Recently, I had in-depth conversations with several friends involved in compliance, asset custody, and risk management. During the discussions, I discovered an interesting phenomenon—what institutions truly worry about is not the TPS of a particular chain, but rather the multitude of hidden costs: whether the wallet system needs to be rebuilt from scratch, how to adapt risk control processes to new environments, whether financial audit standards can be integrated, who is responsible for the reporting system, and how responsibilities are divided if issues arise. In simple terms, as soon as one link in the chain is affected, the entire system becomes like a row of dominoes, with inevitable chain reactions.

Many projects consider EVM compatibility as a bonus feature, but from the perspective of institutions, this aspect carries much more weight—it’s like a scalpel that can reduce the integration cycle from "at least half a year" directly to "weekly delivery." That’s why, despite many chains claiming EVM compatibility, very few projects can truly impress institutional clients.

Against this backdrop, looking at a recent architecture upgrade of a certain project, its strategy can be described as quite aggressive. Instead of taking the old path of "building another isolated ecosystem," they opted for a thorough modular split: the bottom layer handles consensus, data availability, and final settlement; the middle layer provides an EVM-equivalent execution environment; and the upper layer will add privacy and high-efficiency execution capabilities in the future. This is not just simple feature stacking but a complete separation of settlement and execution, giving each layer clear responsibilities and boundaries, ultimately forming a financial channel that institutions can understand, audit, and connect to.

Why is such an architectural design so popular? The core advantage is straightforward: wallets, exchanges, cross-chain bridges, and various service providers can all use standard Ethereum toolchains for integration, eliminating the need for custom adaptation for each chain. Integration costs are significantly reduced, and the cycle is noticeably shortened, which is extremely meaningful for institutional clients.