Why Modular Infrastructure Must Be Credibly Neutral

Rollups delegate block production to a single sequencer, creating a centralized point of failure and value extraction.\n- Censorship Risk: A single operator can reorder or exclude transactions.\n- MEV Capture: All transaction ordering profits are captured by the sequencer, not the network.\n- Liveness Dependency: The entire chain halts if the sequencer goes offline.

Reliance on a small set of high-capacity DA layers like Celestia or EigenDA creates systemic risk.\n- Collusion Vector: A few large operators can withhold data, halting all dependent rollups.\n- Pricing Power: DA providers can impose rent-seeking fees as they become essential infrastructure.\n- Protocol Capture: DA layer governance can favor specific rollup stacks, breaking neutrality.

Security bridges and ZK provers are complex, capital-intensive services prone to centralization.\n- Trust Assumption: Light clients often rely on a handful of relayers (e.g., Across, LayerZero).\n- Prover Centralization: ZK proof generation is dominated by a few hardware-rich entities.\n- Upgrade Keys: Many bridges and provers have admin keys controlled by multi-sigs, not decentralized governance.

Re-staking and shared security models like EigenLayer concentrate economic security in a few node operators.\n- Meta-Slashing: A bug in one AVS can lead to mass, correlated slashing across the ecosystem.\n- Operator Consolidation: Capital efficiency drives stake to a few large node operators, recreating PoS centralization.\n- Governance Attack: Control over the restaking protocol becomes a superpower over all secured services.

When a core infrastructure layer (like a sequencer or bridge) is captured by a dominant application, it becomes a single point of failure and rent extraction. This undermines the entire modular thesis.\n- Celestia's data availability succeeds because it's application-agnostic, unlike early rollup-centric DA layers.\n- EigenLayer's restaking faces constant scrutiny over its potential to centralize economic security.

The ultimate test of neutrality is the cost to fork. Systems like Ethereum's L1 and Celestia's Blobstream are robust because forking them is economically viable, creating a credible threat to incumbents.\n- Build modules with open, forkable interfaces (e.g., OP Stack, Arbitrum Nitro).\n- Investors must assess the social and technical cost of a fork as a key diligence metric.

Projects like UniswapX (intent-based) and Across (optimistic bridges) win by being agnostic to execution venues. Their infrastructure doesn't pick winners, it enables competition.\n- LayerZero's omnichain future depends on its ability to remain a messaging standard, not a walled garden.\n- Investor takeaway: Back stacks where the value accrues to the neutral base layer, not a vertically integrated app.

Forget vague promises. Demand quantifiable proofs of decentralization for critical modules (sequencing, proving, bridging).\n- Sequencer decentralization: Measure time-to-inclusion latency and censorship resistance.\n- Prover networks: Track the number of active provers and the cost to become one.\n- Data availability: Audit the cost of data withholding attacks.

AWS is centralized infrastructure; its neutrality is a policy, not a protocol guarantee. Ethereum is credibly neutral infrastructure; its neutrality is enforced by code and consensus. Modular chains must choose the latter model.\n- AltLayer's restaked rollups attempt to port Ethereum's security model to modular components.\n- Investor red flag: Any infrastructure project whose roadmap leads to "managed services" as the primary revenue.

The highest-value, most defensible assets in a modular stack are the credibly neutral primitives everyone is forced to use.\n- Builders: Create modular components (shared sequencers, ZK coprocessors) that serve all clients equally.\n- Investors: Allocate to the base data layer, interoperability standard, or proof marketplace, not the 100th application-specific rollup.