The blockchain may ultimately just be part of the backend, as trends show today.

Written by: Blockchain Knight

In recent years, the blockchain industry has faced a lingering question: should we build the chain first and then find users, or should we have users and business first and then decide whether to build the chain? The development path in previous years has mostly been the former.

Releasing a new chain, creating an ecological fund, attracting developers, providing incentives and airdrops, and then figuring out how to attract users. This model has almost become the industry standard over the past few years.

But the problems have become increasingly apparent; a chain can have no users, and a pile of projects can have no revenue. No matter how impressive the technical parameters, it does not mean that people are willing to use it—there are too many such cases.

However, recent actions by Robinhood provide another perspective. Robinhood itself has a large number of users, a mature trading system, and real capital flow.

Launching the RH chain on this foundation is essentially not about building a chain for the sake of building a chain, but about gradually moving the existing trading and assets onto the chain.

Therefore, it did not follow the traditional public chain logic of moving step-by-step from technical development to ecological project implementation and then to attracting users, but rather the opposite: first, there are users and trading needs, and then the chain is used as new infrastructure.

In other words, the chain here is not the starting point but the result. Similarly, the stablecoin giant Circle's Arc is following a similar path.

According to information released by Circle, Arc is expected to launch its mainnet on September 16, positioning itself as an open network aimed at financial markets, focusing on scenarios such as stablecoins, payments, settlements, and on-chain finance.

For them, the main issue is not whether people know Circle, but how to make these assets and funds flow operate on infrastructure more suitable for financial business.

Hence, Arc is not simply reconstructing a generic Layer 1. Currently, Circle has announced that over 100 institutions and ecological participants have joined the construction and validation system of Arc.

Robinhood has investment users and trading scenarios, while Circle has stablecoins, payment networks, and financial institutions.

The resources that the two companies possess are different, but the choices they make increasingly resemble each other: when users, funds, and business have already scaled, the chain no longer remains just a technical project but may become part of the business infrastructure.

In the past, industry discussions about blockchain often focused on TPS, gas fees, and cross-chain capabilities, but when real financial businesses begin to enter the chain, the needs will become more specific.

Different businesses have varying requirements for speed, cost, privacy, permissions, and security. A generic public chain can provide basic capabilities but may not necessarily be the best choice for all financial businesses.

The future blockchain market may not only consist of a few super public chains, nor is it likely that every project will need to launch its own chain.

It is more likely that some large networks will continue to play the role of an open ecosystem and liquidity center, while companies with a large number of users, assets, or transactions will begin to establish blockchain networks more suited to their own business.

In the future, chains themselves may increasingly not be treated as an independent product, and users do not need to care about which chain they are using. The blockchain may ultimately just be part of the backend, as trends show today.