The Cost of Copy-Pasting Ethereum's Developer Strategy

Copying the EVM stack (Hardhat, Foundry, MetaMask) creates immediate developer onboarding but zero long-term lock-in. The result is a race to the bottom on fees and ~80% of TVL concentrated on just 2-3 chains.\n- Zero Switching Cost: Developers can fork and redeploy in days.\n- Commoditized Liquidity: Same DEXs (Uniswap, Aave) exist everywhere, diluting value.\n- No Native Innovation: Tooling is optimized for Ethereum's constraints, not your chain's strengths.

Break the EVM monoculture by building a superior, purpose-built VM. This creates native technical advantages that can't be forked.\n- Parallel Execution: Like Solana or Sui, for scaling beyond sequential EVM processing.\n- Novel Fee Markets: Implement native fee abstraction or account sponsorship.\n- Custom Precompiles: Enable high-performance primitives (e.g., for DeFi or gaming) directly in the protocol.

The endgame is chain-agnostic applications. Invest in infrastructure that lets developers ignore the underlying VM. This is the playbook of intent-based protocols (UniswapX, CowSwap) and unified SDKs (like LayerZero, Hyperlane).\n- Intent-Centric Design: Users specify outcomes, solvers compete across chains.\n- Unified Liquidity Layer: Aggregate fragmented capital without bridges.\n- Modular Smart Accounts: User identity and assets are portable across any execution environment.

Solana's core innovation wasn't just speed, but a native developer toolkit for parallel state. Copying Ethereum's sequential EVM model would have been catastrophic.\n- Native Primitive: Sealevel runtime enables concurrent transaction processing, unlike EVM's single-threaded bottleneck.\n- Tooling Mandate: Anchor framework enforces Solana's architectural patterns, preventing costly state conflicts and failed transactions.\n- Result: Sustains ~3k TPS with sub-second finality, while EVM L2s struggle with sequencer centralization and mempool games.

Chains like Avalanche C-Chain and Polygon PoS adopted the EVM for easy dev onboarding but inherited its worst inefficiencies. The tooling mismatch creates systemic risk.\n- State Bloat: EVM's global state model on high-TPS chains leads to exponential storage growth, crippling node operators.\n- Fee Market Failure: First-price auctions and volatile base fees from Ethereum are ill-suited for predictable, low-cost L1s, creating user experience chaos.\n- Vendor Lock-in: Reliance on Hardhat and Foundry means developers optimize for testnet simulation, not production-scale state management.

Aptos and Sui rejected EVM compatibility to build from first principles around asset ownership and parallelization. Their toolchain is the product.\n- Resource-Centric Model: The Move language bakes safety and scarcity into the type system, eliminating entire classes of hacks (e.g., reentrancy, overflow) that plague Solidity.\n- Native Parallelization: Transactions are processed based on data access patterns, not sequential blocks, enabling 160k+ TPS in theoretical benchmarks.\n- Developer On-Ramp: The trade-off is steeper initial learning curve, but it filters for builders committed to the chain's long-term architectural advantages.

Celestia's winning move was ignoring the "EVM-as-a-Service" trap. It provides only data availability and consensus, forcing rollups to build their own optimized execution environments.\n- Modular Mandate: By not providing execution, it incentivizes rollup teams like dYmension and Movement to create purpose-built VMs without legacy constraints.\n- Tooling Vacuum: The lack of default VM created a market for native rollup frameworks (Rollkit, Optimint) that are simpler and more modular than Ethereum's OP Stack monolith.\n- Result: ~$0.001 per MB for data posting, making high-throughput, application-specific chains economically viable for the first time.

Ethereum's success created a tooling monoculture (MetaMask, Ethers.js, The Graph) that assumes a specific fee market, block time, and account model. Porting this stack breaks fundamental assumptions.\n- Wallet Assumptions: MetaMask expects slow, expensive transactions. On a fast chain, its UX patterns cause user errors and failed txs.\n- Indexing Bottlenecks: Subgraphs (The Graph) struggle with the block emission rate of high-TPS chains, leading to hours of indexing lag and broken dApp frontends.\n- Network Effects Trap: Developers choose familiar, broken tools over building native alternatives, sacrificing long-term performance for short-term convenience.

Berachain is executing a controlled subversion of the copy-paste strategy. It uses EVM compatibility as a trojan horse to bootstrap a native DeFi ecosystem built on Proof-of-Liquidity.\n- Architectural Pivot: The EVM is a compatibility layer, but core system contracts and the consensus layer (Polaris) are built for high-throughput DeFi.\n- Native Liquidity Primitive: Validators are incentivized to provide liquidity to protocol-owned AMMs (BEX), aligning security with ecosystem TVL growth from day one.\n- Strategic Trade-off: Accepts short-term dev familiarity to capture liquidity, while planning a long-term transition to more performant native tooling.

Copying Ethereum's stack (EVM, Solidity, Metamask) makes you a commodity L1/L2. You're competing directly with Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, and a dozen others on the exact same metrics: cost and speed. This is a race to the bottom where only the most subsidized chain wins.

• Zero Technical MoAT: Your "innovation" is just a temporary gas subsidy.
• Fragmented Liquidity: You're splitting an already-saturated market of EVM developers and capital.

Break the monoculture. Build a chain optimized for a specific use case (dYdX, Injective) or adopt a non-EVM execution environment (Move VM, SVM, FuelVM). This creates a true technical moat and aligns economic incentives.

• Custom Fee Markets: Tailor block space for your app's needs (e.g., high-frequency trading).
• Native Performance: Escape EVM overhead for ~10,000 TPS in specialized contexts.

The promise of "existing tooling" is a trap. You inherit Ethereum's technical debt: slow finality (~12 mins), expensive state growth, and MEV leakage. Your chain is born with the architectural constraints of 2015.

• Inherited Attack Vectors: You get flash loan exploits and frontrunning for free.
• Innovation Ceiling: You cannot implement novel consensus or state models without breaking compatibility.

Design for the end-user, not the EVM. Use intent-based architectures (UniswapX, Anoma) to abstract complexity and parallel execution (Solana, Monad, Sei) to scale inherently. This is a paradigm shift from transaction processing to outcome fulfillment.

• Better UX: Users specify what they want, not how to do it.
• Theoretical Scalability: Parallel VMs scale with cores, not just clock speed.

Growth is fueled by unsustainable token incentives to bootstrap TVL and developers. When the $100M+ ecosystem fund dries up, activity evaporates to the next subsidized chain. You've built a mercenary ecosystem, not a real economy.

• False Metrics: TVL and transaction count are bought, not earned.
• No Sustainable Flywheel: No native revenue model beyond sequencer fees competing with Ethereum L2s.

Bake sustainability into the protocol design. Use protocol-owned liquidity (Olympus PRO, veToken models) to create permanent capital bases. Drive fees to stakers via real yield from actual usage, not inflation.

• Aligned Stakeholders: Token holders are incentivized for long-term health, not quick flips.
• Revenue Capture: Design fee switches and value accrual that doesn't rely on hyper-inflation.