The way people build on Ethereum has changed. 

Over the past two years, the Ethereum community has adopted a rollup-centric roadmap. Layer-2 blockchains have been embraced as the solution to scale Ethereum to a billion users. This development, along with an increasing openness to modularity on Layer 2s, has unlocked a unique path for developers to customize the components that make the most sense for their project. RaaS (rollup-as-a-service) providers like Caldera have bridged the gap by making blockchain development as simple as choosing snacks from a vending machine.  

When developers come to us, they tell us exactly what they’re looking for in a blockchain: the transaction speeds, block times, level of decentralization, and even the Ethereum camp they feel most aligned with culturally. Then, we help them build and launch a chain that’s tailored to their use case. 

Before the vending machine era, if you wanted your own chain, you needed to build it from scratch with a significant amount of capital investment and developer overhead. Now, any team with a great idea can deploy their own custom chain in minutes. 

Ultimately, the point of modularity is choice. You get to choose the best execution layer, DA layer, sequencer, native fee token, and various integrations for your needs. Building out that vending machine for users is a challenge, but our goal has always been to abstract away the infrastructure, so that it just works when you click the button. 

We see the modular blockchain ecosystem growing even faster in the coming months — especially as efforts in chain abstraction make progress in improving the user and developer experience for multichain applications. As more and more apps decide to launch their own rollups, they will require more customization for their app-specific chain, while also wanting to be aligned with one of the big rollup clusters on Ethereum like Arbitrum and Optimism. 

On one hand, the crypto community is likely reaching a point of saturation when it comes to the tired playbook of announcing a new L2, running a points campaign to attract yield farmers, and then launching with an FDV in the billions. At this point, the market has caught on to this well-worn approach.

However, there is still an obvious and growing need for L2s, and fierce competition in the L2 landscape is going to force teams to innovate more — as we are witnessing with the projects building truly novel applications on Caldera. These days, we’re seeing a lot more app-specific rollups that have a real need for customization, as well as general-purpose “vertical” L2s from teams that have good reason to be bullish on themselves and their communities. The technology is ready for those who need it. 

The beauty of modularity is that more advanced and capable layers can be introduced to the stack, and a modular architecture can easily accommodate them. Data availability, sequencing, and execution are just the start. The modular vending machine can keep adding more and more customization options over time — from provers and decentralized proof verification layers to chain abstraction solutions. 

Caldera allows web3 teams to develop highly customizable rollups, while still staying Ethereum aligned. From an ecosystem perspective, we’re in a unique position with the amazing diversity of applications and communities building with us, as well as the technical diversity of the various rollup clusters in our ecosystem. We’re not tied to any one standard or any one tech stack. That means we can grow across a vast number of stacks and modular components, while also serving all of these communities. 

No matter the scale, the modular vending machine enables projects to deploy custom blockchains that make the most sense for them. Whether it’s a global enterprise in need of an optimized chain that can handle complex logistics, or a crypto-native team of two college students with a new idea for an onchain social app, it’s all possible within the modular framework.