l1

Vitalik commented on "ENS stops L2 Namechain development, v2 will be directly deployed on the Ethereum mainnet": "This is a wise decision. ENS domain names and records are the core state of the Ethereum ecosystem. I believe the best architecture for decentralized identity and social (which I think ENS is in this domain) is to store each user's account and profile data on L1, and use a dedicated L2 (which could be much simpler than a full EVM) to handle user operations (e.g., actions on social platforms)."

According to data from the SolanaFloor platform, in January 2026, the Solana ecosystem's decentralized applications (dApps) generated over $146 million in revenue, ranking first among all Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains.The top three Solana dApps by revenue for that month were: PumpFun: approximately $46 million; Axiom: approximately $15.36 million; Meteora: approximately $13.4 million.

The Bitcoin-native Layer 1 protocol and infrastructure platform Bitway announced the completion of a $4.444 million seed round financing, led by TRON DAO, with participation from HTX Ventures and others.So far, Bitway has raised a total of over $5.8 million from institutional investors. After completing its first seed financing round, it has also completed a targeted strategic financing round, which values Bitway at $100 million.Bitway was founded by former Binance team members and was previously incubated through YZi Labs' EASY Residency program and launched through the Binance Incubator program. Bitway has two core products, including the on-chain wealth management platform Bitway Earn and the Layer 1 application chain Bitway Chain, specifically designed for payment and financing solutions.

Cosmos ecosystem stablecoin protocol Noble announced the launch of an EVM-based Layer 1, Noble EVM, which is expected to go live on March 18. The new Noble EVM will be specifically designed for stablecoin applications.Noble is not the only Cosmos ecosystem project undergoing transformation in recent months; for example, Sei plans to fully transition to an EVM-only chain in the upcoming upgrade, abandoning its CosmWasm and Cosmos native assets.

The managing partner of the crypto venture firm Dragonfly, Haseeb Qureshi, recently stated that by 2026, a large tech company may integrate or acquire a crypto wallet, while more Fortune 100 companies will attempt to launch their own blockchains. However, he also pointed out that fintech companies trying to combat mainstream public chains by building their own L1 public chains are unlikely to succeed overall.Qureshi posted on the X platform that the next wave of enterprise adoption will mainly come from banks and fintech, with some institutions possibly building more private, permissioned networks based on public chains like Avalanche, while integrating existing tools such as OP Stack, Orbit, and ZK Stack, and maintaining connections with public blockchains. Previously, financial giants like JPMorgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and IBM have explored private blockchains, but most remain in testing or limited application stages.He also predicted that among the large tech companies dominating the internet ecosystem (such as Google, Meta, or Apple), one may launch or acquire a crypto wallet in 2026, a move that has the potential to bring billions of users into the crypto ecosystem.However, Qureshi is not optimistic about the "public" L1s launched by fintech companies, believing that they will struggle to compete with crypto-native networks like Ethereum and Solana in key metrics such as active addresses, stablecoin liquidity, and RWA. "The best developers will still choose neutral infrastructure chains."On the price front, Qureshi expects Bitcoin to rise above $150,000 by the end of 2026, although market dominance may decline; the stablecoin market size is expected to grow by about 60% in 2026, while USDT's share may drop from around 60% to 55%. He is also optimistic about the continued growth of prediction markets but believes that AI will struggle to form large-scale applications in the crypto space in the short term, except for security scenarios.

According to Cointelegraph, Ethereum will undergo several major upgrades in 2026, including the Glamsterdam and Heze-Bogota hard forks, aiming to achieve L1 scaling and further application of Web3 technologies.The Glamsterdam hard fork is expected to be launched in mid-2026, focusing on "block access lists" and "built-in proposer-builder separation" (ePBS). The former will enable perfect parallel processing, allowing Ethereum to shift from a single-channel model to a multi-channel model, significantly increasing transaction processing speed; the latter will help improve block generation efficiency and provide more time for the verification of zero-knowledge proofs. Additionally, the Gas limit for Ethereum in 2026 is expected to rise significantly from the current 60 million to 100 million or even 200 million, while the number of data blocks may increase to over 72 per block, further supporting L2 protocols to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. It is anticipated that 10% of Ethereum network validators will shift to validating zero-knowledge proofs, paving the way for L1 scaling to 10,000 transactions per second (TPS). The Heze-Bogota hard fork at the end of the year will also focus on enhancing privacy protection and censorship resistance, further optimizing the Ethereum ecosystem. Previously, Ethereum developers named the subsequent upgrade of Glamsterdam "Hegota."

According to statistics from Castle Labs, L1 tokens have generally performed poorly this year, with the following declines: TON down 73.8%, AVAX down 67.9%, SUI down 67.3%, SOL down 35.9%, ETH down 15.3%, HYPE down 6.5%, while only BNB and TRX recorded positive gains of 18.2% and 9.8%, respectively.

Etherscan posted data on platform X, revealing that Ethereum L1 processed 1,913,481 transactions on December 23, setting a record for the highest daily transaction volume in 2025, with an average transaction fee of $0.16.

Circle launches the L1 blockchain Arc Builders Fund. The fund aims to accelerate innovation, focusing on supporting project teams that can fully leverage the design advantages of Arc, including on-chain markets with low-latency architecture; RWA and private credit markets built on private composable rails; on-chain foreign exchange flows combining Circle StableFX and the Circle payment network; smart commerce for autonomous systems and machine economies; and energy and computing protocols based on deterministic settlement.

