Coinbase Research Director: Specialized Blockchain Networks Rapidly Emerging, Reshaping Crypto Infrastructure Competition Landscape

Coinbase's investment research director David Duong stated that specialized blockchain networks are rapidly emerging (including L2, independent L1, and application-specific chains), reshaping the competition landscape of crypto infrastructure. For example, the Arc platform built by Circle is designed for institutional-grade applications centered around USDC, aiming to be a compliant, optimal institutional infrastructure. Tempo Network, incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, focuses on bridging institutional payment channels to tap into the massive cross-border payment and international trade markets. Additionally, Canton Network is constructing a private, permissioned blockchain environment specifically for unlocking trillions of dollars in institutional capital tokenized assets and securities trading. This infrastructure fragmentation is not accidental but 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 is strategic control. More and more companies are launching their own blockchains to control their data sovereignty, compliance environment, and financial value accumulated by network effects. In the short term, this trend may further accelerate as institutions continue to launch specialized chains targeting high-value, heavily regulated fund flows, prioritizing customized governance, fee structures, privacy controls, and compliance features over using generic shared infrastructure. However, in the long run, we believe the endgame is not endlessly fragmented isolated chains but a network-of-networks architecture: these highly customized blockchains will achieve deep composability through advanced interoperability layers, such as native cross-chain messaging, stake-based shared security mechanisms, and privacy-preserving cross-chain bridges. The ultimate winners will be projects that strike 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, gradually marginalized in a market environment increasingly rewarding compliance, liquidity, and institutional capital mobility.

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