You Won’t Believe How Many Blockchains the Future Holds – Polygon Founder Spills the Beans

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Well now, gather ’round, you starry-eyed prospectors of the Crypto Frontier, for I’ve got a tale to rattle your block and shake your chain. Polygon’s own Sandeep Nailwal—soundin’ mighty sure of himself—reckons the future’s gonna be positively swarmed with custom-made decentralized networks. Picture thousands upon thousands of tiny, fussy, persnickety little blockchains, each doin’ their own thing like cats at a dog show. 🐱⛓️

“Thousands of custom-built chains”: Polygon founder on next generation of blockchains

According to this modern-day Tom Sawyer of Cyberspace, customization is the magic word. And if you’re not custom, well, you’re about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. Sandeep says you best get used to every app worth its salt churning out its own chain faster than a Mississippi paddleboat, each tailored to fit the quirks of its users like a Sunday best suit—in the “very near future,” no less. He’s practically promising a blockchain gold rush, but with fewer pickaxes and a lot more math.

My take: in the very near future we’ll see thousands of chains custom built for very niche purposes. This customization is key for creating apps that different kinds of consumers will use.

I argue, every single meaningful App will be on its own dedicated block-space aka its own… https://t.co/cuog39VK4D

— Sandeep | Polygon (※,※) (@sandeepnailwal) May 2, 2025

If you thought finding your socks after laundry day was tough, just wait ’til you try and keep track of your favorite appchain. These new-fangled networks’ll serve every niche you can imagine—some so obscure you’d need a magnifying glass and a PhD in arcane trivia to understand ’em. Each “meaningful” app will soon be sittin’ on its own high horse—or, more accurately, its very own blockchain. 🐎

Enter the Agglayer—Polygon’s answer to the question nobody knew they had. It’s supposed to lasso all those wild blockchains and herd ’em into one giant digital corral. That’s right, Agglayer’s the new sheriff in town, claiming it’ll unite all these rambunctious appchains no matter how rowdy things get.

U.Today already tipped their hat at Agglayer, reckoning it’ll tie DeFi, GameFi, RWAs and whatever other fancy acronyms the crypto folks conjure up together in one big harmonious hootenanny. Sounds delightful, if you like your rodeos with more code and less steer.

What are appchains?

The Polygon founder’s audience over at X (which used to be Twitter, but folks seem too polite to mention how much better Tweets used to taste) mostly agree on all this custom chain hoopla. A few naysayers piped up, muttering that a bazillion blockchains might make things about as easy to navigate as a corn maze in the dark. 🌽

If you don’t have your glossary handy: an “appchain”—that’s short for application-specific blockchain, for those of us who never graduated Blockchain School—is just a fussy little network tricked out to do one thing better than all the others. Unlike the old monolithic blockchains (think Bitcoin, Ethereum…and Grandma’s fruitcake recipe), these appchains are made to order, adjustable as a barber’s chair. Perfect for finicky dApps who need everything just so.

2023-2024 saw the appchain idea take off faster than a rabbit in a prairie fire, with big outfits like Uniswap and dYdX jumpin’ ship to their own blockchains—proving that sometimes, the grass really is greener when you grow your own.

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2025-05-02 18:11