Rollups discover the income statement
Scaling networks were measured by activity. They are now measured by sequencer revenue, and most of it accrues to a very small number of them.
Jakub Żerdzicki via UnsplashFor several years a scaling network was judged by activity: transactions, addresses, value locked. Those numbers are cheap to produce. The measure that has replaced them is revenue, and it sorts the field considerably faster.
The concentration is stark. Aggregated analysis of the sector describes the largest networks collecting the overwhelming majority of sequencer fee revenue, with a long tail earning almost nothing.
Sequencer revenue is the fee a network collects for ordering and including transactions, less what it pays the base layer for data availability. It is the closest thing these systems have to gross profit.
The cost side changed sharply when data availability became cheap, and that is what made the revenue line legible. Before, most of what a rollup collected went straight back out; after, the difference stayed.
What remains is a business with recognisable characteristics. Ordering rights are valuable, the most valuable positions in a block are worth a disproportionate share of the total, and the operator captures that value directly.
That raises a governance question the sector has mostly deferred. A single operator ordering transactions is a centralised intermediary with a revenue interest in how it orders them, which is the arrangement these systems were built to avoid.
Decentralising the sequencer is the stated intention almost everywhere and the implemented reality almost nowhere, because it is technically hard and it complicates the revenue that now funds the network.
Consolidation is the predictable consequence of the revenue distribution. A network with negligible fees cannot fund development, and the ones with distribution attached to a consumer application are pulling further ahead.
Distribution is doing more work than technology in that outcome. The networks earning most are the ones with a large user base arriving through a product people already used, rather than the ones with the best proving system.
Which is an ordinary lesson arriving in an unusual place. The infrastructure that wins is the one attached to demand, and the sector is now measuring itself in a way that makes that visible.