Coinbase Head of Research: Dedicated blockchain networks are emerging rapidly, reshaping the competitive landscape of crypto infrastructure.

According to ChainCatcher, David Duong, Head of Investment Research at Coinbase, stated, "We believe that dedicated blockchain networks are rapidly emerging (including L2, standalone L1, and application-specific chains), and are quickly reshaping the competitive landscape of crypto infrastructure. For example, the Arc platform, built by Circle, is designed specifically for institutional applications centered around USDC, aiming to become a compliant and optimal institutional infrastructure; while the Tempo network, incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, focuses on opening up institutional payment channels, aiming to penetrate the massive cross-border payments and international trade market."

For example, Canton Network is building a private, permissioned blockchain environment specifically designed to unlock trillions of dollars in institutional capital "locked" by asset tokenization and stock exchanges. This resulting infrastructure fragmentation is not accidental, but rather a strategic response at the institutional level to a core issue: large institutions are generally unwilling to outsource their core business logic to platforms controlled by competitors. The underlying logic lies in strategic control. More and more companies are choosing to launch their own blockchains to control their data sovereignty, compliance environment, and the financial value accumulated through network effects.

In the short term, this trend may accelerate further, with institutions continuing to launch dedicated chains for high-value, heavily regulated capital flows, prioritizing customized governance, fee structures, privacy controls, and compliance features over general-purpose shared infrastructure. However, in the long term, we believe the end result will not be infinitely fragmented "isolated chains," but rather a network architecture within a network: these highly customized blockchains will achieve deep composability through advanced interoperability layers, such as native cross-chain messaging, shared security mechanisms based on staking/re-staking, and privacy-preserving cross-chain bridges.

The ultimate winners will be those projects that can achieve a balance between vertical optimization and seamless horizontal interconnection—achieving cross-chain atomic settlement, unified liquidity pools, and synchronous circulation of real-world assets (RWA); while laggards may be trapped in isolated ecosystems and gradually marginalized in a market environment that increasingly rewards compliance, liquidity, and the free flow of institutional capital.