Layer 1

An Ethereum-compatible chain launched by Binance. A few dozen validators who stake BNB take turns producing blocks: fast and cheap, at the cost of decentralisation.

The first public chain able to run arbitrary smart contracts. Hundreds of thousands of validators keep the ledger together: a little slower and pricier, in exchange for the strongest security and the deepest liquidity.

A public chain that skips sharding and Layer 2s and pushes one chain to the limit. Fees are negligible; the price is expensive nodes and a history of outages.

The chain founded by Justin Sun, where 27 Super Representatives take turns producing blocks. Its DeFi is modest, but it is one of the most-used rails for sending USDT, with tens of billions of dollars of USDT sitting on it.

A chain built by former members of Meta's blockchain team, using the Move language and an object model. Transactions that only touch your own things take a fast path and confirm extremely quickly; the price is a validator set of just over a hundred.

Like Sui, it comes from Meta's Diem team and uses the Move language, but it takes a different route: transactions are executed optimistically in parallel and re-run if they conflict. Blocks are extremely frequent, with fewer than a hundred validators.

Founded by Cornell professor Emin Gün Sirer, it uses Avalanche consensus, built on repeated random-sample voting, to finalise in under two seconds. The mainnet is made of three chains and makes it easy for projects to build their own (Avalanche L1s).

A chain first designed by the Telegram team and later taken over by the community. Contracts cooperate by sending messages and the network can shard without limit; its biggest advantage is a direct line to Telegram's billion-scale user base.