As the team powering over 100 rollups–from Manta Pacific to ApeChain–serving 10+ million users, we've witnessed how poor composability is fracturing Ethereum. Cheap, secure blockspace is not valuable unless people can actually use it. We’re introducing the Metalayer to solve this problem.

Players industry-wide acknowledge this issue, but the solutions on the market today result in a patchwork of walled gardens, features, and security tradeoffs that ultimately ruin the developer and user experience. It costs chains hundreds of thousands in integration fees and weeks of time to integrate these solutions. Once integrated, it's up to chain developers to figure out how to incentivize liquidity. 

Enter the Metalayer. Born from two years of tackling these challenges since Caldera’s first mainnet, the Metalayer transforms the way developers onboard liquidity and users onto rollups. The Metalayer allows developers to take advantage of the ongoing innovation in interoperability without being forced to engineer their app or protocol around yesterday’s architecture: Instead of thinking about interop, focus on building amazing products. Developers also benefit from faster transactions, lower costs, and higher security as the Metalayer upgrades, all without changing their app. 

Most importantly - the Metalayer is not Yet Another Interop Framework. Instead, it’s focused on bringing the best open standards into chains and apps used by millions around the world. We’re bringing the best teams in interop to Caldera powered chains to bring everything they have to offer. 

What is the Metalayer?

The Metalayer is an interoperability network that consists of three complementary systems working in concert:

Execution layer – Caldera is today announcing partnerships with Across, Eco, and Relay to enable intent-based bridging from chains across Ethereum to every chain in Caldera’s network. Our intent routing network finds the fastest and cheapest path to fill user requests.

Settlement Layer – Built on the open-source Hyperlane interoperability framework, our settlement layer enables fast message passing between chains with latency measured in seconds, not minutes. The message passing protocol also supports multi-chain reads, allowing cross-chain applications to query and aggregate state from any chain in the network. 

Developer Toolkit – We provide chain and app devs easy access to our interoperability toolchain, abstracting away the complexity of message passing. It includes a simple API, SDK, and prebuilt UI components. Best of all, as technical advancements in interoperability come to market, the Metalayer uses them, allowing developers and users to automatically benefit.

Universal Availability

The Metalayer is automatically deployed across every Caldera chain. When a new rollup launches, it’s  there from day zero on both testnet and mainnet. We’ve accomplished this via our partnerships - by rolling out a settlement layer which leverages Hyperlane’s permissionless, open architecture and through partnership with intents-based protocols like Eco that can be quickly deployed on every new chain. 

The Metalayer is designed to work on any rollup stack. While other solutions create walled gardens, we're building bridges across the entire Ethereum ecosystem. Our architecture abstracts away the complexity of different rollup technologies, sequencers, and bridge protocols.

This means when a user initiates a cross-chain transaction, they're not just accessing a single bridge or protocol. The Metalayer orchestrates a symphony of integrations - aggregating liquidity, computing optimal paths, and executing transfers through the most efficient routes. As new interoperability technologies emerge, from fast withdrawals to shared sequencing layers, every application in our ecosystem instantly benefits. No code changes required.

Launch Partners

For blockchain teams, the Metalayer delivers immediate value. Teams gain instant access to liquidity across the Caldera ecosystem, pre-integrated relationships with oracles and indexers, and native cross-chain messaging capabilities — all while maintaining sovereignty over their chain. Developers can deploy apps across the entire network. Users experience seamless asset movement between chains with optimal pricing and zero complexity.

We're launching the Metalayer alongside industry pioneers who share our vision. We developed our messaging and settlement infrastructure in collaboration with Hyperlane, Across, Eco, and Relay, deploying their infrastructure on every Caldera chain. 

This is just the beginning. We're inviting bridges, oracles, wallets, and infrastructure providers to help build Ethereum's multi-chain future. By joining the Metalayer, partners gain immediate access to the rollup ecosystem’s largest user and capital base. Developers can start development today by visiting our Docs.

Road to 10,000 rollups

The Metalayer protocol is in audit today, in preparation for our mainnet launch. Within the next 90 days, we’ll release our full mainnet and API libraries across every Caldera chain as well as ZkSync Era, OP mainnet, Base, Arbitrum One, and Ethereum. Later this year, the Metalayer will utilize advances in stack native interop tech from our partner teams at Arbitrum, ZKSync, and Optimism to improve speed and reduce costs for users transacting on the Metalayer. 

At Caldera, we’re serious about a world with 10,000 rollups. Nobody else is sufficiently imaginative about crypto’s eventual scale. Major apps will outscale fat, single sequencer shared chains. The best devs won’t compromise by building on the modern equivalent of the mainframe. 

The Metalayer enables more apps, bigger apps, horizontal apps, and the next 2 billion users. It’s how we make the vision for crypto actually real.