Our Investment in Caldera By Regan Bozman | 07.24

We’re excited to officially announce our participation in Caldera’s Series A funding round, led by Founders Fund. Caldera has quickly emerged as a frontrunner in the rapidly growing Rollups-as-a-Service (RaaS) sector, providing an end-to-end platform for deploying, managing, and scaling rollups with unprecedented ease.

Rollups have become the cornerstone of Ethereum's Layer 2 (L2) scalability strategy. Major platforms such as Arbitrum's Orbit, Optimism's OP Stack, and zkSync's Hyperchains have embraced this architecture to meet growing demand. RaaS providers like Caldera are instrumental in this shift, empowering developers with infrastructure to launch high-performance, cost-efficient rollups.

#Caldera momentum speaks for itself. Its network now supports over 1.7 million unique wallets, surpasses $800 million in total value locked (TVL), and has processed more than 60 million transactions to date. Some of the most prominent chains built on Caldera include Manta Pacific, ApeChain, and Treasure, among others.

The Rise of Rollups: Exponential Growth, New Challenges

Thanks to significantly lower fees on L2s, user activity has skyrocketed. By the end of Q2 2024, Ethereum rollups were processing 6.4x more transactions than the Ethereum base layer. Compared to the same quarter in 2023, rollup activity has surged by 3.7x, underscoring their pivotal role in driving mainstream adoption.

With over 100+ publicly known Ethereum L2s and L3s, and many more on the horizon, we’re fast approaching a future where blockchain scalability is driven by a vast constellation of rollups—all ultimately secured by Ethereum. As of May 2024, Ethereum rollups secure more than $45 billion in on-chain value.

The Fragmentation Dilemma: A Growing Pains Moment

As rollups proliferate, new challenges have emerged within the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) ecosystem:

Inter-rollup isolation: Rollups currently rely on Ethereum L1 for cross-rollup communication, which is both costly and sluggish.

Infrastructure fragmentation: Oracles, bridges, and other services must be redeployed on each rollup separately—making each chain feel like a siloed network.

Limited user participation: Most users cannot meaningfully contribute to validation or governance on the rollups they interact with.

This fragmentation represents both a critical bottleneck and an extraordinary opportunity.

Caldera’s Vision: The Metalayer

Caldera is addressing these limitations head-on with its visionary “Metalayer” concept — an abstraction layer that unifies Ethereum rollups into a single, cohesive framework. The Metalayer is designed to:

Simplify developer workflows

Aggregate liquidity across rollups

Create seamless UX for end-users

Enable multi-rollup applications

Foster cross-rollup innovation (ZK + optimistic)

This is a 100x leap in usability and scalability — not just an incremental improvement.

By enabling developers to design protocols that span across rollups and empowering users to engage in a more unified ecosystem, Caldera is laying the foundation for a truly interoperable Ethereum future.

Looking Ahead

We’re incredibly proud to support Caldera as they lead the charge toward a more integrated, scalable, and user-friendly Ethereum landscape. If you’re building in this space or interested in joining forces with the Caldera team, we encourage you to get in touch. The rollup revolution is just beginning—and Caldera is shaping its future.

#Caldera @Caldera Official $ERA