New Crypto Projects Emerge to Challenge Established Networks
The cryptocurrency market has seen significant growth in recent years, with new projects emerging to challenge established networks on speed, cost, and institutional adoption. One such project is Monad, which launched its public mainnet on November 24, 2025, after raising $494 million in combined venture capital and public token sale funding.
The technical proposition of Monad centers on parallel transaction processing, targeting 10,000 transactions per second with 800-millisecond finality based on testnet benchmarks. This architecture maintains full Ethereum Virtual Machine compatibility, allowing existing Ethereum applications to deploy without code changes.
Another project, Berachain, debuted on February 6, 2025, with a Proof of Liquidity consensus mechanism and attracted $3.1 billion in pre-deposits through its Boyco platform before the mainnet launch. This innovative approach links validator rewards directly to liquidity provision, using two tokens: BERA and BGT.
Celestia addresses a fundamental architectural constraint by separating data availability into a dedicated modular layer that rollups can plug into without building their own validator sets. Over 160 gigabytes of data have flowed through the Celestia network since launch, supporting more than 56 rollups with 37 operating on mainnet and 19 on testnet.
Ondo Finance occupies a different category entirely by tokenising United States Treasury securities, offering institutional-grade yield to on-chain investors through its OUSG and USDY products. Ondo surpassed $1 billion in total value locked and is the largest DeFi-native issuer in a tokenised Treasury market worth approximately $15 billion.
Sui has grown into one of the largest Layer 1 networks by total value locked, with its stablecoin market capitalisation growing from $5.4 million in January 2024 to more than $1.15 billion by May 2025. The platform achieved 297,000 transactions per second in testing with 390-millisecond finality and targets gaming, social media, and consumer applications where transaction speed directly affects user experience.