EcoCity: When Rollups Hit Their Limits

Tanssi Foundation
2 days ago
4 min read

This Rally campaign invites creators to analyze sovereign L1s (appchains) launching inside EcoCity, a live environment built on Tanssi.

Tanssi runs a campaign with Rally.fun to educate creators on the decision-making process of companies launching their own L1 blockchain instead of using a roll-up

Instead of repeating rollup narratives, EcoCity focuses on real infrastructure decisions already made by teams shipping production chains.

Your role is to translate those decisions into clear, useful insight.

From Rollups to Reality

For years, the industry scaled by layering rollups on top of Ethereum.

It worked. For a while.

L2s reduced fees, restored usability, and absorbed the congestion that stalled earlier cycles. But the shared blockspace model is approaching structural limits.

We explored this shift in detail during the L1 Renaissance campaign, launched with Rally, where creators analyzed why shared blockspace is no longer sufficient and why sovereignty is returning.

During the L1 Renaissance campaign, launched with Rally, creators analyzed why shared blockspace is no longer sufficient and why sovereignty is returning.

That campaign established the thesis. EcoCity shows what happens next.

From Thesis to Reality

The L1 renaissance stopped being a thought experiment the moment teams began shipping products that could not function inside shared rollup environments.

EcoCity exists to make that shift observable.

Rather than debating architecture in the abstract, EcoCity lets users interact with live sovereign L1s that are already running, or verifiably in the process of deployment.

Each chain inside EcoCity represents a concrete decision. A team evaluated shared blockspace, tested its limits, and concluded that control over execution, fees, and governance was not optional for their product.

This is the difference between narratives and infrastructure. EcoCity is built around the latter.

Why Shared Blockspace Hits a Ceiling

Rollups inherit constraints from their parent chain. That inheritance becomes friction as soon as an application needs guarantees rather than best-effort execution.

Fees still spike during L1 congestion. Sequencers remain centralized points of failure. Throughput is bounded by upstream data availability. Applications cannot fully control their own fee markets, execution logic, or upgrade schedules.

These limitations are not theoretical.

Payment systems need predictable costs.

Trading engines require deterministic execution and tight control over sequencing.

Games need consistent throughput and low-latency state transitions.
RWAs need governance aligned with real-world constraints, not shared upgrade calendars.

As more sectors enter onchain production, these inherited limits shift from tolerable trade-offs to hard blockers.

Why Sovereignty Becomes a Product Requirement

The projects launching inside EcoCity did not choose sovereignty for ideological reasons.

They chose it because their products demanded:

Dedicated execution environments
Stable and predictable fee markets
Control over upgrades and governance
Performance guarantees that do not degrade under external load

In shared rollup environments, these properties cannot be isolated. Activity elsewhere directly affects your users.

In sovereign L1s, the execution environment is aligned with the product itself.

That alignment is what makes certain applications viable at scale.

What Changed: Orchestration Makes This Practical

Until recently, this level of control came at a prohibitive cost.

Launching a sovereign L1 required months of work before a single user interaction was possible. Teams had to bootstrap validators, manage sequencing, run RPC infrastructure, build explorers and indexers, and maintain monitoring and upgrade pipelines.

Most teams never made it past this phase.

This is where orchestration changes the equation.

Platforms like Tanssi remove much of the operational overhead that previously made sovereignty unrealistic. Teams can now deploy production-ready L1s on realistic timelines and focus on product development rather than rebuilding infrastructure.

EcoCity is a direct result of that shift.

EcoCity Is Live

It is live, and LFD Season 3 has reached its final form.

Instead of presenting sovereignty as an abstract design choice, EcoCity exposes users directly to existing chains or to teams onboarding users to mainnet deployments.

Exploration happens through interaction: onchain quests, live environments, and direct engagement with builders.

You can see how teams are using their sovereign chains.

Who Is Shipping Inside EcoCity:

In the coming weeks, teams including:

will onboard users to engage with their products on the mainnet.

Each team is bringing a specific product with concrete requirements around execution, fees, governance, or performance.

Their presence inside EcoCity reflects a deliberate choice to run dedicated blockspace rather than adapt their product to shared rollup constraints.

Why Interaction Matters

User participation, whether through quests, testing features, or engaging with live chains, directly contributes to ecosystem growth. This creates feedback loops that are difficult to replicate in shared environments, where applications compete for attention, throughput, and fee stability simultaneously.

For builders, this means observing real usage patterns within their own execution environments.

For users, it means discovering how different sovereign L1s behave under real conditions rather than curated demos.