Supra Containers: The Best of AppChains and L2s, Without the Drawbacks

Web3 builders have been turning to AppChains and Layer 2s to benefit from sovereign blockspace — dedicated environments free from congestion, driven by their own custom token economies. These models have gained strong product-market fit by offering builders freedom over governance, fees, and the limited performance of older generation L1s. However, they come with serious trade-offs: high setup costs, complex integrations (bridging, oracles, automation, and VRF), lack of atomic composability, and thus fragmented liquidity.

Today, we introduce a revolutionary solution that gives builders all the advantages they love about AppChains — without the heavy costs of infrastructure setup — Supra Containers.

Supra Containers offer dedicated DappSpace, customizable governance, and a composable ecosystem with shared liquidity, all while being secured by Supra’s high-performance Layer 1. Builders will be able to  launch powerful decentralized application ecosystems with sovereignty and flexibility, without the headaches that traditionally come with AppChains and Layer 2s.

What Builders Love About AppChains (and Where They Fall Short)

Builders have embraced AppChains and Layer 2s because they offer dedicated blockspace, ensuring predictable performance without any kind of L1 congestion from unrelated dApps. The primary need for these arose from the need for dedicated blockspace – the ability to create a dedicated environment for their dApp or a group of related dApps, free from interference from the unpredictable activities of other applications, which can cause performance degradation and surging transaction fees.

They also found strong product market fit because of the ability to create bespoke economies powered by custom tokens, local fee markets, and governance rules tailored to their unique needs. Builders and communities have isolation and control over their own environments, allowing for greater customization and performance guarantees.

However, these benefits do come at a cost:

• Expensive setup: Bootstrapping economic security, managing validators, and integrating external services like oracles and bridges are costly and complex.
• Lack of atomic composability: AppChains and L2s suffer from fragmented liquidity and struggle to seamlessly interact with other ecosystems, leading to inefficiencies.
• Fragmented liquidity: With no shared liquidity pools, AppChain-based projects often face liquidity issues that stifle growth and adoption.

Some sovereign L1 AppChain ecosystem creation efforts like Avalanche’s Subnets, Polkadot’s Parachains, and Cosmos Zones have attempted to bridge some of these gaps. However, builders still end up with high operational costs, complex infrastructure, and limited cross-ecosystem interoperability and composability. Moreover, bootstrapping economic security is also often a steep uphill battle for these AppChains, as stakers may not be attracted to their block reward incentives due to a lack of conviction in the individual AppChains.

But what if there was a way to build an AppChain without having to leave the high-performance L1 or having to sacrifice composability?

Introducing Supra Containers

Supra Containers offer builders dedicated, customizable DappSpace directly on Supra L1, enabling builders to maximally express their vision in a personal space, with the power, speed, and shared security of Supra’s high-performance Layer 1 network.

Think of Supra L1 as a well-planned city, and Supra Containers as custom districts within this city that you can own and operate. Each district has the freedom to create its own rules, not only to design their own fee structures, but also to designate an asset of their choice to pay for those fees, whilst benefiting from the city’s shared security systems, infrastructure, and native services, such as oracle price feeds. And in getting this freedom, you don’t lose composability or the ability to communicate freely with other districts and their residents. Anything you build in your district is composable with the rest of the Supra ecosystem, with shared liquidity across the L1 space and other Containers.

Here’s what makes Supra Containers a game-changer:

1. Dedicated DappSpace on Supra Layer 1: Containers have dedicated DappSpace within Supra L1’s high-performance infrastructure, giving your dApps dedicated block execution space to run on, ensuring consistent performance without worrying about network-wide activity, fluctuations, or potential congestion concerns. Your DappSpace can be reserved just for you, when you need it.
2. Custom Governance and Token Economy: Tailor your dApp’s economic model, set your own gas token and gas prices, and create bespoke fee structures, giving you complete customization over your ecosystem. With Supra Containers, you can focus on iterating and optimizing your business model while benefiting from seamless access to the infrastructure of Supra Layer 1.
3. MultiVM Support: Supra is a MultiVM Layer 1, supporting both MoveVM and EVM, with SolanaVM and CosmWasm coming soon, so you can build with the language and execution environment you’re most comfortable in without worrying about having to learn a new language. The same applies to Supra Containers too; you’ll be able to build with the language you already know and prefer.
4. Atomic Composability: Supra Containers and smart contracts within are composable with smart contracts on other Containers and dApps across the broader Supra L1 ecosystem built on the same VM. You can interact and call other dApps across Supra built on the same VM instantly. This also paves the way for liquidity to be truly unlocked, unlike AppChain-based ecosystems where liquidity is fragmented and fractured. Supra Containers and the Supra L1 ecosystem benefit from composable, shared liquidity, and the capital efficiency that will create strong network effects.
5. Vertically Integrated Services: Use Supra’s built-in oracle price feeds, onchain randomness, automation, and cross-chain communication natively within your Containers. These vertically integrated services eliminate the need for complex and expensive third-party integrations, allowing you to build feature-rich dApps right out of the box. Supra native services are more secure, lower latency, and more cost-effective too.
6. Unparalleled Performance: Leverage the Supra L1 network’s processing power enabled by Moonshot Consensus, delivering 500k TPS with sub-second consensus latency and a three-tier parallel execution design. You will have the opportunity to scale your Container to meet dApp demand without sacrificing user experience.
7. Scalable DappSpace: Builders will be able to make data driven decisions to adjust the DappSpace they need over time, progressively aiming to flexibly reserve the space that is actually needed and used.

