see if anyone would meet with me in person to talk about the idea,” While the quant trading club was not very big, one brave individual did respond to the message. Nick Prezler, a sophomore studying statistics, said he’d be open to sharing ideas about quant trading and crypto. Noah laughs when telling me about setting up his meeting with Nick, “He thought I was just wanting to share ideas, but I was going into that meeting trying to recruit a co-founder.” The plan was to meet up after math class and walk back to their dorms for a chat.
“The day we met was the worst downpour that I had ever experienced on campus, but we still met up after class. Nick’s dorm was a mile in the opposite direction from where I was trying to go, but we got so engrossed in our conversation that we didn’t really notice. We got completely soaked, but by the end of our walk, Nick had decided to join the team.”
With the founding team assembled, AnomalyFi was off to the races… or so they thought. Noah, Ricardo, and Nick did make solid, initial progress scaling AnomalyFi; they entered in several different pitch competitions, received early interest from universities to leverage their analytics tools, and even set up some initial meetings with investors. However, over time, Noah and team realized that the analytics market was extremely crowded, and they were going to have difficulty carving out their own niche within the space. It was time to explore a different path for AnomalyFi.
A key innovation that Noah had arrived at with AnomalyFi was achieving sub second latency to process transactions from the myriad L2s building on top of Ethereum. This was work that directly exposed them to the mess of countless rollups building on top of Ethereum, and they only saw this mess increasing with the rollup-as-a-service market heating up.
“Initially, we thought we could just service these rollups with our data analytics platform,” Noah recounts. “But then, at a more fundamental level, we understood that rollup-as-a-service platforms are inherently centralizing. If we could build a decentralized network to allow them to decentralize more simply, that could be a great product. And that’s kind of where NodeKit started and it all snowballed from there.”
And snowball it did. With a new name for the company and a revised vision, Ricardo, Noah, and Nick spent their next summer working remotely and building out NodeKit in the free time they had during their respective summer internships.
“Nick was over in Philadelphia working in trading, Ricardo was stuck on campus in Wisconsin, and I was in the middle of nowhere back home,” Noah tells me. But everyday after work (and sometimes during) they would hop online and hack on NodeKit together. With time, NodeKit grew into more than just a shared sequencer. The product as it stands today is building key infrastructure to connect all of web3.
The first product NodeKit built was called SEQ, a shared sequencer. SEQ offers two key advantages for Layer 2 blockchains (L2s): improved decentralization and partial composability between chains. For most L2 solutions, building independent decentralized sequencers is complex and resource-intensive. Shared sequencers address this challenge by providing a more scalable and cost-effective solution, effectively decentralizing transaction ordering across multiple chains simultaneously.
However, despite their benefits in improving decentralization, shared sequencers face limitations when it comes to achieving true cross-chain composability. The core issue lies in their ability to guarantee only atomic inclusion rather than atomic execution. This means that while transactions can be bundled across different chains (inclusion), there is no guarantee they will succeed in unison (execution).
To address this limitation, the NodeKit team started to develop their next offering, Javelin. Javelin is a Superbuilder, a revolutionary approach to block production. Superbuilders function as specialized block producers that simultaneously build blocks for multiple chains. Similar to how applications on Ethereum achieve composability through a shared state-aware block producer, chains utilizing Javelin become composable by sharing block production across multiple networks. This enables seamless and atomic execution of cross-chain transactions, ensuring that transactions are not only included but also executed simultaneously—a crucial feature for numerous cross-chain applications.
The implementation of Superbuilders effectively transforms decentralized applications (dApps) into multi-chain entities, allowing them to access users and liquidity across various chains concurrently. From a user perspective, this creates a unified experience comparable to traditional banking, where one account serves multiple purposes without requiring separate balances for different merchants. These simplifications, made possible through cross-chain composability, are essential for achieving a seamless "it just works" user experience that will drive broader adoption of blockchain technology.
After settling on the new direction for NodeKit, Noah and team were quickly forced into the realities of balancing university life and building a fast-growing startup.
“We got identified by LBank to join their Summer Bootcamp for crypto startups. We were the only people from the Midwest, or even a state school there. It took place in Cabo at the end of August and so I actually had to miss the first week of school for it. I had to come late to all of my classes and explain to my professors why I hadn’t shown up to any of the classes. I don’t think they were surprised when I told them I was dropping out two months later.”
Dropping out became the clear decision for all three of the NodeKit team after seeing the immediate traction their startup was achieving. They were crowned winners of the LBank Bootcamp and immediately started attracting interest from investors, ultimately closing their pre-seed with Borderless Capital, a16z’s CSX, and Symbolic Capital in the round.
“We’ve had a lot of interesting experiences being young founders in the space,” Noah reflects when I ask him about building NodeKit as a college dropout. “It’s not that we're often the only dropouts in the room at conferences or pitch competitions, but we’re also likely the only ones from state schools.” In a space that highly values credentials and brand, Noah has carved his own path to success by exhibiting a relentless commitment to shipping high quality product.
“We’ve proven time and time again that it doesn’t matter if you have a PhD from Stanford or you’re a professor at Yale. At the end of the day, if you build great products and provide a great customer experience, that’s the only thing people care about.”
With Javelin announced, NodeKit is well on their way to building a more composable future for Ethereum. They recently graduated from a16z’s CSX program and Beacon. They announced their pre-seed round led by Borderless Capital. And most importantly, the Ethereum roadmap has only proved the need for the critical infrastructure they’re providing.
Now, NodeKit’s testnet is just around the corner and the team knows they have a big few months ahead. “We want to bring composability to all chains. We want to supercharge DeFi, consumer apps, everything,” states Noah.
It’s certainly a big vision, but we know Noah is well equipped to pull it off. And in a callback to the beginning of our conversation, Noah again illustrates just how fast he and his team are executing. He gives me an update on NodeKit’s recent development progress. “Our engineering team was shipping so fast that we realized we needed to move up the date of our testnet. If that’s not bullish I don’t know what is.”✦