• The market is looking up after a long dry spell. And there’s no better time than now to scout for some new entrants on the L1 scene that stood the test of the bear market. 
• Layer-1 blockchains alone constitute a market cap of $1.08 trillion.

These foundational chains form the base infrastructural layer of the Web3 ecosystem. While Bitcoin, Ethereum, Avalanche, BNB, Solana, etc., remain the blue chips of L1s, let’s look for innovative ones rocking the charts this Alt season.

Our experts compiled a feature-by-feature, use case-by-use case comparison of the 4 new entrants, giving tough competition to the veteran Solana blockchain.

Solana

Solana has been through many ups and downs and outages ever since the FTX downfall. However, the platform is known for its high speed and scalability and is one of the favorites among developers and gaming experts for building gaming ecosystems.

Its hackathons and conferences have given birth to many successful web3 games. Recently, Solana Labs released a beta version of GameShift for developers to create games using its API.

But Solana has been marred by a period of low TVL and user base, which recently started seeing an uptick.

SOL’s 1-month RSI at 82 shows overbought signals and slackens buyer interest. It is trading at $59, up 124% in the past month and 371% in a year.

Elysium

Elysium is a carbon-neutral L-1 blockchain native to Vulcan Forged. Elysium uses Proof-of-Victory, a new consensus mechanism for true decentralization, scalability, and instant finalization. It has a TPS of 2,500.

The Elysium ecosystem, led by Vulcan Forged, has seen exponential organic growth over the last two years. It currently serves 200,000 users across 15 games and titles, including VulcanVerse, Forge Arena, and Berserk.

Elysium is optimized for AI, the metaverse, NFTs, and web3 gaming, offering an immersive experience to the users. Its upcoming release – MetaScapes, introduces a patented metaverse-as-a-service engine. It announced the first-ever Oculus VR NFT Game, Tartarus, last month.

Elysium has its own NFT marketplace and cloud wallet, and it supports all EVM-compatible coding languages and wallets. Elysium is headed for more innovations that the web3 gaming ecosystem has yet to see.

PYR has jumped a solid 144% in a month and 134% in a year.  

Aleph Zero

It’s another among the emerging L1s deploying Web3 apps as fast as legacy solutions, from gaming to Web3 enterprise. It is ZK-privacy enhanced and benefits from instantaneous transaction finality at 0.9 secs at an average cost of 0.0003 AZERO.

The blockchain has seen notable adoption from the developer community and also has a native privacy stack to its name.  Deutsche Network is among the list of validators ensuring the security and privacy of the blockchain.

Aleph Zero saw considerable gains at 81% in the past month and 59% yearly gains.

Nexa

Nexa is another highly scalable UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) based Layer-1 blockchain, Nexa. It offers EVM-like smart contracts called ‘wise contracts’ and native token services to the developers building over it.

It offers functionality natively without the need for smart contracts or token standards like ERC-20. It uses the Nexapow algorithm, along with SHA-256 hashing with Schorr signatures similar to Bitcoin.

The blockchain uses the Proof-of-Work consensus to incentivize mining and validation. It can be scaled to the theoretical capacity of 1,00,000 TPS for P2P, P2B, and B2B transactions. However, its actual strength has yet to be tested.

Nexa has registered a jump of 123% in a month and is currently trading at $0.00000921.

Tectum

Tectum is another notable L1 with a TPS exceeding 1 million. It offers instant event status delivery and ownership updates. It uses its proprietary Proof-of-Utility Consensus, making it a great option for an overlay solution for numerous blockchain systems.

Tectum uses 3FA authentication to provide a secure solution for online user authentication.

It uses a transactionless payment protocol called SoftNote for instant payments and zero-fee processing. However, it provides zero traceability as all transactions are recorded privately with SoftNote.

Which L1 Will Rule The Charts?

Solana looks tepid in comparison to the newcomer L1s. Each emerging L1 stands out for its unique features and utilities and the promise it holds for investors.

Nexa’s wise contracts, Tectum’s transactionless payments, and Aleph’s ZK privacy are quite futuristic innovations.

However, an L1 is directly proportional to its developer activity and ecosystem. Elysium is seeing some of the most innovative games and upgrades live and coming up. PYR has witnessed one of the biggest rises this year, backed by investor trust, commendable features, and a great developer community.

Which one will you choose?