01 The set
What is on this board
One tag: the base chains that settle their own transactions rather than renting settlement from someone else. The top 1,000 by market cap holds 118 of them, and the board draws the 100 largest — past that a bubble comes out smaller than its own label.
This is the most top-heavy board on the site, by a wide margin. Bitcoin alone is around three quarters of everything drawn here, and the four largest coins are most of the rest. The area scale is logarithmic — that is the only reason the smaller chains are visible at all — so the picture already understates how lopsided the sector is. Read the tail here as a tail, not as a set of peers.
The boundary is also softer than the name suggests. A few chains are filed as both Layer 1 and Layer 2 because they are genuinely both, or because the project describes itself one way and settles the other. Coins carry every tag that fits, so several of these names appear on the DeFi and DePIN boards as well.
Everything else works the way it does on the whole-market board: size is market cap, color is the price change over the period on the buttons, and grey means a coin barely moved. The longer version, with the exact color thresholds, is in the guide.
02 Movers
Biggest moves in the sector, last 24 hours
▲ Gainers
| Coin | Price | 24h | Volume |
|---|---|---|---|
| ONGOntology Gas | $0.0873 | +43.42% | $142M |
| GALAGala | $0.0019 | +28.91% | $94M |
| XPLPlasma | $0.1056 | +27.87% | $1.1B |
| BCHBitcoin Cash | $263.64 | +21.87% | $541M |
| BERABerachain | $0.1854 | +16.91% | $32M |
▼ Losers
| Coin | Price | 24h | Volume |
|---|---|---|---|
| MANTRAMANTRA | $0.0046 | -7.96% | $38M |
| KIIKiiChain | $0.0641 | -1.47% | $324M |
| XMRMonero | $412.36 | -1.17% | $146M |
| CCCanton | $0.1030 | -0.70% | $22M |
| TRXTRON | $0.3402 | +1.73% | $771M |
Both tables are drawn from this board only, and every coin in them traded at least $10M in the past 24 hours. That volume floor is the same one the whole-market board uses, and it matters more here: a sector is a slice, so fewer coins clear a fixed dollar amount, and the ones that do not are exactly where a spectacular percentage turns out to be one buyer on a quiet market.
03 Background
What is a Layer 1?
A Layer 1 is a blockchain that is responsible for its own security. It orders transactions, agrees on the result without asking another chain, and pays the people doing that work in its own coin. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and the rest of the large names here are all Layer 1s. Everything else in crypto — tokens, applications, the Layer 2s — ultimately settles onto one of them.
The coin is the security budget, and that is what makes this board different. On every other page here a bubble is a claim on a business, a governance vote, or a position in something. On this one the coin is the payment that keeps the chain honest. Validators or miners are paid in it, out of transaction fees and out of newly issued supply. Anyone wanting to rewrite the chain's history has to out-spend that budget, which in a proof-of-stake system means buying an enormous share of the coin and in a proof-of-work system means buying more hardware and electricity than everyone else combined.
So market cap here is closer to a cost of attack than to a valuation. It is not a precise one — a determined attacker does not have to buy at the market price, and the price would move against them while they tried — but the direction is right, and it explains a thing that otherwise looks irrational: chains genuinely need their coin to be expensive. A cheap coin is a cheap chain to attack, and applications holding real money notice.
How they are paid for differs, and it shows up in the supply. Proof of work buys security with electricity: the coin pays miners, miners buy hardware and power, and the cost is external. Proof of stake buys it with the coin itself: holders lock coins up, get paid for it in new coins, and lose them if they misbehave. That is why issuance schedules get argued about so intensely in this sector and almost nowhere else on this site — issuance is not a detail of the tokenomics, it is the price the chain pays for being trustworthy.
They compete on one axis, which is unusual. Most sectors here contain businesses doing different things. Layer 1s do the same thing as each other, and the trade-off between how fast they do it, how cheaply, how final the result is, and how many independent machines have to agree, is the entire competition. A chain that gets faster usually did it by asking fewer or more expensive machines to participate. There is no arrangement that wins on all four, which is why the sector has not consolidated into one chain despite fifteen years of trying.
Where the sector's value has been going. Activity moving to Layer 2s does not straightforwardly help or hurt the chain underneath: the Layer 2 pays the Layer 1 for data and settlement, so usage still lands here, but far less of it per transaction than if the transaction had happened directly. That is a live argument with real money on both sides of it, and this board is one place you can watch it play out over the yearly view — against the Layer 2 board, which is smaller than most people expect.
What the picture does not carry. Nothing here shows how many independent validators a chain actually has, how concentrated its stake is, how much of the supply is locked, or whether the chain has ever stopped producing blocks. Those are the properties that decide whether the security budget means anything, and they are not recoverable from a market cap and a price change. This board is a good map of where the money sits and a poor one of what it bought.
04 The app
The same filter, over the whole market
This page is one fixed slice: one sector, the largest names in it, four periods, prices in dollars. The app it was cut from carries all 1,000 coins and lets you set the filter yourself — by category, by chain ecosystem, by exchange — then keep what you found as favorites. Free, no ads, no account, and it runs in a browser tab as well as on a phone.
Open the full board →