Dr Philipp Kant did not move into blockchain through markets. He came through research. Trained in particle physics and holding a PhD in Higgs physics, he began in a field where precision, formal models and methodological discipline are central. His move into commercial engineering was a move into a setting where systems could be designed, built and tested on shorter timelines.
Dr Kant describes the transition in practical terms. He discovered functional programming while working as a postdoctoral researcher in particle physics and was drawn to its level of abstraction. That path took him into startups in Berlin and then, in 2017, to IOHK. He had heard of Bitcoin, but the attraction was technical rather than ideological.
“The reason why it was really interesting for me was because they were using Haskell, which is one of the more prominent functional programming languages that I also really like.”
This background matters because Dr Kant’s contribution to Cardano, and now to Tachys, is as much about engineering method as code. One of the clearest ideas he articulates is that agility and formality are not opposites. He developed that position during Cardano’s redesign, when performance, stability and launch constraints forced difficult choices. He explains that the original implementation had been built in a startup mode where development speed was prioritised and concerns such as modularity, maintainability and performance behaviour were not sufficiently central.
His first task at IOHK was to analyse launch parameters. The conclusion was operational. A fully decentralised launch was too difficult at that stage for performance and stability reasons, so the team launched in a federated form with a smaller, more predictable node set. At the same time, they began a reimplementation. Dr Kant describes the next step as introducing formal specifications to describe system behaviour and then implementing from those specifications, without accepting the assumption that this requires a rigid waterfall process.
“That doesn’t have to be the case, and you can basically develop using these very sophisticated tools, and still have a lot of flexibility in the way that you write your software.”
He is also clear about the operational value. The aim is to solve hard problems earlier and reduce integration risk before lower-level design choices become constraints. He describes a top-down design approach that still allows early validation, including testing behaviour by simulating components such as network communication, including delays, before full networking functionality is implemented. This is a practical point, not a theoretical one. It affects delivery, reliability and the cost of change.
Dr Kant’s move to Ensurable Systems carries that approach into a wider commercial setting. He describes Ensurable Systems as an engineering company using the same approach applied during the Cardano rewrite to build other systems that run predictably and behave as intended.
“The idea is to build systems using the same kind of methodology that we used for Cardano, and thereby making sure that they run in the way that you want to and that you ensure that they run in a predictable manner.”
The company’s current focus is work in the vicinity of Cardano, and Dr Kant places that in the context of Cardano’s decentralised development model, where treasury funding allows multiple teams to build useful components.
He identifies Tachys as the first project Ensurable Systems is engaging with in that setting, and defines its role in ecosystem terms rather than as a standalone product announcement.
“Tachys is the first project that we’re engaging with that will add value to Cardano, and do that by enabling the Cardano ecosystem to grow.”
Tachys is a collaborative project. Dr Kant describes it as involving Ensurable Systems and four other entities: Well-Typed, PNSol, HAL8 and Apex Fusion. He also identifies Apex as a chain seeking this performance profile for financial applications, which places Tachys within a defined partner-chain use case.
Dr Kant frames Tachys as a specific engineering option for Cardano-based chains with particular requirements. His definition is direct and operational.
“What Tachys is for is to allow a blockchain based on the Cardano code to work faster in both in the sense that a transaction that you send gets included faster so you have a shorter user feedback time, and also in terms of being able to process more transactions in any given time interval.”
He is equally clear that this comes with trade-offs. Cardano, as deployed, protects leader schedule privacy so outside actors cannot know in advance who will produce the next block. Dr Kant explains that this makes certain attacks harder, but also constrains speed because preserving that property introduces uncertainty into block production timing and can create competing blocks that then need to be resolved.
Tachys changes that balance by giving up leader schedule privacy in order to support faster block production. He links that choice to application needs, saying Apex wants this for a chain targeting financial applications where transaction speed and volume matter.
Before implementation is live, the proposal is already in Cardano’s public review process via a Cardano Improvement Proposal or CIP. He says the Tachys CIP is live and under discussion, and describes a process involving CIP editors, review, an active stage and possible acceptance onto the proposal list. He also says the process is useful even if the proposal is not intended to change Cardano mainnet directly, because it is designed to improve the wider ecosystem and benefits from public technical scrutiny.
His comments on the CIP process also show the same research discipline visible elsewhere in the conversation. He expects criticism and treats it as part of the work.
“There’s a lot of excitement about it. There’s also some interesting academic discussion with some of the researchers.” He describes the discussion as productive, with additions to the CIP and clarifications to the threat model, including which scenarios are and are not being considered.
Dr Kant also places Tachys within a broader strategy for ecosystem growth around Cardano. He points to Ethereum’s expansion through many projects cloning and extending the code base, with ideas moving between projects and the wider network. His view is that Cardano can benefit from a similar pattern if it becomes easier for teams to build on the existing architecture. In that argument, modularity is not only a technical choice. It is a condition for wider experimentation and contribution.
That point is grounded in architecture. Dr Kant explains that the Cardano node was redesigned so different parts of the code can be replaced, including consensus and ledger components. He uses a seminar example to make the point concrete: a colleague created a toy ledger based on Pokémon rather than coins to demonstrate that the ledger component could be swapped while the surrounding architecture remained intact.
“It’s very modular, and I think there is a great potential in basically taking that modularity the last mile.”
He is also clear that the practical setup experience still lags the architecture. Referring to Apex’s experience cloning Cardano and setting up its own chain, he says,
“It’s not as easy as it should be.” That gap between architectural capability and practical accessibility is where Tachys and related work become important. The work is not only about higher throughput. It also addresses reuse and adaptation for partner chains.
His background in Higgs physics is relevant here in a narrow technical sense. His scientific training is grounded in formal models and constraints, including symmetries and the problem of zero masses in particle physics. The same habit of reasoning appears in his engineering work: start from system structure, identify constraints, and design around explicit trade-offs. In Tachys, that is visible in the top-down design approach and in the way performance gains are framed against changes in security assumptions.
Dr Kant’s account of the future of Tachys is tied to partner chains and ecosystem growth, not a single deployment. He describes the goal as implementing Tachys and combining it with additional work that makes it easier to set up chains on the Cardano code base. He connects that to a practical outcome: more projects reusing the code, more technical activity around partner chains, and a broader Cardano community beyond a single chain.