Delphi Digital stated in a post that the valuation premium of Layer1 is disappearing, and the transition from "fat protocols" to "fat applications" has been ongoing for some time, but the market is just beginning to price this in. The demand for homogeneous infrastructure is weakening, and investor expectations have shifted.Major public chains are under greater pressure to demonstrate real and sustainable recurring revenue. Stablecoins may be a way out, with over $30 billion of USDC and USDT already deployed across various alternative Layer1 and Layer2 networks, generating over $1 billion in revenue annually for Circle and Tether.The ecosystem that truly drives the demand for these stablecoins has a total fee revenue of about $800 million. Many public chains have realized this and are beginning to internalize the economic benefits of stablecoins, rather than continuing to subsidize the issuers.

Originally known as the Terra ecosystem project Prism Protocol, in 2024 it was rebranded as Pryzm and focused on yield optimization. The Cosmos ecosystem L1 Pryzm announced that it will gradually cease operations, with plans to complete this by January next year.Pryzm stated that the decision to cease operations was due to the financial unsustainability of maintaining L1, and that there were risks involved in handing the company over to new management. Pryzm urges users to redeem their assets as soon as possible within the next two to three days.

Alliance DAO co-founder QW posted on social media that he has "outgrown the age of wanting to win debates," but if anyone believes that "a weighted index of their chosen basket of public chains (L1)" will outperform the "8-10 top-rated project portfolio" he listed in the next 10 years, he is willing to settle this debate with a wager.QW has previously shared his "10/10 project list" publicly multiple times, emphasizing that the long-term fundamentals of quality projects will significantly outperform a broad-based portfolio centered around public chains.According to previous news from ChainCatcher, Dragonfly partner: Ethereum already has a solid moat, and the claim that "blockchains have no moat" is overly absurd.

According to Cointelegraph, 1Money, a company co-founded by former Binance US CEO Brian Shroder, has announced the launch of a stablecoin orchestration platform, paving the way for its planned Layer 1 payment blockchain.The platform adopts a zero platform fee model, charging only usage-based fees for stablecoin and fiat transactions. Shroder stated that the era of traditional stablecoin service providers charging high monthly fees and commissions is over. Future L1 networks will enable zero gas fee payments.Shroder served as CEO of Binance.US from 2021 to 2023, founded 1Money in 2024, and secured $20 million in seed funding this January. Three months ago, the company obtained 34 money transmission licenses in the United States, and the platform will offer regulated stablecoin custody services.

According to the latest crypto weekly report released by Gate Ventures, directly applying traditional short-term valuation models (such as short-term price-to-earnings and revenue models) to blockchain networks can lead to systemic pricing errors.Due to the exponential characteristics of curves adopted by the crypto industry, the long-term growth potential of assets like ETH and SOL is still significantly underestimated; market sentiment and linear thinking obscure their true growth potential. Currently, overall market sentiment remains weak, with BTC rising 4.07% and ETH rising 6.82% last week, while the fear and greed index remains in the "extreme fear" range.In terms of ecosystem dynamics, Ethereum has raised the block Gas Limit to 60 million in preparation for the Fusaka upgrade, marking the largest execution layer expansion for Ethereum in nearly four years.Paxos has acquired Fordefi for over $100 million to strengthen its institutional custody services. Meanwhile, DWF Labs has launched a $75 million fund focused on building institutional-grade DeFi infrastructure.In terms of financing, the total amount disclosed last week was $164 million, which represents an 88% decrease compared to the previous period due to tightening market conditions. Infrastructure projects accounted for 62% of all financing, while DeFi recorded the highest financing scale.

SolanaFloor posted on the X platform that the monthly revenue of DApps on the Solana chain exceeds that of all L1 and L2 chains, maintaining a lead in DApp revenue.

Alliance DAO co-founder QwQiao clarified in a post on X that he does not short L1 tokens, but he also cannot regard them as "high-quality investments." He stated that L1 tokens are not "bad investments," but there are thousands of optional assets, making it easier to find truly competitive high-quality targets.Previously, QwQiao mentioned that the L1 track lacks a moat, is easily commoditized, and struggles to capture meaningful long-term value. He believes that betting on the application layer may be a more certain direction and stated that all the assets he currently holds possess long-term competitive advantages and are in fields of exponential growth.

Alliance DAO co-founder QwQiao stated in a post on platform X that they will not short L1 tokens, but they cannot convince themselves that they are "great investments." However, L1 tokens are also not considered "bad investments." With thousands of assets to choose from, there are always some quality assets to be found. QwQiao claims that every asset they currently hold has a lasting competitive advantage and operates in exponentially growing fields.QwQiao previously pointed out that L1 tokens lack a moat, are easily commoditized, and struggle to capture meaningful value, suggesting that betting on the application layer may be a way out.

Alliance DAO co-founder QwQiao stated on social media, "The reason I find it hard to convince myself to hold L1 public chain tokens long-term is not because their price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios are high, but because they lack a moat. Without a moat, they will be commoditized and unable to capture meaningful value.Nowadays, users can easily transfer across chains. Aside from a few complex smart contracts, most application developers can quickly migrate from one chain to another. Moreover, launching a new chain is easier than ever before. The switching costs of blockchain are far less than those of infrastructure like AWS.The only way I currently see chains strengthening their moats is by verticalizing and controlling the application layer. My observation is that chains like Solana, Base, and Hyperliquid have already come to this conclusion and are actively pushing forward. Of course, emerging enterprise chains like Tempo are doing the same.There is almost no doubt about the exponential growth of the crypto industry, but the best way to express this view is to bet on the application layer."