From PolyMarket to Hyperliquid: App Chains Are Becoming the New Alpha

Over the past period, the popularity of the prediction market project PolyMarket has taught the industry a lesson: when a truly in-demand, well-designed application gains traction, it can not only bring users and buzz but can even push a long-dormant network back into the spotlight—Polygon briefly surpassing Base on Chain Revenue to take the top spot is a highly representative signal. But what's more noteworthy is the "top priority" that PolyMarket repeatedly emphasized amidst the hype: building its own chain.

This sounds like a further technical upgrade, but in essence, it's an inevitable choice for an application entering the deep waters of growth. Once product validation is complete, trading behavior stabilizes, and user scale expands, applications begin to grow dissatisfied with "renting someone else's infrastructure" and instead wish to control the key user experience and revenue streams. The same path has emerged in another, more classic case: the leading Perp DEX, Hyperliquid. It wasn't content with being just an "application" on a mainstream public chain. Instead, it built its own App Chain from the ground up, unifying the trading system, execution environment, and user experience, ultimately achieving a level of smoothness and throughput close to that of a "centralized exchange," thereby building its moat.

Looking at these two cases together points to the same trend: App Chains are becoming the new Alpha.

Why do "the more successful an app is, the more it wants to build its own chain"?

The more successful an application is, the more likely it is to reach the point of "building its own chain." The reasons are pragmatic: when you transition from "validating if the product works" to the "scaled operation" phase, the public chain no longer offers just traffic and tooling benefits but a host of external variables you cannot control. Choosing a public chain early on is, of course, the most cost-effective—fast deployment, mature ecosystem, existing users and assets; the most important thing is to get the product truly working and have users willing to keep using it. But once the business explodes, your critical path becomes increasingly affected by public network conditions like congestion, fee volatility, and confirmation times. The uncertainty in user experience begins to directly erode conversion and retention. Simultaneously, costs shift from "user complaints" to "financial structure": in high-frequency, high-volume scenarios, gas and infrastructure expenses become a curve that must be actuarially managed and can fluctuate wildly with external conditions.

Going a step further, successful applications care more about "value capture" and "iteration speed." A significant portion of the trading volume and growth you generate is naturally captured by the underlying infrastructure and middle layers, yet it's difficult for you to accurately redirect incentives back to the core users who contribute liquidity and trading. You want to customize rules for key processes and optimize the execution environment, but you're limited to patching things up within the public framework. Therefore, projects like PolyMarket, which have already gained momentum, see "building their own chain" as the main focus for the next phase. Strong trading products like Hyperliquid directly use an App Chain to bind the execution environment, user experience, and economic system together, turning controllability into a moat. At this stage, the chain is no longer just a deployment location; it becomes part of the product.

A chain can be launched, but network effects may not follow

App Chains are indeed becoming a trend, but that doesn't mean the barrier to entry is lower—more accurately, "launching a chain" is getting easier, while "making a chain truly work" is getting harder. Many teams think that after building their own chain, they can reclaim control over experience, costs, and rules, only to discover upon launch that the hardest part shifts from engineering implementation to network operation: users won't migrate just because you have another chain, and capital won't automatically flow in just because you changed the execution environment. Once a chain becomes independent, it immediately faces the reality of "starting from scratch": how to onboard the first batch of users, how to get assets to flow smoothly onto it, how to stabilize trading and usage frequency—these aren't problems solved simply by launching a chain.

More specifically, App Chains commonly run into three walls:

• Cold Start: New chains lack default entry points and positioning. Users need extra learning, extra switching, and extra trust.
• Liquidity Fragmentation: Once assets are bridged, version and path issues arise. Liquidity pools get split, leading to insufficient depth. The user experience becomes more expensive, slower, and more complex, even causing confusion like "the same token having different prices in different places."
• Weak Ecosystem Synergy: You can make your product more specialized and refined, but if it cannot be seen by the broader network and cannot form smooth asset and user flows with other chains and applications, it easily becomes a "functionally strong but isolated" new island.

Therefore, the truly scarce capability in the App Chain era is shifting from "can you launch a chain?" to "can you make the chain part of a network from day one," making the flow of users and capital feel as natural as if they were on the same chain.

Getting App Chains into the Flywheel Faster—From "Launch" to "Usage"

The difficulty with App Chains is no longer just "can you launch one," but whether it can be used immediately after launch: how do users get in, how do assets arrive, how is liquidity onboarded, and will the cross-chain experience be crippled by fragmentation? The essential reason many ambitious teams consider an appchain is to "own their own infrastructure" (sequencing, block timing, execution model, RPC, transaction revenue, etc.), using more controllable block space to build better products and businesses. But in reality, poor interoperability and the fragmentation between chains often turn onboarding into a cost black hole, making a new chain launch feel like a "new island" rather than a "network node."

Caldera's approach is to turn this journey into a reusable product suite: its Rollup Engine lowers the deployment and operational barrier, making chain launches a more manageable routine task rather than heavy engineering. Then, its Metalayer makes "connectivity" a default configuration, equipping every chain from day one with a full suite of capabilities like cross-chain messaging, fast bridging, bridge aggregation, and developer tools. This reduces friction for user and capital flow across chains, making "going live" closer to "plugging into an existing interconnected ecosystem." On this foundation, Caldera's growth logic isn't point-based SaaS but a network flywheel: each new chain brings new users and liquidity sources, and Metalayer makes these increments more likely to flow within the ecosystem and benefit existing chains, thereby increasing the entire network's appeal to the next batch of teams.

The design around $ERA further "accelerates and compounds" this flywheel: it serves both as the universal participation and economic coordination medium for Metalayer (the fee basis for operations like cross-chain interactions) and, through staking/node participation and governance, binds the incentives of chains, applications, users, and infrastructure participants within the same network. This turns collaboration and growth from "possible" into "more likely to sustain momentum." A more concrete example is how ecosystem联动 incentives themselves reinforce network effects. For instance, Espresso allocated over 2% of the total $ESP supply to the Caldera community during its TGE and designated $ERA holders and stakers as key airdrop recipients: the value回流 from external, high-quality partners increases the attractiveness of participating in the $ERA ecosystem; more holding and staking further enhance network cohesion and collaboration expectations, which in turn facilitates more partnerships and more chains choosing to "connect to the network." Ultimately, Caldera aims to solve this: making App Chains not just launchable, but usable smoothly from day one and faster to enter a growth flywheel.

The Alpha of App Chains Lies Not in "Launching Chains," but in "Networking"

From PolyMarket to Hyperliquid, the industry is seeing one thing increasingly clearly: when applications enter the scaled operation phase, the "chain" upgrades from a deployment location to part of the product itself, with user experience, cost structure, iteration speed, and value capture all being rewritten around it. But the real barrier for App Chains changes accordingly: launching a chain is getting easier; the hard part is making a chain have entry points, asset pathways, liquidity, and collaboration from the moment it goes live. Therefore, the next phase's Alpha isn't "who launched more chains," but who can turn "new chain cold start" into an act of "joining a network," pushing fragmentation friction low enough that users can deposit, trade, and use across chains as naturally as if they were on the same chain. When this connectivity capability and incentive mechanism (e.g., participation around $ERA and external partnership value回流) can continuously self-reinforce, App Chains will move from point-in-time successes to replicable systemic victories and become a truly sustainable new Alpha.