High-Performance L1 Blockchains Compete for Developer Attention
The crypto world is witnessing an intense competition among high-performance Layer 1 (L1) blockchains, as Sui, Monad, and Solana vie for developers' attention.
With a finite pool of around 23,000 full-time Web3 developers worldwide, every ecosystem gain by one chain comes at the expense of another. This zero-sum game has led to significant milestones in the first quarter of 2026, including EVM-compatible parallel execution architecture and object-based Move models.
Much of this competition stems from developers' realization that L2 solutions have created problems such as bridging latency, liquidity silos, and user experience friction. As a result, monolithic L1 architectures are experiencing a structural renaissance, with high-performance base layers now preferred over app-specific rollups.
Solana remains the leader in real-world throughput and DeFi liquidity, boasting $8 billion in total value locked and a proven 65,000 TPS burst capacity under live conditions. However, Monad's EVM-compatible parallel execution architecture promises 10,000 sustained TPS while eliminating the need to learn new programming languages.
Sui, on the other hand, has attracted major gaming and payments partnerships with its object-based Move model, which allows many transactions involving different objects to be processed in parallel without conflict detection overhead. The network processed a peak of 297 million transactions in a single day during a gaming event in November 2025.