For most of the last cycle, blockchains competed on execution: faster blocks, lower fees, and higher throughput. That race has largely run its course. Blockspace is now abundant across dozens of L1s and L2s, and adding more of it is no longer enough to differentiate a network. Chains that relied on execution performance alone are now facing that reality, with many struggling to retain activity once incentives end, as recently illustrated by Blast.

The constraint has moved. A smart contract is only as useful as the information it can act on, and most of what onchain finance needs still sits outside the chain running it: market prices, events on other networks, assets on chains built for settlement, and institutional data that can't be made public.

Part of that need is well served. Oracle networks such as Chainlink, Pyth and RedStone deliver price feeds at scale, and messaging protocols such as LayerZero, Wormhole and Axelar move tokens and instructions between chains. Both were built around two questions, what an asset is worth and how a message gets from one chain to another, and both run alongside the chains they serve, with their own operators, security models and fees.

Three needs remain much less served. Contracts can't easily verify that something happened on another network or in a Web2 system. Large assets such as XRP and BTC sit largely outside onchain finance because their native chains were designed to settle value, not to run applications. And contracts have few ways to act on private data without exposing it.

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