High-Performance L1s Emerge as Blockchain Competition Heats Up

The blockchain landscape has seen a resurgence of interest in high-performance Layer 1 (L1) blockchains, driven by application developers re-evaluating their base-layer choices. Three L1s - Solana, Monad, and Sui - are competing for developer talent and protocol-level network effects.

Solana stands out with over $8 billion in total value locked and a proven 65,000 transactions per second (TPS) burst capacity under live conditions. However, its median time-to-finality of 400 milliseconds is still higher than the ideal 200-300 millisecond range.

Monad's innovative parallel execution architecture targets Ethereum developers directly with a promise of 10,000 sustained TPS while eliminating the need to learn new programming languages. Its internal devnet benchmarks reported 10,000 TPS during stress testing in early 2026.