The blockchain infrastructure of 2025 has arrived at a point reminiscent of the 'pre-internet era.' During that stage, the internet was experiencing rapid growth while simultaneously facing new bottlenecks due to non-unified protocols and lack of communication between networks. Ethereum's current situation is quite similar; the rapid expansion of the Rollup system has made it feasible for mainstream applications to go on-chain, but at the same time, the increasingly fragmented chain layout, higher development and maintenance costs, and the disjointed cross-chain experience are quickly eroding the benefits brought by scaling.
The growth of the RaaS (Rollup-as-a-Service) market precisely reflects this contradiction. Between 2024 and 2025, the global RaaS market size continues to expand from $1.12 billion, with a compound annual growth rate exceeding 29%, and the Asia-Pacific region even surpassing a growth rate of 30%. The data behind this reflects not just the 'heat of the track,' but also a structural change in scaling methods: self-built chains are giving way to standardized services, and the way Rollups are created is shifting from repeated engineering projects to becoming industrially produced infrastructure. Web3 has thus moved from the 'Battle of the Hundred Chains' to a new stage of 'systematization of infrastructure.'
New dilemmas after scaling
The rapid increase in Rollups has been particularly evident in the past two years. Take Caldera as an example; it serves over 60 chains, covers 40 million independent wallets, has over 550 million dollars in TVL, and has facilitated over 1 billion on-chain transactions. Among the 160+ mainnet Rollups in the entire Ethereum ecosystem, the chains supported by Caldera account for more than a quarter. The driving factors are easy to understand: RaaS services have made chain development no longer reliant on specialized teams grinding for half a year; DA layers like Celestia and EigenDA have significantly reduced costs; the maturity of frameworks like OP Stack, Arbitrum Orbit, zkSync, and Polygon zkEVM has transformed 'deploying a reasonably performing chain' from a daunting task into an engineering option.
Turning from 'impossible' to 'too easy' does not bring about unobstructed growth but rather another form of systemic complexity. States and assets are scattered on their own islands; infrastructure teams face redundant construction; developers must maintain the code and compatibility of multiple chains; users are forced to jump between multiple chain environments, migrate, and deal with repeated onboarding. This scenario is strikingly similar to the fragmented network landscape of the early internet in the 1990s: every network can run, but there are no 'channels' between networks, making it impossible to build a truly scaled overall structure.
Connectivity is the true bottleneck
RaaS has reduced the cost of self-built Rollups from 'almost prohibitive' to an acceptable range. What originally took three to four months, involving consensus, DA, security, auditing, node operation, monitoring, and other multi-layer systems, has now become a matter of selecting configuration options. However, the real challenge after Rollup expansion lies in: Rollup moves execution away from L1 but does not solve the connectivity issue between 'Rollup and Rollup'.
Cross-chain still relies on L1 paths, which are slow, expensive, and unpredictable; bridges are either secure but have long wait times, or fast but with questionable safety; developers can deploy multi-chain structures but cannot create a truly unified experience of 'one application spanning multiple chains'. This lack of interoperability is eroding Rollup's advantages, even causing some teams to hesitate about 'self-launching chains', not because the chains are bad, but because they feel too isolated. In short, RaaS has brought 'scaled expansion', but what comes with it is 'scaled fragmentation'. The next unavoidable question for the industry has shifted from scaling to connectivity: how to enable more and more Rollups to collaborate with each other instead of isolating themselves?
Reorganizing the entire Rollup world
The key perspective behind the Metalayer developed by Caldera is: scaling is not the goal; collaboration is the ultimate infrastructure objective. After helping over 100 projects launch chains, Caldera has realized one thing: launching a chain is easy, but making it operational is the real challenge. The script for every new chain launch is the same. Teams spend months on technology, launch the chain, and then find there's no wallet support, no applications willing to migrate, and no users coming in. You have to negotiate cooperation one by one, find ways to bring in liquidity. Technology only accounts for 20%; the remaining 80% is about 'getting the ecosystem to operate'. The more realistic situation is that many teams fall into stagnation three months after their chain goes live: daily active users are in the hundreds, TVL lingers around six figures, and only team members post in developer forums. This is not a technical issue, but a systemic dilemma of cold-starting the ecosystem.
