Why Modular Blockchains Will Win the Informal Sector

Sending small-value cross-border payments on a monolithic L1 is economically irrational. High base fees and volatile gas prices make sub-$100 transfers a net loss.

• Solution: A sovereign rollup optimized for payments, using Celestia for cheap data availability and a shared sequencer like Espresso for near-instant finality.
• Key Benefit: Transaction costs drop to < $0.01, enabling micro-remittances.
• Key Benefit: ~2-second settlement via pre-confirmations, matching informal hawala network speeds.

Tracking customer points and inventory for thousands of small merchants requires massive, cheap state growth—a crippling burden for monolithic chains.

• Solution: A rollup with a custom state model, offloading historical data to Celestia or EigenDA and using validity proofs for security.
• Key Benefit: ~100x cheaper state growth versus storing all data on L1.
• Key Benefit: Vendor-specific execution logic allows for complex loyalty rules without congesting a global VM.

Community-based risk sharing (e.g., burial societies, farmer co-ops) relies on trusted treasurers, leading to fraud and opacity. Deploying a full smart contract platform is overkill.

• Solution: A minimal sovereign rollup or specific appchain built with the Cosmos SDK or Polygon CDK, dedicated solely to pool logic.
• Key Benefit: Censorship-resistant governance and transparent treasury management via on-chain proposals.
• Key Benefit: Interoperability via IBC allows pools to securely bridge assets from other informal economy chains.

Paying hundreds of workers at the end of a shift creates predictable, massive transaction spikes that monolithic networks (e.g., Solana during congestion, Ethereum L1) cannot handle cheaply.

• Solution: A high-throughput rollup using Fuel's parallel execution or a zkEVM with a decentralized sequencer like Astria.
• Key Benefit: ~10,000 TPS capacity isolated from broader network noise.
• Key Benefit: Predictable, sub-cent fees regardless of global meme coin activity on other chains.

Single-layer chains like early Ethereum force all activity—execution, settlement, data—onto one congested lane. This creates an impossible trilemma for informal use: high fees, low throughput, and centralization pressure.

• Result: ~$50 remittance fees and 15+ second settlement kill micro-transactions.
• Consequence: Developers are forced to choose between security (Ethereum L1) and usability (compromised alt-L1s).

Rollups (Optimism, Arbitrum, zkSync) handle execution off-chain, posting compressed proofs or data back to a secure base layer (Ethereum, Celestia). This is the core modular unlock.

• Benefit: ~$0.01 transaction costs enable micropayments and social payments.
• Flexibility: Teams can deploy app-specific chains (dYdX, Aevo) with custom VMs, optimized for their informal sector use case without fracturing liquidity.

Data availability layers (Celestia, EigenDA, Avail) decouple data publishing from consensus. Rollups can post transaction data here instead of to Ethereum L1, reducing costs by ~90%.

• Critical for Scale: Enables 10,000+ TPS per rollup by removing the L1 data bottleneck.
• Security Trade-off: Provides scalable crypto-economic security, a calculated risk acceptable for many informal economy applications versus high L1 fees.

Modular design enables sovereign chains (fueled by Celestia) or rollups (secured by Ethereum) to interoperate via trust-minimized bridges and shared sequencers (like Espresso, Astria).

• Result: A cohesive ecosystem where value and state flow freely between specialized chains—essential for complex, cross-border informal finance.
• Contrast: Beats fragmented, insecure bridging between monolithic L1s (a major hack vector).

App-specific rollups can mint their own fee tokens and reward validators/sequencers directly, creating closed-loop economies. This aligns incentives for local, informal network operators.

• Bootstrapping: Near-zero cost to launch a chain via Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) providers (Conduit, Caldera).
• Sustainability: Fee abstraction and sponsored transactions allow for seamless user onboarding, removing the crypto-native barrier of needing the base gas token.

Modular stacks (like Eclipse using Solana VM) enable parallel execution and intent-based architectures. Users declare what they want (e.g., "swap X for Y at best rate"), not how to do it.

• Efficiency: Solvers (like in UniswapX, CowSwap) compete across modular layers, optimizing for cost and speed.
• User Experience: Abstracts blockchain complexity entirely—the ultimate gateway for the next billion informal users.