Asset-Specific L1s Are the Future

Moving from the “What” to the “For Whom”

As with every technology, initial builders focus on horizontal solutions. These are broad solutions that are more focused on “what” the technology can do. For example, the first batch of social media applications, like Orkut, were broad and concentrated more on what a digital social experience may look like.

Once the market understands the "what", new companies emerge to customize the experience for a certain user base. This “verticalization” was seen in sectors as diverse as payments, where we saw a Cambrian explosion of payment methods develop from institutional to mid-market to retail, across formats like wire, digital, cards and e-wallets, to Software-as-a-Service which transitioned from a “Horizontal” SaaS to “Vertical SaaS”, so Social Media, that has now segregated our lives into work (Linkedin), news (http://x.com), entertainment (Tiktok/Instagram), and friends and family (Instagram/Facebook).

For blockchains, we now know “what” they are. They are coordination systems.

For many real world asset use cases, the primary bottleneck is not raw TPS, but the lack of robust coordination, compliance, and workflow primitives at the protocol level.

In the real world, participants coordinate around assets or industries. “RWA” is not an industry. Public securities are. Private Credit is. Precious Metals are. Each industry has a completely different set of participants, demands, and requirements. Real Estate, more so than others.

Asset-Specific Chains are the Future

Asset-specific chains can outperform general-purpose networks for particular domains by making design choices that match the regulatory, operational, and performance requirements of that asset class.

Design decisions around many of the above categories will dictate market leadership for a particular Asset-Specific L1.

For example, a generic chain that supports gaming, NFTs, and RWAs is not equipped to work with RWA regulators and their requests, such as having a set of trusted validators. This feature is at odds with other goals of the chain, making it impossible, or at best, unprofitable for the chain to add features that only cater to a subset of users.

Most blockchains rely heavily on gas fees as their primary revenue mechanism. While fee markets differ across chains, gas alone is an unsustainable economic foundation, especially for industries with complex workflows and regulated participants like real estate.

Asset-specific chains, however, are not limited to gas-based monetization. Because they are built around a defined market and its participants, they can draw revenue from the underlying economic activity of that sector. In real estate, where brokers typically charge 3–8% and multiple intermediaries operate across each transaction, there is significantly more room for structured, service-based value capture.

Lastly, chains are only as good as their ecosystem. No BD team can onboard every sector; they can only do it poorly. Shallow ecosystems lead to ghost chains. Integra aims to create an asset-specific ecosystem that optimizes technology and business development efforts towards one globally coordinated asset class.