What Metalayer aims to do is eliminate 80% of the repetitive work. It is not creating another chain, nor is it building a better cross-chain bridge. What it aims to create is a 'connectivity layer' with the goal of allowing Rollups to interact as if they were on the same network. The key idea is: instead of each chain building its own ecosystem, all chains share a common ecological base. How to achieve this? Three directions. Developers can directly call across chains when writing code, without needing to adapt for each chain. This means a DeFi protocol does not need to deploy separately on ten chains; instead, it can deploy once and read liquidity data from all chains. When new links are incorporated, they automatically gain support from the entire ecosystem's wallets, asset liquidity, and application networks, without starting from scratch for cooperation. It's like joining an existing business alliance; you don't need to sign contracts individually with each merchant; the moment you join, you automatically gain all rights and interests. All participants benefit from network growth through $ERA, tying interests together. When the network's value grows, it's not just the platform that benefits, but every contributor receives their corresponding rewards.
For users, the effect is: cross-chain has changed from 'troublesome multi-step operations' to 'just one click'. No need to worry about the underlying path taken, what bridges are used, or whether there will be issues with wrapped assets. If you see an opportunity on chain A and want to transfer assets from chain B, you used to have to open three websites, connect your wallet twice, wait for over ten minutes, and worry about whether something would go wrong in the middle. Now you only need to confirm once, and the rest is handled by the system. This change in experience is what truly makes ordinary users willing to use a multi-chain ecosystem.
New propositions after scaling
Why is this time point worth noting? Because Rollup has moved from the experimental stage to the infrastructure stage. The data is straightforward: L2's transaction volume is already about 10 times that of the Ethereum mainnet. Since Ethereum shifted to a Rollup-centric roadmap in 2020, over 38.5 billion dollars in value has been transferred to L2 and L3. The technical feasibility of scaling has been demonstrated. But new bottlenecks have emerged; the growth rate of Rollup has exceeded its collaborative capacity limits. There are more and more chains, but their connectivity has not kept pace. This means the first wave of scaling benefits is being offset by fragmentation. The next wave of growth will not come from 'more chains' but from 'chains being able to collaborate like a network'. Solutions like Metalayer are gaining attention, not because they offer a novel technology, but because they fill in the long-missing segment of the scaling roadmap: the connectivity layer. If Rollup is the path to Ethereum's scaling, then the connectivity layer is the interconnection hub between the roads, the true infrastructure that enables the network's scale to take effect.
Looking back at the evolution of Ethereum, a clear thread can be seen. Layer 2 and Rollups moved computation off-chain, solving the 'too slow' problem and significantly increasing throughput. The RaaS platform standardized deployment, and Caldera helped teams deploy more than 100 chains in two years, addressing the 'difficulty of launching chains'. But when launching chains becomes easy, the ecosystem starts to fragment. Each chain operates independently, yet collaboration is challenging. This stage is now beginning, and Caldera's launch of Metalayer represents a significant attempt in this phase: not to create another chain, but to provide a collaboration layer for the entire Rollup world. Cross-chain development is as simple as local development. New links, upon integration, immediately gain wallet, liquidity, and application ecosystem support; all participants benefit from network growth through a token mechanism. In terms of user experience, complex cross-chain operations are simplified to a single click; on the development side, one deployment covers multiple chains. Just as the early internet needed the TCP/IP protocol to unleash network potential, the blockchain world also needs unified collaboration standards. Scaling has brought the industry to this point, and collaboration will take the industry further. The shift from 'building more roads' to 'connecting roads into a network' marks the entry of the Ethereum ecosystem into a new stage. And the exploration on this road has just begun.
