Why the Hub Concept Is a Legacy of Web2 Thinking

Protocols like Uniswap and Curve act as canonical liquidity hubs, forcing all cross-chain swaps to route through their pools. This creates:

• Vulnerability to MEV and sandwich attacks on the hub chain.
• Capital inefficiency with liquidity locked in silos, unlike intent-based systems like UniswapX or CowSwap.

Proof-of-Stake hubs like Ethereum and Solana concentrate validation power. This replicates the cloud oligopoly (AWS, GCP) leading to:

• Censorship risk from regulatory pressure on a few entities.
• Governance capture where token-weighted votes stifle innovation, unlike modular execution layers or alt-DA solutions.

Canonical bridges (e.g., Arbitrum Bridge, Optimism Gateway) and messaging hubs like LayerZero and Axelar become critical trust points. This creates:

• Systemic risk: A hub failure halts all connected chains.
• Vendor lock-in, stifling the competitive routing found in Across Protocol's intent-based model.

Reliance on a single DA layer (e.g., Ethereum calldata) for all rollups recreates the centralized database problem. This results in:

• Congestion spillover where one app's traffic bloats costs for all.
• Limited scalability, a problem directly addressed by modular stacks using Celestia or EigenDA.

Rejects the execution layer entirely, focusing solely on cheap, scalable data availability. This enables sovereign rollups to launch without permission.

• Enables true modular sovereignty; chains own their execution and settlement.
• Scales DA throughput independently, with ~$0.01 per MB blob costs.
• Proves that a hub's value is in unbundling, not bundling.

Turns Ethereum's staked ETH into a reusable security primitive for new networks (AVSs). It's a hub for cryptoeconomic security, not transactions.

• Re-stakes $15B+ in TVL to bootstrap security for new protocols.
• Unbundles security from consensus, a core tenet of modular design.
• Creates a market where security is a commodity, not a monopoly.

Their shared security models often impose a sovereignty tax—forcing chains to use a native token (ATOM, DOT) for security and governance.

• Creates economic alignment but also vendor lock-in and high capital costs.
• Contrasts with the permissionless validator set freedom of Ethereum rollups or Celestia rollups.
• Shows that a hub's governance can become a bottleneck for innovation.

Building a coordinated network of L2s (Orbit Chains, OP Stack chains) with shared bridging and governance. It's a hub for developer tooling and liquidity.

• Standardizes tech stack (OP Stack, Arbitrum Orbit) for ~2-second cross-chain messaging.
• Aggregates liquidity and users across a unified ecosystem.
• Balances sovereignty with interoperability, but centralizes upgrade keys.

These protocols enable direct, application-layer messaging between any chain, bypassing central hubs. The mesh is the infrastructure.

• Enables omnichain applications where logic spans multiple sovereign chains.
• Reduces reliance on any single bridge or liquidity hub.
• Proves the endpoint (validators/ors) matters more than the pathway.

No single hub wins. The end-state is a mesh where Celestia provides DA, EigenLayer provides security, Arbitrum provides execution clusters, and LayerZero provides connectivity.

• Winners are protocols that provide the best primitive, not the most bundled suite.
• Developers will assemble chains like Lego from the best-in-class components.
• The Hub is an anti-pattern; the network is the platform.