Caldera is seen as a 'chain creation tool', but its greater ambition lies in being a 'fund settlement layer'. The Rollup Engine addresses engineering efficiency issues: building chains quickly, configurability, and modularity. However, as the ecosystem expands, the more challenging issue is the fragmentation of funds and liquidity between chains.
The introduction of Metalayer elevates cross-chain from 'bridging' to 'settlement network'. It acts like a financial routing system, translating users' intentions into executable cross-chain transactions. Bridge Preview allows users to complete the optimal path selection in one go at the operational level, all driven by $ERA tokens.
A recent highlight is that Caldera has begun exploring 'on-chain capital markets'. When treasury management can switch quickly between multiple Rollups, yield management, risk diversification, and duration matching can all be achieved in real-time on-chain. This means Caldera is not just an 'engineer's tool', but could also be a 'fund manager's underlying platform'.
With a current TVL exceeding $550 million and more than 60 Rollups in scale, it is foreseeable that Caldera's next competitive focus will not stay on 'who is faster', but rather on 'who can operate multi-chain funds more efficiently and securely'. This is the logic of capital markets.
