A question I'm often asked: what makes rollups-as-a-service (RaaS) so valuable?
 
RaaS is a highly desirable and competitive market. There are at least 6 RaaS providers hosting mainnet rollups and I’m aware of at least five others operating on a smaller scale. It seems every other RPC provider has announced a RaaS product, albeit with varying degrees of seriousness. On top of all this, at least one more major player — one of the biggest companies in crypto — is gearing up to enter the market.
 
There is clear consensus that RaaS is one of the most valuable places to build and

I see three main reasons why:
 
• the RaaS provider owns distribution. We own the relationship with the developer and sit at the very bottom of the developer stack. Every other bit of infrastructure is upstream from there
 
• rollups sit in a strategic position with respect to the flow of funds, with the native bridge and sequencing
 
• we have the mandate of heaven. Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap is happening. There will be tens of thousands of rollups sooner than you expect and RaaS providers will be core to that

How do you translate this to business value?
 
Some aim to monetize value-added services on top. Once a customer is committed to the rollup itself, the RaaS provider can provide auxiliary cloud infrastructure and monetize (think RPCs, indexers/subgraphs, AA, data APIs, oracles, MPC, wallets, etc). There is a natural right to win as the RaaS provider: technical advantage from deeply integrated shared infrastructure, distribution from owning the customer relationship, and the ability to build a cohesive one-stop shop product instead of the norm — a disparate patchwork of providers which often don't play nice with each other.
 
Some might position themselves as a mixture of product + services. In addition to hosting the rollup itself (product), they do stack-level customizations in exchange for a chunk of token supply (service). The product could then be tailored to work with and maintain custom-built rollup stack forks. There are a lot of reasons this isn’t easy, but this could be lucrative.
 
Some choose to build their own rollup stack, to subsume the role of an Optimism/Arbitrum/ZKSync, which will give them a long-term technical moat.

Our approach is unique and better. More to come.