Before pushing into the world of L3s, our team at Syndicate has been building infrastructure since 2021 for developers and onchain communities ranging from .SWOOSH to FWB to more easily and scalably build mainstream-scale applications on L1s and L2s.

Modular L3s now open up exciting new possibilities for onchain communities and application developers. But they still face the same core challenge as new L1s and L2s: they need a lot of infrastructure and apps to be useful and used.

Over the last two months, we’ve helped launch L3s like Syndicate Frame Chain, Gold, Degen Chain and are working on others like PengChain, HAM Chain, and more. Here’s what we’ve been telling teams that are considering an L3 and how we can help.

Launching an L3 is not the hardest part—making it useful is

Companies that we’re partnering with like Conduit, Caldera, and others are doing incredible work to make it easier than ever for teams to launch L3s. This is critical to unlocking modular L3s at scale—teams can now choose from a growing number of execution, data availability, and settlement layer options (and more to come) to launch a new L3 within minutes.

But once an L3 is live, it’s largely an empty sandbox. It doesn’t come with all of the infrastructure that developers expect and need to build useful applications on the L3 that ultimately bring in users, developers, growth, transactions, and value.

In our experience, making the L3 useful and usable is the hardest part that teams should focus on and worry about. That’s where Syndicate comes in to help.

L3s need a lot of core and custom infrastructure

In addition to an RPC, block explorer, and bridge (there are a variety of options here), there is a lot of core and custom infrastructure that L3s need to be useful to developers and users post launch. L3s are also unique relative to L1s or L2s, as they’re typically more specific to a particular community or application area like gaming, social, consumer, commerce, or finance. As a result, L3s have unique needs from an infrastructure perspective to enable the types of use cases and activities that they’re focused on.

Because our team at Syndicate has been focused on application developer infrastructure, tools, and APIs over the years, it’s natural for us to deeply care about and want to help developers with L3s’ unique infrastructure needs pre and post launch. And we already have a lot of infrastructure and tools that we can bring to L3s today.

Below are just a few examples of the types of infrastructure and tools we’re helping L3s like Degen Chain with right now to make them more useful and widely adopted.

Simple transaction APIs with automated gas

Developers want easy ways to integrate and build on L3s, and since L3s offer ultra-low gas fees, we’re finding that developers on L3s often want to build mainstream-scale consumer applications and games that completely abstract transactions and gas for end users.

Our Transaction Cloud was built exactly for this: its simple APIs for transactions and automated gas across any EVM chain—including L3s—power web3 applications at scale for teams like .SWOOSH and Llama alike. Our Transaction Cloud not only helps web3 developers build mainstream-scale applications easier and faster, but it also opens up the potential for web2 applications to easily integrate with L3s through the abstraction of web3’s complexity into simple HTTP REST APIs that any developer can work with. Our Transaction Cloud has been updated to support Degen Chain and all L3s we help launch.

Another example is the Syndicate Frame API we built for developers of Farcaster Frames, enabling Frames to easily make onchain transactions without needing to build a custom backend, key management, or transaction broadcasting and monitoring infrastructure. Instead, developers save time and can just focus on building great Frame experiences. Over 60+ developers have built Frames using this API, and we connected the API to Syndicate Frame Chain, an L3 for unbounded Frame experimentation with unlimited, free gas for developers.

Industry standard contract factories and libraries

When a new L3 launches, developers expect that many of the industry standard contract factories and libraries exist on the L3 to use and compose their applications with. But these things neither come out of the box with L3s nor are tailored to an L3’s use case or custom requirements.

For Degen Chain, we’ve been helping deploy many of the core contracts and libraries that developers expect. For example, we deployed the Safe multisig smart account factory to Degen Chain so applications on the L3 could leverage its battle-tested multisig smart accounts. We also deployed the Farcaster signature verification contracts made by fastfourier.eth to Degen Chain, providing Farcaster interactions like Frames built on Degen Chain with the same validation and assurances of Frames built on Optimism L2 where these contracts currently exist. We also deployed Syndicate’s ERC-721M and ERC-20M modular token contract factories for developers to leverage natively for digital assets and their applications on Degen Chain.

We’re seeing more of these needs emerge everyday across all of the L3s we’re working with—so we’re ensuring that more of these standard contract factories and libraries come out of the box for new L3s to give developers the tools they need to build useful applications for users on day one post launch.

Cross and off-chain data oracles

A common request we’re seeing is the need to bring off and cross-chain data natively on L3s. It could be data from a contract on another chain like Base, social information from an off-chain source like Farcaster, prices from a mix of onchain contracts and offchain APIs, and more. Writing this data on the L3 enables applications to natively leverage and compose with it, saving developers the pain of building and maintaining their own off and cross-chain data infrastructure. Also, with L3s’ ultra-low gas fees, writing all kinds of data at any scale onchain becomes possible in ways that are not feasible with L1s or L2s, unlocking new application and design possibilities on L3s.

This is an area our team at Syndicate is actively working on with L3s to enhance the richness of applications that developers can build. For example, we already built a v1 price oracle for $DEGEN natively on Degen Chain that many developers have been asking for. On Gold, we built an oracle that mirrors data from contracts on Base natively to Gold so game developers can create seamless multi-chain player experiences on the L3 without bridging. Check out the repo for the off and cross-chain data oracles L3s we’re building for L3s and various teams—let us know if this is of interest to your rollup or application.

And so much more

We’re just getting started and in the early innings of everything we’ll be doing to empower L3s with the infrastructure and tools needed to make their onchain communities, ecosystems, and applications grow and thrive long-term post launch.

In addition to everything above, we’re also spearheading new developer ecosystem initiatives like ‘Deploy on Degen Week’ to activate hundreds of teams to deploy useful applications and infrastructure on Degen Chain all at once. We’re exploring the design of new economic mechanisms and models for L3s, innovative gas subsidy tooling native to L3s, and so much more.

The design space and opportunity to innovate in L3s for onchain communities and applications is wide open—if you’re considering an L3, we invite you to join us and a growing number of pioneering communities and teams in this space. Reach out to us here.

How We’re Making L3s Useful Post Launch