The Technical Edge: How Supra Containers Work

Let’s get one thing clear — Containers are not L2s. At its core, a Container is a logical partition of Supra L1 blockspace, creating a dedicated DappSpace within the L1 network itself. This effectively enshrines the AppChain model within the L1. Supra Containers utilize a unique approach to transaction processing:

• Isolation for Parallel Execution: Transactions from different Containers mostly may not conflict, allowing for parallel execution via a simple work-sharing queue algorithm.
• Efficient Resource Allocation: The Supra L1 network nodes are grouped into subcommittees called Clans, which execute on different virtual machines. This allows for extensive optimization in resource utilization and allocation across nodes in the network.
• Smart Batching: Transactions accessing keys within a specific Container are batched together, creating a uniform workload that maximizes efficiency.
• Seamless Integration: Supra’s vertically integrated services, such as in-protocol price feeds, automation, onchain verifiable randomness, and cross-chain communication, are woven into the fabric of Supra’s infrastructure and thus accessible natively to Containers. This means developers can easily use these tools at will, without any additional overhead, latency, or complexity.
• Solitude Without Any Fragmentation: While Containers are dedicated environments for dApps, their composability with the Supra Layer 1 ecosystem and other Containers opens up a world of possibilities and ideas for builders to create a bigger, more interconnected ecosystem.

This architecture not only enhances performance but also provides developers with unprecedented control over their dApp’s environment.

More Power to the Builders 

Supra Containers flip the script on dApp development, giving more power and control to the builders. It gives developers a lot of freedom to experiment, innovate, and discover more effective economic models and business models for your dApps. Container admins can customize:

• Bespoke Tokenomics: Create your own token and fee structure, tailoring each container’s economic model to their specific needs.
• Flexible Access Control: Implement gated communities, NFT-based access, or any custom governance model you envision as part of your Container’s access policy.
• Value Capture at the App Layer: Design innovative business models with greater control over revenue streams.

A New Paradigm for Onchain Ecosystems

Supra Containers are more than just a technological advancement; they’re a catalyst for a new wave of blockchain innovation:

1. Lowered Barriers to Entry: Developers will be able to bring ambitious ideas to life without the prohibitive costs and complexities of launching a separate chain.
2. Enhanced User Experiences: With high-performance, low latency, and customizable environments, dApps can offer experiences that rival or surpass traditional online value exchange.
3. Ecosystem Composability: While providing isolation, Containers enable seamless interactions between dApps, fostering a more interconnected and efficient blockchain ecosystem.
4. Sustainable Scaling: Projects can start small and scale massively without changing their underlying infrastructure, enabling long-term growth strategies. You may start off small, and over time see your DappSpace grow, as your Container activity grows.
5. New Business Models: The ability to customize token economics and gas fee structures within Containers opens up novel ways for projects to capture value and sustain development.

The Future of dApp Development is Here

Supra Containers represent a fundamental shift in how we approach blockchain application development. By offering dedicated DappSpace on a high-performance L1, we’re eliminating the traditional trade-offs between economic customization, performance, and ease of use.

For developers, this means:

• Freedom to focus on innovation at the application layer
• Enhanced ability to capture value from your creations
• Scalability without the need for complex L2 solutions
• Faster and easier to go to market than AppChains or L2s
• All with lower overall costs than AppChains and L2s by a wide margin

For users, the benefits are equally compelling:

• Faster, more responsive dApps
• Potentially lower fees due to added execution optimizations
• Seamless experiences across a diverse ecosystem of dApps

Supra Containers are more than just a feature – we envision them to be the foundation for how next generation dApps shall seek to build, with a level of sovereignty that enables builders to fully realize their vision. Whether you’re building the next big DeFi protocol, a revolutionary blockchain game, or any decentralized application you can imagine, Supra Containers can give you the tools, the environment, and the freedom you need to bring your vision to life and competitively sustain it.

Welcome to the future of dApp development. Welcome to Supra Containers.