Should developers join corporate public chains like Base and Robinhood?
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Should developers join corporate public chains like Base and Robinhood?
There are five major risks you need to be aware of.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsWritten by: Jonah
Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News
Should developers build on the Robinhood public chain or the Tempo public chain under Stripe? These two projects share a core commonality: the operators control both the underlying public chain platform and hold the largest on-chain traffic applications.
Looking at past cases ranging from Amazon and Microsoft to Coinbase's Base chain, this "platform + proprietary top-tier application" integrated model generates conflicts of interest, bringing negative impacts on onboarding developers: developers bear platform control risks in exchange for traffic dividends, yet face the platform's wavering interest orientation. This article will dissect the conflicts of interest herein, the actual impact on developers, and corresponding risk avoidance solutions.
The Alluring Gimmick: Traffic Distribution Support
What was the original intention when developers initially chose enterprise-backed public chains? Some public chains directly provide high onboarding subsidies; in most cases, the core selling point of the public chain is traffic support. Taking Coinbase Base as an example, its core external promotion logic is: onboard into the Base ecosystem, and the platform will drive traffic and exposure for the developer's project through the Coinbase wallet or App. The Robinhood public chain and Stripe's Tempo also follow this logic.
Theoretically, this is a win-win situation: acquiring users from scratch is extremely difficult, and developers can rely on the platform's ready-made traffic for a quick cold start; meanwhile, the public chain can extract transaction fees from projects, and if the platform drives traffic to the project, it can additionally collect promotion commissions, equivalent to directly monetizing the developer's R&D results.
However, after implementation, various problems follow one after another. The root cause lies in the platform naturally prioritizing support for its own native products rather than third-party developers. Coinbase will tilt resources towards its proprietary exchange and wallet; Robinhood prioritizes its own brokerage and wallet; Stripe goes all out to promote its self-developed payment system. Below, we dissect the five major risks one by one.
Risk One: The Platform Enters the Fray and Competes Directly with Developers
For enterprises operating both the underlying platform and on-chain applications, suppressing third-party developers has long been a normality supported by ample historical evidence. The Wall Street Journal once disclosed that Amazon management would access operational data of third-party sellers, filter out hit products, and launch proprietary competing products. Merchants validate market demand on the Amazon platform, yet Amazon competes on the same stage leveraging exclusive data advantages.
Another classic case is Microsoft and the Netscape browser. Netscape relied entirely on the Windows system to acquire users; Microsoft subsequently pre-installed the IE browser into the operating system, completely crushing the competitor. Enterprise chains like Base, the Robinhood public chain, and Tempo similarly share this conflict of interest with third-party projects onboarding onto them.
Risk Two: Supporting Wallets Will Not Bind to a Single Public Chain
Wallets have no motivation to primarily promote projects only on this developer's chain. The core competitiveness of wallet products is to open up industry-wide crypto asset services to users; if only a single public chain is supported, product competitiveness will be significantly weakened, and users will switch directly to multi-chain wallets. Therefore, the Coinbase wallet must be compatible with Solana, and Robinhood and Tempo supporting wallets will face the same compatibility pressure in the future.
This means wallets will inevitably display assets and applications from other public chains. Even the optimal product strategy for wallets is to directly integrate leading applications in the sector — just like the Phantom wallet has Hyperliquid perpetual contract trading embedded, even though the application is not deployed on the public chain belonging to the wallet.
This logic directly dissolves the traffic advantage championed by enterprise chains: out of their own development needs, wallets will screen quality applications across the network for unified exposure; projects not on this chain can similarly share the traffic, and the scarce value of onboarding this enterprise chain shrinks significantly.
Risk Three: Competitors of the Platform Will Exclude the Developer's Products
Industry players in a competitive relationship with this enterprise have absolutely no motivation to promote projects within its ecosystem. Why support a competitor's ecosystem? USDC previously encountered a similar dilemma: due to being bound to Coinbase behind the scenes, many third-party platforms were unwilling to list the stablecoin. Similarly, for projects deployed only on the Robinhood chain, the Coinbase wallet will not actively integrate and promote them, and vice versa.
Risk Four: The Platform Holds Users and Divides the Developer's Profits
There is a general rule in the crypto industry: the party that controls end users usually earns far more than the protocols accessing the platform, constantly squeezing protocol profits until profits approach marginal cost. I have elaborated on this business model in articles such as "Value Capture Logic" and regarding AI agents. Even if developers onboard enterprise chains and the platform fulfills traffic support commitments, relying entirely on a single platform distribution channel remains extremely high risk — the platform holds user control, possesses extremely strong bargaining power, and constantly compresses the developer's profit space.
A more stable route is to build proprietary distribution channels, treating third-party platforms merely as traffic accelerators. Hyperliquid and Polymarket are typical cases: they directly establish independent user reach channels, and then through developer incentive codes, spread their own protocols across major platforms.
Risk Five: Promised Traffic Support Falls Through Completely
Traffic exposure promised by the platform may completely fail to be realized. A large number of developers have complained that the Coinbase wallet has long prioritized social functions, almost giving no exposure resources to projects within the Base chain; although Base officials stated they would rectify this, this matter is sufficient to prove: strategic adjustments by enterprise senior management will directly determine the quality of traffic support policies.
How Should Developers Respond?
In comparison, the advantages of purely neutral public chains stand out exceptionally. Ethereum and Solana are natively free from this type of platform risk, belonging to completely neutral layers: any developer deployed on Ethereum does not need to worry about Ethereum officials launching similar applications to compete with them. This neutrality is a core advantage that has long been underestimated.
So, should developers actually onboard enterprise public chains?
Here are several ways to mitigate the risks brought by conflicts of interest:
- The platform provides high onboarding subsidies (this model is more common in public chain foundations, less adopted by enterprise chains), developers themselves weigh whether subsidy returns can cover potential risks;
- The platform issues strong written commitments, guaranteeing they will not enter the fray to compete and will implement traffic support (but business history proves, such agreements have extremely weak binding force and are easy to fail);
- Autonomously disperse risks: multi-chain deployment + build proprietary traffic channels. This grants multi-ecosystem options, and also allows guarding their own profit space.
From this perspective, enterprise public chains are suitable for the early stage of project cold starts, leveraging platform traffic to complete the cold start, but the core goal is to accumulate users belonging to themselves, rather than long-term dependence on the platform.
Currently, the enterprise public chain business model is still in an early stage; in the future, platforms may introduce solutions to alleviate existing contradictions, while entirely new risks will also emerge.
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