Over the past year, the most genuine "votes" in the crypto industry have occurred less and less in governance forums and more in deployment scripts, migration plans, and budget sheets. Project teams are no longer expressing their stance with slogans, but rather choosing their ecosystem through actions: where to migrate the mainnet, which toolchain to prioritize for the next phase of product development, and which market with stronger network effects to bet on liquidity and partnerships.
Noble's shift is a prime example. As one of the most successful stablecoin infrastructures in the Cosmos ecosystem, it once handled the issuance and cross-chain distribution of native USDC and connected numerous chains with stablecoin settlement scenarios through IBC. However, when it announced its migration to the independent EVM L1 and deeply integrated its stablecoin products with the network value capture mechanism, the signal was clear: the main battleground for stablecoins, settlement, and application distribution remains the EVM. The stablecoin market share is highly concentrated in the EVM, and the developer tools and wallet/dApp ecosystem are more mature. But this doesn't mean that "moving away from the EVM" equates to "squeezing into a general-purpose chain" and everything will be fine. On the contrary, as more and more teams move to the EVM, they are beginning to redefine a question: are we choosing a chain, or are we choosing a growth model?
Why is "own EVM chain" becoming more common?
First, the advantages of the EVM remain clear: larger stablecoin and asset volume, more comprehensive integration options, and more mature developer tools. This determines that many applications will ultimately prefer to complete their growth and distribution within the EVM. However, on the other hand, on general-purpose blockchains, applications often face a series of exogenous constraints: fee fluctuations, congestion, shared sorting environments, unified upgrade schedules, and the resulting uncontrollable user experience. The appeal of application chains/rollups lies in "internalizing" these constraints—teams can choose more suitable block times, execution models, RPC and infrastructure configurations based on business characteristics, and more tightly bind transaction revenue and incentive design to their own network and product growth.
In other words, the industry is shifting from "choosing a chain and adapting to it" to "choosing an architecture and shaping it." When the cost of this path is significantly reduced, "having your own EVM chain" becomes more of a replicable product strategy than a high-stakes gamble.
Rollup as a Service is transforming "self-built blockchain" from a capital-intensive endeavor into a standard practice.
The obstacle to the widespread adoption of blockchain application models is not "lack of clear value," but rather "excessive construction and maintenance costs." From blockchain construction, security, operation, and monitoring, to cross-chain functionality, bridging, messaging, and user deposit paths, each aspect represents significant human and time costs. For most teams, even those who accept "chain as a product" may be deterred by the complexity of the engineering. This is the context in which Rollup as a Service (RaaS) has emerged: it productizes deployment, hosting, maintenance, and some security engineering, allowing teams to focus their efforts on the application itself—functionality, ecosystem partnerships, growth, and monetization.
Taking Caldera as an example, its core narrative and roadmap are quite typical: initially, it lowered the deployment threshold of rollups to a more affordable level through the Rollup Engine; and after the rapid growth in the number of rollups, it further focused on "how to smooth out fragmentation." Caldera calls this layer the Metalayer: it aims to enable new chains to have more complete interconnectivity capabilities from the outset, including rapid bridging, aggregation, and developer SDKs, reducing the integration costs and time costs incurred by teams in connecting to multiple vendors separately. Behind this is a very realistic judgment: the real bottleneck of the application chain model is not "whether it is possible to build a chain," but "whether a chain of its own will affect the user experience." If the user deposit, cross-chain, and interaction paths are smooth enough, the sovereignty and controllability of the application chain/rollup will be more attractive; conversely, the disconnect between interoperability and liquidity will offset the benefits of "lower gas and higher performance."
After the distribution logic changed, "interconnectivity" became a growth infrastructure.
While RaaS lowers the barrier to entry for "self-built chains," new problems become more prominent: chains can be built more easily, but users and funds may not be as readily available. For most applications, the real attrition of growth often occurs before usage—how many steps are involved in depositing funds, how long does cross-chain processing take, are fees transparent, and what happens if it fails? Funds are dispersed across the Ethereum mainnet, various L2 servers, exchanges, and other ecosystems, and user entry points come from wallets, aggregators, centralized channels, or dApp redirects. In this distribution pattern, cross-chain and deposit paths are essentially part of the conversion funnel; the greater the friction, the more likely new users are consumed "before reaching the product."
Because interconnectivity is beginning to impact conversion and retention, the competitive focus of RaaS is shifting from "can we launch a chain with one click?" to "can we prevent chains from becoming isolated islands?" Some infrastructure teams are also extending their focus from deployment capabilities to the productization of the interconnect layer. For example, Caldera, in addition to providing rollup deployment and operation capabilities, has launched Metalayer as one of its core directions, aiming to bring forward and standardize the integration of cross-chain, bridging, and related toolchains as much as possible. This allows new chains to have smoother asset entry and cross-network flow paths from the moment they launch, rather than piecemeal additions after launch. For projects, this means fewer vendors assembling, shorter integration cycles, and a more controllable user experience; for users, it means fewer "choices" and less operational friction. With reduced interconnectivity friction, the sovereignty and controllability of application chains/rollups will not be offset by cross-chain complexity, and it will be easier to replicate and succeed on a larger scale.
The next generation's standard is not "where to relocate," but "taking growth into our own hands."
As more and more projects gravitate towards EVM, the industry's decision-making focus is shifting from "which chain to align with" to "choosing a more effective growth and delivery method." EVM's advantages as a distribution market remain valid, but if businesses are placed on a general-purpose chain in the long term, key experiences will become more dependent on the external environment: cost fluctuations due to congestion, queuing and failure rates caused by shared execution, and upgrades and parameter constraints under a unified pace. These uncertainties are tolerable in the early stages; however, once scale is achieved, they will directly impact conversion and commercialization, making growth more dependent on market conditions.
The reason why "own EVM chain/rollup" is becoming increasingly standard is not because all projects want to build infrastructure, but because it makes growth variables more controllable: costs and performance are more stable, the confirmation and execution environment is more aligned with business needs, upgrades can follow product development, and it's easier to create a closed loop between chain layer revenue, incentives, resource investment, and product operations. More importantly, RaaS reduces the cost of building and maintaining a chain, and interconnection layers like Metalayer reduce cross-chain and integration friction, making "having your own execution environment" no longer equivalent to "sacrificing distribution and liquidity." When both types of costs decrease simultaneously, own EVM chain/rollup transforms from a customized option for a few leading projects into a replicable standard solution for more applications in the scaling phase.
