In The Battle Of Chains, Distribution Is King

Opinion by: Marcin Kaźmierczak, co-founder of RedStone

The fight for dominance in blockchain won’t be won by whoever has the lowest fees or the fastest consensus; it will be won by whoever can mobilize the largest base of users.

Circle, Stripe, Coinbase and others are soon to follow, rewriting their business models around proprietary chains. They already control the payment flows, merchant networks and trading activity that most blockchains spend years trying to attract.

By redirecting that existing volume into their own ecosystems, they don’t just launch chains; they throw them into orbit with gravity.

This shift is the axis around which the next wave of blockchain dominance will rotate. Transaction fees that once accrued to neutral networks now stay in-house. Compliance and settlement can be built into the DNA of the chain. Merchants, traders and institutions aren’t asked to join — they’re automatically upgraded into validators, liquidity providers and onchain participants.

For incumbents, the cold-start problem disappears. For everyone else, it defines the gap between success and irrelevance. The result is a new competitive landscape.

Distribution as infrastructure

Consider Coinbase’s launch of Base. It didn’t need to “bootstrap” the new chain. Instead, it routed tens of millions of existing users directly to it. Overnight, Base became one of the most active layer 2s in the ecosystem, not because it offered radically different technology but because Coinbase already owned the audience.

Circle has a similar advantage with USDC (USDC). By directing settlement flows toward its own chain, Arc, Circle secures the network effects of the most widely used dollar stablecoin. Likewise, Stripe, with its millions of merchants, can migrate payment rails onto Tempo, offering lower fees and faster payouts as incentives. Taken together, these moves show that the center of gravity in blockchain has already shifted upstream.

Startups need to design effective incentive programs, invest heavily in marketing and hope speculators stick around long enough to bootstrap real activity. Incumbents, by contrast, instantly convert existing customers into network participants. What would take a startup chain years of ecosystem building, these companies accomplish instantly with entrenched customer bases.

The new center of gravity

Some skeptics still argue that corporate chains will fragment liquidity, or isolate users from the open cryptocurrency ecosystem. They’re not entirely wrong. Liquidity could splinter, and not all flows will remain composable with Ethereum or other general-purpose networks, but the gravitational pull of distribution is impossible to ignore.

While the launch of PayPal USD (PYUSD) may not have disrupted the stablecoin market overnight, if even 5% of its 400 million users begin transacting on proprietary rails, the adoption shockwaves will dwarf most crypto-native launches. If JPMorgan directs institutional settlement onto Kinexys, the market effect will be immediate.

This is why the debate over “throughput wars” and marginal improvements in consensus efficiency is losing its relevance. Architecture bends to distribution, not the other way around. A chain with users will always outcompete a chain with features. The shift toward distribution-first chains has created a new set of winners and losers.

The architecture fork is just strategy

We’re already seeing how this battle has divided the landscape. Coinbase, Circle and Stripe can automatically turn their users into validators, liquidity providers and transactors. To make that stick, architecture is picked with precision. A sovereign layer 1 enables them to embed compliance and control economic flows for high-value institutional settlements, whereas a layer 2 facilitates faster launches, Ethereum security guarantees and the immediate onboarding of existing users.

From there, the playbook is straightforward: Launch with a captive audience, sweeten the deal with lower fees or faster payouts, ensure interoperability and expand outward from core flows. This model leapfrogs technical tinkering, converting existing customers into participants in a new value system, whether they realize it or not.

Related: Coinbase stock surges after JPMorgan upgrade of Base, USDC potential

Neutral layer 1s and startups face a starkly different reality. They can’t outscale Stripe’s merchants or Circle’s stablecoin flows, and they can’t force users to show up. But “disadvantage” doesn’t mean doom. Their path forward is specialization. Ethereum can continue emphasizing neutrality and settlement finality, Solana can focus on high-frequency environments, and other layer 1s can develop niche, domain-specific ecosystems that corporate chains cannot easily replicate. In this environment, the chain that best converts its distribution into network effects will dominate, while technical elegance alone is insufficient.

Code matters, but customers decide

The multichain future is certain and will be defined by the gravitational force of companies that already control users at scale. Over the next five years, banks, fintechs, payment processors, social platforms and even gaming companies will all face the same choice: launch their own chain to capture the value of their user base or watch competitors do it first. Success will not go to the architect of the cleverest protocol, but to the one who mobilizes millions from the very beginning.

For traditional layer 1s, this is a crossroads. Competing on throughput or fees won’t be enough against companies that already own the audience. Their only durable path forward is to specialize and capitalize on the domain-specific ecosystems that corporate chains can’t replicate. The future will be multichain, but unevenly so. General-purpose layer 1s risk being sidelined, while platforms with distribution at scale define the next wave of adoption.

Technology creates possibilities. Distribution creates inevitability. In the coming era, the chains that control users will dictate the rules of the game.

​Opinion by: Marcin Kaźmierczak, co-founder of RedStone.

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