I had previously messed around with quite a few things. From being brought into the industry by early mining brothers, to later researching early mining in various DeFi protocols, and then chasing various popular NFTs, one could say I’ve been part of every trend.
For a while, I was engaged in 'cross-chain arbitrage'. Sounds fancy, right? In simple terms, it means moving assets from one chain to another to earn the information and profit differences between different ecosystems. During that time, my daily life consisted of sitting in front of the computer, staring at several screens, using three or four different cross-chain bridges.
I still clearly remember one afternoon. There was a new project on Arbitrum that had an opportunity, and I needed to immediately transfer a stablecoin I had on Optimism. I chose one of the most mainstream cross-chain bridges at the time, confirmed the transaction, and then it was a long wait.
Time passed second by second, and the 'processing' circle on the screen kept spinning. Half an hour passed, no response. An hour passed, still no response. I started to panic, checking the block explorer, but couldn’t find a clear status on either side. I went to the project's community to ask, and the admin just robotically replied, 'Network congestion, please be patient.'
That feeling is really uncomfortable. Money is stuck in limbo, uncertain of its fate. You don’t know if it’s a network issue or if the bridge itself has a problem, and you have no idea whether this money will eventually arrive or will forever disappear into some unknown contract address.
Finally, after almost three hours of messing around, that money finally arrived. Of course, the opportunity had long been missed.
Since that day, I have felt a deep fatigue towards the so-called 'multi-chain future'. This is not the future at all; it’s just dividing a path into several segments, digging several rivers in between, and leaving you to figure out how to row across.
For a while after that, I became very laid-back, just holding onto Ethereum and a few leading L2s, not really messing around anymore. Until one time, chatting with a friend who develops blockchain games, he mentioned Caldera.
He said their team was almost driven crazy by multi-chain deployment, and later found a tool called Caldera that could help them quickly set up their own dedicated chain, with performance entirely under their control and at a very low cost. At the time, I thought that sounded good, but I didn’t take it too seriously, thinking it was just another tool for developers.
What really got me to start studying it seriously was something a friend said later. He said, 'The key point is that all the chains built with this set of tools will be interconnected, and assets can be transferred directly without going through those chaotic bridges anymore.'
This sentence hit me right at my pain point.
I spent a weekend reading everything I could find about Caldera. I discovered that its ambition is far more than just being a 'website building tool'. What it is truly doing is establishing a unified underlying transportation network for this fragmented world.
At that moment, all my previous bad memories about cross-chain had answers. What we lacked was not more or faster chains, but a bottom protocol that can securely and efficiently connect all chains.
So, I started paying attention to $ERA.
For me, it is no longer a cold trading code or a speculative target waiting to pump. Looking at it feels like seeing the blueprint for a future transportation network. I believe that with each new 'dedicated line' connected and with every application running on it, the value of this network will increase.
My investment is more like a ticket. A ticket to a Web3 world that no longer fractures and allows assets and identities to flow freely. I no longer need to anxiously 'cross chains' every day because in that world, we are all part of a larger network.
Now, I still pay attention to the fluctuations in the market, but I feel more certain inside. Because I know that I am investing not just in a project, but in a solution to real problems, a solution that I have personally experienced the pain of. If you want to understand the future I see, you can start from @Caldera Official to get to know #caldera and $ERA .
