Author: 0xResearcher

In the past year, the most real "voting" in the encryption industry has occurred less and less in governance forums, but in deployment scripts, migration plans and budget tables. The project team no longer relies on slogans to express its position, but uses actions to choose the ecology: where to move the main network, which tool stack to prioritize the next phase of products, and which market with stronger network effects to bet on liquidity and partnerships.

Noble's pivot is a classic example. As one of the most successful stablecoin infrastructures in the Cosmos ecosystem, it has been responsible for the issuance and cross-chain distribution of native USDC, and has connected a large number of chains with stablecoin settlement scenarios through IBC. But when it announced its migration to the independent EVM L1 and deeply bound stablecoin products to the network value capture mechanism, the signal was clear enough: the main battlefield for stablecoins, settlement and application distribution is still EVM. The stablecoin market share is highly concentrated in EVM, developer tools and wallet/dApp ecosystems are more mature. But this does not mean that "getting rid of EVM" is equivalent to "squeezing into a certain general chain" and everything will be fine. On the contrary, more and more teams are beginning to redefine a question while moving towards EVM: Are we choosing a chain or a growth method?

Why are "your own EVM chains" becoming more common?

First of all, the advantages of EVM are still clear: the stablecoins and assets are larger, the integration objects are more complete, and the developer tools are more mature. This determines that many applications still want to complete growth and distribution in the EVM. But on the other hand, on the general chain, applications often have to accept a series of exogenous constraints: cost fluctuations, congestion, shared sorting environment, unified upgrade rhythm, and the resulting uncontrollable user experience. The attraction of application chain/rollup is to "endogenize" these constraints - the team can choose more appropriate block production time, execution model, RPC and infrastructure configuration based on business characteristics, and bind transaction revenue and incentive design more closely to its own network and product growth.

In other words, the industry is shifting from "choose a chain and adapt to it" to "choose an architecture and shape it." When the cost of this path is significantly reduced, "owning your own EVM chain" becomes more like a replicable product strategy rather than a big gamble.

Rollup as a Service is turning "self-built chain" from asset-heavy to standard action

What hinders the popularization of the application chain model is not "the value is not clear enough", but "the construction and operation and maintenance are too expensive." From chain construction, security, operation and maintenance, monitoring, to cross-chain, bridging, messaging and user deposit paths, each item means high labor and time costs. For most teams, even if they accept that "the chain is the product", they may be dissuaded by the complexity of the project. This is also the background for Rollup as a Service (RaaS) to come to the forefront: it productizes deployment, hosting, maintenance and part of security engineering, allowing the team to focus on the application itself - functions, ecological cooperation, growth and commercialization.

Take Caldera as an example. Its core narrative and route are relatively typical: in the early days, the rollup deployment threshold was lowered to a more affordable level through the Rollup Engine; and after the number of rollups increased rapidly, the focus was further placed on "how to smooth out fragmentation." This layer is called Metalayer in Caldera: it is hoped that the new chain will have more complete interconnection capabilities at the beginning of its launch, including fast bridging, aggregation and developer SDK, and reduce the integration cost and time cost of the team to connect multiple suppliers. Behind this is a very realistic judgment: the real bottleneck of the application chain model is not "whether it can be a chain", but "will having a chain of its own have an impact on the user experience?" If the user's deposit, cross-chain and interaction paths are smooth enough, the sovereignty and controllable experience of the application chain/rollup will be more attractive; on the contrary, the separation of interoperability and liquidity will offset the benefits of "lower gas and higher performance".

After the distribution logic changes, "Internet" becomes a growth infrastructure

When the threshold for “self-built chains” has been lowered by RaaS, new problems have become more prominent: chains can be built more easily, but it may not be easier for users and funds to come in. For most applications, the real growth loss often occurs before use - how many steps to deposit, how long to wait for cross-chain, whether the fees are transparent, and what to do if it fails. Funds are scattered across the Ethereum main network, various L2s, exchanges and other ecosystems, and user entrances also come from wallets, aggregators, centralized channels or dApp jumps; in this distribution pattern, cross-chain and deposit paths are essentially part of the conversion funnel. The greater the friction, the easier it is to consume new additions "before reaching the product".

Precisely because the Internet has begun to affect conversion and retention, the competitive point of RaaS is shifting from "whether it can send a link with one click" to "whether it can prevent the chain from becoming an island." Some infrastructure teams have also extended their focus from deployment capabilities to the productization of the interconnection layer: Caldera, for example, in addition to providing rollup deployment and operation and maintenance capabilities, has also launched Metalayer as one of its core directions. It hopes to advance and standardize the integration of cross-chains, bridging and related tool chains as much as possible, so that new chains will have smoother asset entry and cross-network transfer paths when they go online, instead of patchwork after they go online. For the project side, this means less supplier assembly, shorter integration cycles, and a more controllable user experience; for users, it means fewer "multiple choice questions" and less operational friction. After the interconnection friction is reduced, the sovereignty and controllable experience of the application chain/rollup will not be offset by the complexity of cross-chain, and it will be easier to replicate on a larger scale.

The standard for the next generation is not "where to move", but "to take growth into one's own hands"

As more and more projects move closer to EVM, the industry's decision-making focus is also changing: from "which chain to choose to team up with" to "choosing a more effective growth and delivery method." The advantages of EVM as a distribution market still hold true, but if the business is placed on a universal chain for a long time, the key experience will be more dependent on the external environment: cost fluctuations caused by congestion, queuing and failure rates caused by shared execution, and upgrades and parameter constraints at a unified rhythm. These uncertainties are acceptable in the early stage; once it enters the scale stage, they will directly affect transformation and commercialization, making growth more like "eating based on the market situation."

The reason why "own EVM chain/rollup" is becoming more and more standard is not that all project parties want to build infrastructure, but that it makes growth variables more controllable: costs and performance are more stable, the confirmation and execution environment is more suitable for the business, the upgrade rhythm can follow the product, and it is easier to form a closed loop between chain layer income, incentives and resource investment and product management. More importantly, RaaS reduces chain construction and operation and maintenance costs, and an interconnection layer similar to Metalayer reduces cross-chain and integration friction, so that "having your own execution environment" no longer equals "sacrifice of distribution and liquidity." When these two types of costs decrease at the same time, the self-owned EVM chain /rollup will change from a customized option for a few headers to a standard solution that can be copied by more applications in the scale-up stage.