When Infrastructure Becomes Strategy: Gateway for Foundations

The evolving relationship between foundations and infrastructure vendors - and the case for Tatum Gateway

Building relationships with blockchain foundations has been my main focus since joining Tatum. This is a true privilege and it gives me a front row view of how the industry is maturing in real time.

It allows me to spot real needs and see how they are being tackled in the wild.

With the launch of Tatum Gateway - our blockchain orchestration system, that picture has never been clearer. Over the past months, we worked closely with customers, partners, and foundations and saw the same pattern again and again:

Infrastructure is getting more powerful - but also more fragmented - and managing it internally is becoming a growing tax on time, focus, and resources.

Teams want to innovate. Instead, they increasingly find themselves running infrastructure operations that distract from their core mission. We built the gateway to change that.

From the “L1 wars” to strategic maturity

During the 2021-2023 “L1 wars,” developer growth was everything. Foundations had strong treasuries, VC money was abundant, and partnering with infrastructure vendors was often the fastest way to lower developer friction.

The fruits of that era were many:

-Standard RPCs became widely available
-Tooling matured
-Multi-chain deployment became normal
-Developer experience became a key competitive battleground

But the model was largely utilitarian and grant-driven. Vendors were one of the end sources of capital-fuelled growth in the space.

But today, the equation has shifted entirely. Success is no longer about growth at all costs.

Funding is more disciplined. Foundations are returning to their core missions. Vendor ecosystems are richer and more competitive. Growth now needs to be sustainable, measurable, and strategically aligned - not simply subsidized.

From developer adoption to real user adoption

Ecosystems matured, the focus for many foundations has naturally shifted from developer adoption to user adoption - driven by real, high-usage applications.

We now see networks supporting products like prediction markets such as Polymarket on Polygon experimental token launch platforms like pump.fun on Solana, on-chain betting, gaming, and other consumer-facing apps that run continuously and at scale.

These apps do not just test networks - they stress-test them. Reliability, uptime, latency, and resilience are no longer “infrastructure preferences” - they are core product requirements. When users depend on an application, every failed request, every outage, and every routing issue becomes a growth risk for both the app and the ecosystem behind it.

And that is exactly where today’s infrastructure reality starts to collide with this new phase of adoption.

Lots of teams were still treating infrastructure as a cost center to minimize, they can no longer afford to do that. The best teams today are treating it as a competitive moat to leverage.

The new problem: fragmentation and operational overhead

Builders now juggle multiple infrastructure vendors, tools, and services. That flexibility is powerful - but it comes with hidden costs:

-Multiple contracts and invoices
-Custom integrations
-Failover logic
-Monitoring and routing
-Internal tooling to keep it all working

It is the streaming-service problem applied to infrastructure: more choice is great - until the complexity outweighs the benefit.

The industry is already responding to this challenge. Recent initiatives like Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) models from platforms such as Developer DAO Cloud are emerging as solutions, emphasizing cost efficiency and managed node diversity.

This market movement validates the core problem: foundations need easier, more cost-effective infrastructure management. The race is on to provide solutions that abstract away this complexity while maintaining the performance and reliability that production applications demand.

Foundations see this every day in their ecosystems, and increasingly recognize that interoperability and orchestration are not “nice-to-have” -  they are essential on all levels from blockchain architecture to infrastructure.

Where Tatum Gateway fits

This is exactly the environment Tatum Gateway was built for.

The Gateway directly solves the primary pain points foundations face in 2025: It eliminates RPC provider fragmentation by providing a single, unified orchestration layer across all supported networks. Rather than managing separate RPC endpoints, credentials, and failover logic for each blockchain, all traffic is routed through a single Gateway instance.

Gateway sits above your infrastructure stack and orchestrates vendor endpoints from a single control plane, removing the complexity teams usually manage manually. It enables true vendor interoperability - routing traffic intelligently so developers do not have to.

The benefit is simple:

Developers focus on building (rather than plumbing) - while foundations get healthier, more resilient ecosystems.

And very importantly to note that this is not a theory - the Tatum Gateway is already live and supports demanding, real-world workloads.

Why this matters to foundations

In 2025, blockchain infrastructure is facing a critical inflection point. This creates operational overhead and potential single points of failure - a concern that weighs heavily on foundation stakeholders managing their ecosystem’s stability. Regulatory uncertainty and the need to ensure robust interoperability between different networks adds another layer of complexity that foundations must navigate. Foundations want:

-Sustainable developer growth
-Lower barriers to entry
-Simpler onboarding
-Better reliability and performance
-Efficient cost structures

Gateway directly supports these goals.

With the gateway we can even enable fully-branded onboarding experiences and developer portals with plug-and-play setup - ideal for hackathons, ecosystem programs, and long-term developer retention.

When infrastructure becomes easier and more cost-efficient, runways extend, innovation accelerates, and users ultimately benefit.

A shared mission

At Tatum, I focus on building long-term partnerships with foundations around real priorities. Our goals are aligned: making Web3 easier to build on, more reliable to use, and able to scale on real demand.

Tatum Gateway supports that by simplifying infrastructure while improving reliability for the apps and users that depend on it. For foundations, piloting the Gateway is a simple way to see those benefits in action.

Because as the industry matures, partnerships built around shared strategy - rather than just grants - are what will shape the next decade of Web3.

Let’s build it together!