Chainfeeds Summary:
The next generation's standard is not "where to move", but "taking growth into our own hands".
Article source:
https://foresightnews.pro/article/detail/94626
Article Author:
0xResearcher
Opinion:
0xResearcher: Over the past year, the most genuine "voting" in the crypto industry has occurred less and less in governance forums and more in deployment scripts, migration plans, and budget sheets. Project teams no longer express their direction through narratives or stances, but rather choose their ecosystem through concrete actions: where to deploy the mainnet, which toolchain to prioritize for the next phase of product adaptation, and which market with stronger network effects to bet on liquidity and partnerships. Behind this change is the industry's shift from being driven by ideology to being driven by efficiency and growth. Noble's shift is a typical 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. But when it decided to migrate to the independent EVM L1 and deeply bind its stablecoin products with the network value capture mechanism, the signal was clear enough: the main battlefield for stablecoins, settlement, and application distribution is still the EVM. The stablecoin market share is highly concentrated in the EVM, and the developer tools, wallets, and dApp ecosystem are also more mature. But this does not mean that "de-EVM" is equivalent to "squeezing into a general-purpose chain" and that the problem can be solved. As more and more teams move closer to the EVM, they are also beginning to rethink: are we choosing a chain or a growth model? The advantages of the EVM remain very clear: a larger asset and stablecoin volume, more mature developer tools, and more complete wallet and infrastructure integration. This determines that many applications will ultimately still want to complete their growth and distribution within the EVM. However, running applications on a general-purpose chain often means accepting a series of exogenous constraints—fee volatility, network congestion, shared sorting environment, uniform upgrade pace, and the resulting uncontrollable user experience. The appeal of application chains or rollups lies in "internalizing" these constraints. Teams can choose more suitable block times, execution models, RPC architectures, and infrastructure configurations based on their own business characteristics, and more closely bind transaction revenue, incentive design, and their own network and product growth. Compared to "adapting to a chain," this model is closer to "creating an execution environment." What hinders the popularization of application chain models has never been an unclear value logic, but rather the excessively high construction and maintenance costs. From blockchain deployment, security, operation, and monitoring, to cross-chain functionality, bridging, messaging, and user deposit paths, each aspect requires significant engineering investment. Even teams that embrace the "chain as a product" philosophy are often deterred by complexity and manpower costs. The emergence of Rollup as a Service (RaaS) aims to productize these high-cost aspects, allowing teams to refocus their efforts on functionality, ecosystem partnerships, and growth. However, as "self-built chains" become easier, new bottlenecks emerge: while chains can launch faster, user and capital inflows may not be as readily available. Deposit paths, cross-chain procedures, fee transparency, and failure handling have become part of the growth funnel. Interconnectivity is beginning to directly impact conversion and retention rates, shifting the competitive focus of RaaS from "whether a chain can be launched" to "whether the chain can avoid becoming an isolated island." Infrastructure teams like Caldera are extending deployment capabilities to the interconnect layer, using products like Metalayer to integrate and standardize cross-chain functionality, bridging, and tools upfront, ensuring smooth asset entry and flow paths for new chains from the outset. When the cost of building a blockchain and the friction between interconnections decrease simultaneously, "owning your own EVM chain/rollup" will not come at the cost of sacrificing distribution and liquidity, but will instead become a replicable standard solution for applications in the scaling stage.
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