Swarm Tactics & Numbers
The Chitin Sovereignty is an insectoid civilization that rose from a single teeming homeworld and never stopped multiplying. The Sovereignty's castes handle trade, science, and war the way a hive divides labor, and the population crisis that strains the other alliances is, for the Chitin, an existential clock. Broods hatch faster than worlds can hold them. The Sovereignty does not see the new system as territory to negotiate over. It sees room, and it will take it.
Commerce and procreation are the same enterprise to the Exchange: both are about growth, and growth is sacred. Its swarming trade fleets carry goods, eggs, and settlers in the same holds, so that every market the Exchange opens becomes a colony and every colony becomes a market. The population explosion that frightens other factions is the Exchange's entire business model. Multiple habitable worlds means multiple new broods, and the Exchange has already sold futures on planets nobody has landed on yet.