When Migration Becomes the Norm: Why "Your Own EVM Chain" Is Becoming Standard

Over the past year, the most genuine "voting" in the crypto industry has increasingly occurred not in governance forums, but in deployment scripts, migration plans, and budget sheets. Projects no longer express their stance through slogans; instead, they choose ecosystems through action: deciding where to migrate their mainnet, which toolstack to prioritize for their next-phase product adaptation, and which market with stronger network effects to bet their liquidity and partnerships on.

Noble's pivot is a classic case. As one of the most successful stablecoin infrastructure projects within the Cosmos ecosystem, it was responsible for the issuance and cross-chain distribution of native USDC, connecting numerous chains and stablecoin settlement scenarios via IBC. However, when it announced its migration to an independent EVM L1 and deeply integrated its stablecoin product with network value capture mechanisms, the signal was clear enough: the main battleground for stablecoins, settlement, and application distribution remains within the EVM ecosystem. Stablecoin market share is highly concentrated in EVM, and its developer tools and wallet/dApp ecosystems are more mature. But this doesn't mean that "going to EVM" is synonymous with "squeezing onto a general-purpose chain" and calling it a day. On the contrary, while more and more teams are moving towards EVM, they are beginning to redefine a fundamental question: Are we choosing a chain, or are we choosing a growth model?

Why are "Own EVM Chains" Becoming More Common?

First, the advantages of EVM remain clear: larger stablecoin and asset volumes, more comprehensive integration targets, and more mature developer tools. This determines that many applications ultimately still want to achieve growth and distribution within the EVM ecosystem. On the other hand, on general-purpose chains, applications often have to accept a series of exogenous constraints: fee volatility, congestion, shared sequencing environments, unified upgrade schedules, and the resulting uncontrollable user experience. The appeal of appchains/rollups lies in "internalizing" these constraints—teams can select more suitable block times, execution models, RPC, and infrastructure configurations tailored to their business characteristics, and more tightly bind transaction revenue and incentive designs to their own network and product growth.

In other words, the industry is shifting from "choosing a chain and adapting to it" to "choosing an architecture and shaping it." As the cost of this path is significantly reduced, "having your own EVM chain" increasingly resembles a replicable product strategy rather than a high-stakes gamble.

Rollup as a Service is Turning "Building Your Own Chain" from a Capital-Intensive Endeavor into a Standard Practice

What hinders the widespread adoption of the appchain model is not "unclear value," but "prohibitively expensive construction and operation." From chain setup, security, operation, and monitoring to cross-chain interoperability, bridging, message passing, and user onboarding paths, each component entails high human and time costs. For most teams, even if they acknowledge "the chain as a product," they might be deterred by engineering complexity. This is also the backdrop for the rise of Rollup as a Service (RaaS): it productizes deployment, hosting, maintenance, and part of the security engineering, allowing teams to refocus their energy on the application itself—features, ecosystem partnerships, growth, and commercialization.

Taking Caldera as an example, its core narrative and roadmap are quite typical: initially lowering the barrier to rollup deployment to a more manageable level through its Rollup Engine; and as the number of rollups grew rapidly, further shifting focus to "how to smooth out fragmentation." Caldera refers to this layer as the Metalayer: aiming to equip new chains with more complete interconnectivity capabilities from the outset, including fast bridging, aggregation, and developer SDKs, reducing the integration and time costs teams incur from separately interfacing with multiple vendors. Underlying this is a pragmatic assessment: the real bottleneck for the appchain model is not "can we build a chain," but "does having our own chain negatively impact user experience?" If user onboarding, cross-chain, and interaction paths are smooth enough, the sovereignty and controllable experience of an appchain/rollup become more attractive; conversely, interoperability and liquidity fragmentation can negate the benefits of "lower gas fees and higher performance."

After the Distribution Logic Changes, "Interconnectivity" Becomes Growth Infrastructure

When the barrier to "building your own chain" is lowered by RaaS, a new problem becomes more prominent: chains can be created more easily, but users and capital may not flow in as easily. For most applications, the real growth friction often occurs before usage—how many steps for onboarding, how long to wait for cross-chain transfers, whether fees are transparent, what happens if it fails. Capital is scattered across the Ethereum mainnet, various L2s, exchanges, and other ecosystems; user entry points also come from wallets, aggregators, centralized channels, or dApp referrals. In this distribution landscape, cross-chain and onboarding paths are essentially part of the conversion funnel. The greater the friction, the more likely new users are lost "before they even reach the product."

Precisely because interconnectivity now impacts conversion and retention, the competitive focus of RaaS is shifting from "can you launch a chain with one click" to "can you prevent the chain from becoming an island." Some infrastructure teams are also extending their focus from deployment capabilities to productizing the interconnectivity layer. Taking Caldera as an example, beyond providing rollup deployment and operational capabilities, it has also made interconnectivity a core direction with its Metalayer, aiming to pre-integrate and standardize cross-chain, bridging, and related toolchain integrations as much as possible. This allows new chains to launch with smoother asset onboarding and cross-network flow paths, rather than patching them together piecemeal post-launch. For project teams, this means fewer vendor assemblies, shorter integration cycles, and more controllable user experiences; for users, it means fewer "multiple-choice questions" and less operational friction. Only when interconnectivity friction decreases can the sovereignty and controllable experience of appchains/rollups not be offset by cross-chain complexity, making them easier to replicate successfully on a larger scale.

The Next-Generation Standard is Not "Where to Migrate," But "Taking Growth into Your Own Hands"

As more and more projects gravitate towards EVM, the industry's decision-making focus is also changing: from "which chain to align with" to "choosing a more effective growth and delivery method." EVM's advantage as a distribution market still holds, but if a business remains on a general-purpose chain long-term, its key experiences become more dependent on the external environment: fee volatility caused by congestion, queuing and failure rates due to shared execution, and upgrade and parameter constraints under unified schedules. These uncertainties might be acceptable in the early stages; once scaling begins, they directly impact conversion and commercialization, making growth feel more like "relying on market conditions."

The reason "own EVM chain/rollup" is increasingly becoming a standard is not that every project wants to become infrastructure, but because it makes growth variables more controllable: fees and performance are more stable, confirmation and execution environments are better tailored to the business, upgrade schedules can follow product cycles, and it's easier to create a closed loop between chain-layer revenue, incentives, resource investment, and product operations. More importantly, RaaS lowers the cost of building and operating a chain, while interconnectivity layers like Metalayer reduce cross-chain and integration friction, ensuring that "having your own execution environment" no longer equates to "sacrificing distribution and liquidity." When both types of costs decline simultaneously, owning an EVM chain/rollup transforms from a bespoke option for a few leading players into a replicable, standard solution for more applications during their scaling phase.