Layer 1 coins on a live bubble chart

Every coin on this page runs its own blockchain. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Cardano, Avalanche, Sui and the rest of the layer 1 coins settle their own transactions and don't borrow security from any other chain. The bubbles above show how they're moving right now, with size and color doing the work a price table would make you read line by line.

It's a filtered slice of the main chart. The home page runs the same crypto heat map bubbles across the whole market, 1,000+ coins at once. Here, everything built on top of another chain is stripped out, so the base chains get compared with each other instead of fighting Bitcoin for screen space.

What the layer 1 crypto bubbles are telling you

Start with color, not size. Green means a chain's coin is up over the timeframe you picked, red means down, and brightness tells you by how much. When nearly every layer 1 turns the same color at once, that's the whole market moving and not any single chain.

The split days are the interesting ones. Bitcoin flat, Ethereum a little red, and two or three smaller chains glowing green usually means money is rotating toward a narrative (a new app launching on Sui, an ETF headline for Solana), and on a layer 1 crypto list sorted by market cap you'd probably not notice it until most of the move was over.

Size depends on the mode. Performance mode, which I leave on almost all the time, sizes bubbles by how far they moved, so a mid-cap chain that jumped 15% can look bigger than Ethereum for a day. Market cap mode is the sobering one. Bitcoin swallows most of the screen and Ethereum takes a clear second, and after those two the drop-off is steep enough to be a little humbling if you hold something ranked 40th.

For timeframes, the 24h view is the one I check most. Well, the 7d, really. Twenty-four hours on layer 1s is mostly noise unless something broke. I used to write off the 1y view as useless for this category, until I noticed it's the only setting where the slow fade of the 2021-era chains shows up clearly, next to whichever newer chain is in fashion.

What is a layer 1 blockchain, in plain terms

Most explainers will tell you a layer 1 is "the base chain" and stop there. That's correct. It also skips the part that matters on a chart like this.

A layer 1 blockchain orders transactions and agrees on them by itself (proof of work for Bitcoin, proof of stake for nearly everyone else), with nothing underneath it. The coin is how the network pays whoever secures it, and usually how you pay fees to use it.

That fee link is why the category matters for price. When a layer 1 gets busy, fees rise and demand for its coin rises with them, at least in theory. Ethereum is the cleanest case study: after the Merge in September 2022 issuance dropped to a fraction of what it was under proof of work, and during busy stretches enough ETH got burned in fees to make total supply shrink. Then the Dencun upgrade in March 2024 pushed a lot of activity onto cheaper layer 2s, fee burn fell off and supply started growing again. Same chain and same coin, with different economics inside eighteen months.

Layer 1 protocols also differ in what they're chasing. Bitcoin barely changes, on purpose. Solana goes for raw speed on a single chain and has paid for it with outages, the most recent major one I know of on February 6, 2024, when block production stopped for about five hours. Ethereum chose a slower base layer and handed scaling to layer 2s, while Cardano ships slowly and likes to publish research before code. None of those is the right answer. They're bets.

The name comes from networking, by the way. In the OSI model, layer 1 is the physical layer: cables, radio signals, actual copper. Which is why a good share of people typing "layer 1" into Google are network engineers looking for something about switches, and they must be fairly confused when a page of floating Solana bubbles comes up. Back to blockchains.

A layer 1 blockchain list, with the short version of each

These are the chains that usually end up as the biggest bubbles here. Dates are mainnet launches, and the last column is my own one-line summary, so feel free to disagree with it.

The XRP row is the one that starts arguments. Its validators are chosen differently from a normal proof-of-stake chain, and whether that makes it too centralized depends on who you ask. Avalanche muddies the naming too: it renamed its subnets "L1s" in 2024, so you'll see "layer 1" used for chains that are really children of Avalanche. Labels in this industry drift faster than the tech does.

Layer 1 blockchains by market cap, and what the ranking hides

Switch to market cap mode and the order is roughly the table above, reshuffled: Bitcoin, then Ethereum, then a pack whose positions shift month to month.

Market cap is price times circulating supply, and supply is where layer 1s get slippery. Several of the newer high-throughput chains still have big chunks of tokens reserved for teams and early backers that unlock over years (Sui and Aptos have both run monthly unlock schedules), so today's market cap understates how many coins will eventually hit the market. Fully diluted valuation catches that. The bubble chart doesn't show it, so it's worth checking an unlock calendar before reading much into a big bubble on a young chain.

