The recent surge in popularity of the prediction market project PolyMarket has taught the industry a lesson: when a genuinely relevant and product-driven application takes off, it can not only attract users and generate buzz, but it can even bring a long-dormant network back into the spotlight—Polygon's momentary surpassing of Base to top the Chain Revenue rankings is a prime example. But even more noteworthy is PolyMarket's repeated emphasis on its "primary task" amidst its popularity: building its own blockchain.
This sounds like a further technological upgrade, but it's essentially an inevitable choice as applications enter a deeper growth phase. Once product validation is complete, transaction activity stabilizes, and the user base expands, applications no longer want to simply "rent someone else's underlying infrastructure" but instead desire to control key user experience and revenue streams. The same path is seen in another, more typical example: Hyperliquid, the leader in Perp DEX. It didn't settle for simply creating an "application" on a mainstream public chain; instead, it directly unified the trading system, execution environment, and user experience by building its own App Chain, ultimately achieving near-centralized exchange-level smoothness and throughput, thus establishing a competitive advantage.
Looking at the two cases together, they point to the same trend: App Chain is becoming the new Alpha.
Why do "the more successful an application is, the more people want to build their own blockchain"?
The more successful an application is, the more likely it is to reach the stage of "building its own blockchain." The reason is quite practical: when you move from "verifying whether the product can run" to the "scaled operation" stage, public blockchains no longer bring just traffic and tool benefits, but a bunch of external variables that you cannot control. Choosing a public blockchain in the early stages is certainly the most cost-effective—fast deployment, mature ecosystem, users and assets are already there, and it's most important to first truly get the product running and users willing to continue using it. However, once the business explodes, your critical path will be affected more and more frequently by public network conditions such as congestion, fee fluctuations, and confirmation times. The uncertainty of the experience begins to directly devour conversion and retention. At the same time, costs will change from "user complaints" to "financial structure": in high-frequency, high-volume scenarios, gas and infrastructure expenditures will become a curve that must be carefully calculated, managed, and may fluctuate dramatically with the external environment.
Furthermore, successful applications place greater emphasis on "value loops" and "iteration speed." A significant portion of the transactions and growth you generate is often naturally captured by the underlying and middle layers, making it difficult to accurately channel incentives back to the core users who truly contribute liquidity and transactions. You might want to customize rules for key processes and optimize the execution environment, but you can only make minor tweaks within the public framework. Therefore, projects like PolyMarket, which have already established momentum, will make "self-built chains" their next main focus; strong transaction products like Hyperliquid directly use App Chain to bind the execution environment, user experience, and economic system together, turning controllability into a competitive advantage. At this stage, the chain is no longer just a deployment location, but an integral part of the product.
While the blockchain can be deployed, the network effect may not be able to keep up.
App Chains are indeed becoming a trend, but this doesn't mean the barrier to entry has lowered—more accurately, it's becoming easier to "launch a chain" than to "make the chain actually run." Many teams believe that building their own chain will allow them to recoup the experience, costs, and rules, only to find after launch that the most difficult part has shifted from engineering implementation to network operation: users won't migrate just because you have another chain, and funds won't automatically flow in just because you change the execution environment. Once a chain becomes independent, it immediately faces the reality of "starting from scratch": how to import the first batch of users, how to ensure assets arrive smoothly, and how to stabilize transaction and usage frequency—these are not problems that can be solved simply by launching a chain.
More specifically, App Chain typically encounters three walls:
Cold start : The new chain lacks a default entry point and location, requiring users to learn, switch, and trust it additionally.
Liquidity fragmentation : When assets are transferred across chains, versions and paths emerge, pools are fragmented and lack depth, which in turn makes the user experience more expensive, slower, and more complicated, and even leads to confusion such as "the same coin has different prices in different places".
Weak ecosystem synergy : You can make your product more specialized and more advanced, but if it cannot be seen by a larger network and cannot form a smooth flow of assets and users with other chains and applications, it can easily become a new island that is "very powerful but very lonely".
Therefore, the truly scarce capability in the App Chain era is shifting from "whether we can launch a chain" to "whether we can make the chain a part of the network from day one," allowing the flow of users and funds to be as natural as if they were on the same chain.
Enabling App Chain to enter the flywheel faster—from "release" to "use".
The challenge for App Chains has long since moved beyond simply "whether a chain can be launched," to whether it can be immediately put to use after launch: how do users come onboard, how do assets come in, how is liquidity handled, and will the cross-chain experience be hampered by fragmentation? Many ambitious teams consider App Chains because they essentially want to "own their own underlying infrastructure" (sequencing, block generation rhythm, execution model, RPC, transaction revenue, etc.) to create better products and businesses with a more controllable block space; however, in reality, poor interoperability and fragmentation between chains often turn onboarding into a cost black hole, making new chain launches feel like "new islands" rather than "network nodes."
Caldera's approach is to create a reusable product portfolio for this path: using Rollup Engine to lower the barriers to deployment and maintenance, making chain launches a more controllable and routine process rather than a heavy engineering project; and then using Metalayer to make "connectivity" a default configuration, enabling each chain to have a complete set of capabilities from day 1, including cross-chain messaging, fast bridging, bridge aggregation, and development tools, reducing friction in cross-chain user and fund transfers, and making "going live" closer to "connecting to an existing interconnected ecosystem." Based on this, Caldera's growth logic is not a single-point SaaS, but a network flywheel: each new chain brings new users and liquidity sources, and Metalayer makes it easier for these incremental gains to flow within the ecosystem and feed back into existing chains, thereby increasing the network's attractiveness to the next batch of teams.
The design around $ERA further "accelerates and compoundes" the flywheel: it is both the general participation and economic coordination vehicle of Metalayer (the basis for pricing fees for cross-chain interactions and other operations), and through staking/node participation and governance, it binds the incentives of chain, application, user and infrastructure participants in the same network, making collaboration and growth "possible" to "easier to continuously roll". A more intuitive example is how ecosystem-linked incentives can reinforce network effects. For instance, when Espresso launched its TGE, it allocated over 2% of its total supply to the Caldera community, targeting holders and stakers as key airdrop recipients. This resulted in value returning to high-quality external partners, increasing the attractiveness of participating in the ecosystem. Furthermore, increased holding and staking further strengthened network cohesion and collaboration expectations, leading to more partnerships and more chains choosing to "join the network." Ultimately, Caldera aims to ensure that App Chains not only can be launched, but also used more smoothly from day one and enter the growth flywheel more quickly.
App Chain's Alpha doesn't focus on "issuing chains," but on "connecting to the network."
From PolyMarket to Hyperliquid, the industry is increasingly recognizing one thing: as applications scale up, the "chain" evolves from a deployment location into an integral part of the product, with user experience, cost structure, iteration speed, and value return all rewritten around it. However, the real barrier to entry for App Chains is also changing: launching a chain is becoming easier, but ensuring that the chain has an entry point, asset pathways, liquidity, and collaboration from the moment it launches. Therefore, the next stage of Alpha is not about "who launched more chains," but about who can transform the "cold start of a new chain" into the action of "joining the network," minimizing fragmentation and friction to a sufficiently low level, allowing users to deposit funds, trade, and use cross-chain as naturally as if they were on the same chain. When this connectivity and incentive mechanisms (such as participation and external collaboration around $ERA) can continuously reinforce themselves, App Chains will move from single-point success to replicable systemic victories, and only then will they become truly sustainable new Alphas.
