A look at blockchains as a service

Quick Take

• As blockchains see increased adoption, there are more and more unique requirements from applications 
• General-purpose blockchains have great utility but they often face trade-offs when it comes to optimizing for a specific application
• Application-specific blockchains can circumvent this by allowing the deployers to have greater control over what a specific blockchain optimizes for
• Numerous solutions have sprung up to target this problem, for example, Polkadot and Kusama parachains, Avalanche subnets, and now, Cosmos’ Sagan
• While these solutions typically trade-off decentralization for customizability, the interest in them indicates that they are likely to be integral for the future of blockchains