The ranking also hides usage. A chain can sit in the top ten by market cap and process a fraction of the activity of something ranked 30th. Market cap measures what people will pay for the coin, not how much the chain gets used, and those two can drift apart for years.

The layer 1s that didn't survive (and one that nearly didn't)

Terra is the one everyone remembers, and it was a layer 1 in the full sense: its own chain, built with the Cosmos SDK, secured by LUNA. Its stablecoin UST kept its dollar peg through an algorithm instead of cash reserves, since 1 UST could always be swapped for $1 worth of freshly minted LUNA. Demand came largely from Anchor Protocol, which paid close to 20% on UST deposits. In May 2022 heavy withdrawals pushed UST off its peg. As holders rushed to redeem, every redemption minted more LUNA into a falling market, so LUNA went from roughly $80 to a fraction of a cent in about a week, the validators halted the chain, and something like $40 billion in combined value disappeared.

What's left is confusing on a chart. The original chain carries on as Terra Classic (LUNC), with a supply in the trillions. A new chain launched at the end of May 2022 under the LUNA name, minus the stablecoin. If you ever see a small LUNA bubble and a separate LUNC one, that's why they're different coins.

The quieter failures are more common. EOS raised about $4 billion in a year-long token sale that ended in 2018, was pitched as the Ethereum killer, and then slowly lost its developers; as far as I know the network was rebranded as Vaulta in 2025. Fantom went through its own reset, migrating to a new chain and token called Sonic around the turn of 2025. Neither collapsed overnight. On a bubble chart that kind of decline looks like a circle getting slightly smaller every month until nobody notices it anymore, which is exactly what the 1y view makes visible.

Then there's the near miss. SOL was one of the assets most tied to Sam Bankman-Fried's firms, and after FTX fell apart in November 2022 it dropped to around $8 by the end of December. It was back above $200 during 2024. So a crash doesn't prove a chain is dead, and a recovery doesn't prove it's safe.

The common thread is that a layer 1 fails when the reason to hold its coin goes away. For Terra that reason was a yield that could never last. For EOS it was an app ecosystem that never really arrived. Market cap warns you about neither, which is one more reason to click into a bubble before trusting its size.

Layer 1 vs layer 2, and where the line gets blurry

A layer 2 runs its own execution but posts its data or proofs back to a layer 1, and it inherits that chain's security by doing so. Arbitrum and Base both work this way on top of Ethereum. Their tokens, where they have one, live on the layer 2 coins page rather than here.

The middle is where it gets blurry. Polygon PoS started out as a sidechain with its own validator set that checkpoints to Ethereum, which is why some sites file POL as a layer 1 and others as a layer 2 (yes, it's messy, and no, the sites aren't going to agree any time soon). Bitcoin has its own version of this with Lightning and the growing pile of "Bitcoin L2s," a few of which are sidechains with better marketing.

For a price chart, the practical difference is value capture. Fees paid on a layer 2 mostly stay with that layer 2, and only the cost of posting data flows back to the base chain. Since Dencun made that posting cheap, layer 2 activity has grown much faster than Ethereum's own fee revenue. Whether that's good or bad for ETH is probably the most argued-over question in this corner of crypto, and the bubbles won't settle it; they just show which way the market is leaning that week.

What this page won't tell you

It's a price and momentum view. That's the whole job.

If you want TVL and fee revenue per chain, DefiLlama's chains dashboard does that far better than a bubble chart ever could, and it's free. CoinGecko's own layer 1 category page is the better place for a full census of the category, tiny chains included. CoinMarketCap has a layer 1 list too, and it does the job, if a long table is what you came for.

The bubbles can't show security either. A chain secured by a couple of dozen validators and one secured by hundreds of thousands look identical as circles. The classification is borrowed as well: which coins count as layer 1 here follows CoinGecko's category tagging, so edge cases like Polygon inherit whatever call the source made. We don't hand-curate the list, and it seems better to say so than to imply otherwise.

A Monday-morning way to use it

Say it's Monday, the 7d view is on, and Avalanche and Sui are both bright green while Solana sits pale red. Click each green bubble first and check whether volume rose with the price, because a move on thin volume fades more often than it holds. Then load Bitcoin plus those two chains into an altcoins comparison, putting BTC first since correlation is measured against whichever coin you add first. If both come back close to 1.0, the green week was mostly the market lifting everything, and the chain-specific story you were about to believe probably isn't the reason.