From PolyMarket to Hyperliquid: App Chains are becoming the new Alpha

The recent popularity of the prediction market project PolyMarket has taught the industry a lesson: when a truly demanded and product-oriented application takes off, it can not only attract users and generate discussions but can even bring a long-silent network back into the spotlight—Polygon once surpassed Base on Chain Revenue, which is a highly representative signal. However, what is more noteworthy is PolyMarket's repeated emphasis on its "top priority" amidst the heat: to build its own chain.

This sounds like a further technical upgrade, but essentially it is an inevitable choice when an application enters the deep waters of growth. Once product validation is complete, transaction behavior stabilizes, and user scale expands, the application begins to feel dissatisfied with "renting someone else's infrastructure" and hopes to control key experiences and revenue streams itself. A similar path is also seen in another more typical case: the leading Perp DEX, Hyperliquid. It did not settle for being an "application" on a mainstream public chain but instead unified the trading system, execution environment, and user experience by directly building its own App Chain, ultimately achieving a level of smoothness and throughput close to that of a "centralized exchange," thereby establishing a competitive moat.

When these two cases are viewed together, they point to the same trend: App Chains are becoming the new Alpha.

Why do "successful applications want to build their own chains"?

The more successful an application is, the more likely it is to take the step of "building its own chain," for very practical reasons: when you transition from "validating whether the product can run" to "scalable operations," the public chain no longer just brings traffic and tool benefits, but a host of external variables that you cannot control. In the early stages, choosing a public chain is certainly the most cost-effective—deployment is quick, the ecosystem is mature, and users and assets are already present. The most important thing is to get the product running smoothly and ensure users are willing to continue using it; however, once the business explodes, your critical path will increasingly be affected by congestion, fee fluctuations, confirmation times, and other public network states, and the uncertainty of the experience begins to directly consume conversion and retention. At the same time, costs will shift from "user complaints" to "financial structure": in high-frequency, high-volume scenarios, gas and infrastructure expenses will become a curve that must be calculated, managed, and may fluctuate dramatically with external conditions.

Furthermore, successful applications will pay more attention to "value closure" and "iteration speed." A significant portion of the transactions and growth you achieve is often naturally captured by the underlying and intermediate layers, making it difficult for you to accurately return incentives to the core users who truly contribute liquidity and transactions; you want to customize rules for key processes and optimize the execution environment, but you can only make patchwork adjustments within a public framework. Thus, projects like PolyMarket that have already gained momentum will regard "building their own chain" as the main line for the next stage; strong trading products like Hyperliquid will directly bind the execution environment, experience, and economic system together with an App Chain, turning controllability into a competitive moat. At this stage, the chain is no longer just a deployment location but a part of the product.

Chains can be launched, but network effects may not follow

App Chains are indeed becoming a trend, but this does not mean the barriers have lowered—more accurately, it is becoming easier to "launch a chain," while "making the chain truly operational" is becoming increasingly difficult. Many teams believe that once they build their own chain, they can reclaim the experience, costs, and rules, only to find out after going live that the hardest part has shifted from engineering implementation to network operation: users will not migrate just because you have an additional chain, and funds will not automatically flow in just because you changed the execution environment. Once a chain is independent, it will immediately face the reality of "starting from scratch": how to onboard the first batch of users, how to ensure assets flow smoothly, how to stabilize transaction and usage frequency—none of these can be solved merely by launching the chain itself.

More specifically, App Chains commonly encounter three walls:

• Cold start: New chains lack default entry points and locations, requiring users to learn, switch, and trust additionally.

• Liquidity fragmentation: Once assets cross chains, versions and paths emerge, pools become fragmented and lack depth, leading to a user experience that becomes more expensive, slower, and more complex, even resulting in confusion like "the same coin has different prices in different places."

• Weak ecological synergy: You can make your product more specialized and extreme, but if it cannot be seen by a larger network or cannot form smooth asset and user flows with other chains and applications, it can easily become a "powerful but isolated" new island.

Therefore, the truly scarce capability in the App Chain era is shifting from "can we launch a chain" to "can we 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.

Accelerating App Chain into the flywheel— from "launching" to "using"

The difficulty of App Chains is no longer just about "can we launch a chain," but whether it can be immediately utilized after launching: how users come in, how assets arrive, how liquidity is sustained, and whether cross-chain experiences will be dragged down by fragmentation. Many ambitious teams consider app chains essentially because they want "to own their own infrastructure" (sequencing, block production rhythm, execution model, RPC, transaction revenue, etc.), using more controllable block space to create better products and businesses; however, in reality, poor interoperability and fragmentation between chains often turn onboarding into a cost black hole, making the launch of a new chain feel like a "new island" rather than a "network node."

Caldera's approach is to turn this path into a reusable product suite: using the Rollup Engine to lower deployment and operational thresholds, making chain launching a more controllable routine action; then using Metalayer to make "connections" a default configuration, enabling each chain to have cross-chain messaging, rapid bridging, bridge aggregation, and development tools from day one, reducing friction for users and funds in cross-chain transfers, making "going live" closer to "joining an existing interconnected ecosystem." On this basis, Caldera's growth logic is not a single-point SaaS but a network flywheel: each new chain will bring new users and sources of liquidity, and Metalayer will make it easier for these increments to flow within the ecosystem and feed back into existing chains, thereby enhancing the entire network's attractiveness to the next batch of teams.

The design around $ERA further "accelerates and compounds" the flywheel: it serves as a general participation and economic coordination vehicle for Metalayer (the fee pricing basis for cross-chain interactions, etc.), and through staking/node participation and governance, it binds the incentives of chains, applications, users, and infrastructure participants within the same network, making collaboration and growth shift from "possible" to "easier to sustain." A more intuitive example is that ecological linkage incentives themselves will reinforce network effects; for instance, Espresso allocated over 2% of the total supply of $ESP to the Caldera community during its TGE and made holders and stakers of $ERA key airdrop targets: the value return from high-quality external partners enhances the attractiveness of participating in the $ERA ecosystem; and more holdings and staking further strengthen network cohesion and collaboration expectations, in turn facilitating more cooperation and more chains choosing to "join the network." Ultimately, what Caldera aims to solve is to ensure that App Chains not only can be launched but can also be used more smoothly from day one and enter the growth flywheel more quickly.

The Alpha of App Chains lies not in "launching chains," but in "networking"

From PolyMarket to Hyperliquid, the industry is increasingly clear about one thing: when applications enter the stage of scalable operations, "chains" will upgrade from deployment locations to parts of the product, with experience, cost structure, iteration speed, and value return all beginning to revolve around it. However, the true barrier for App Chains has also changed: launching chains is becoming easier, but the challenge is to ensure that the chain has entry points, asset paths, liquidity, and collaboration right from the start. Therefore, the next phase of Alpha is not "who has launched more chains," but who can turn "cold starting a new chain" into an action of "joining the network," reducing fragmented friction to a sufficiently low level, allowing users to complete deposits, transactions, and cross-chain usage as naturally as if they were on the same chain. When this connectivity capability and incentive mechanism (such as participation and external cooperation returns around $ERA) can continuously self-reinforce, App Chains will transition from single-point success to replicable systemic victories, becoming the truly sustainable new Alpha.