L1 Blockchains Solana, Monad, and Sui Engage in High-Stakes Competition

The cryptocurrency landscape is witnessing a new wave of competition among Layer 1 (L1) blockchains, particularly Solana, Monad, and Sui. The three high-performance chains are vying for developer attention in a finite pool, making the competition a zero-sum game.

Solana has taken an early lead with over $8 billion in total value locked and a proven 65,000 transactions per second (TPS) burst capacity under live conditions. However, Monad is promising to deliver 10,000 sustained TPS through its EVM-compatible parallel execution architecture, targeting Ethereum developers directly.

Sui's object-based Move model has produced the fastest institutional onboarding story of the three, attracting major gaming and payments partnerships since its mainnet launch in 2023. Sui recorded a peak of 297 million transactions in a single day during a gaming event in November 2025, enabled by its object-level parallelism.

The resurgence of L1 performance can be attributed to the growing demand for end-to-end latency and atomic composability among application developers building consumer-facing products, high-frequency DeFi protocols, and real-time gaming systems. Delphi Digital's research note in January 2026 identified monolithic L1 architectures as experiencing a structural renaissance.