Layer 1 Crypto Wheel

The layer 1 crypto wheel picks one of twenty base-layer blockchains at random. A layer 1 settles its own transactions and secures itself, rather than borrowing security from a chain underneath it — which is the whole of the distinction and most of the reason the category is worth separating.

One question decides membership

Does the chain settle its own transactions and secure itself? If yes, it belongs here. If it executes elsewhere and posts results back to something underneath it for final settlement, it belongs on the layer 2 wheel instead. That is the entire test, and unusually for a crypto category it is close to binary — which makes this one of the few labels on this site that is a fact rather than an opinion.

What follows from that test is more interesting than the test itself. A base layer has to pay for its own security, which means it has to have something valuable enough to pay with, which means the token is not decoration — it is the budget. Chains in this category compete on how cheaply they can buy enough security to be worth trusting, and the different answers they have reached are the reason the category contains such wildly dissimilar designs.

Why the familiar names keep turning up

Base layers accumulate value. They hold the settlement asset, they collect the fees, and everything built on top of them denominates itself in their token. So the largest chains by market capitalisation are disproportionately layer 1s, and this wheel consequently shares a good number of names with the main one.

That overlap is honest rather than lazy — the same coins genuinely are both "large" and "a base layer" — but it is worth knowing before you spin. If the goal is to land on something you have not thought about, the narrower theme wheels reach much further down the rankings than this one does. If the goal is specifically to compare settlement layers against each other, this is the wheel that holds them side by side and nothing else.

The comparisons that do not survive contact

Transactions per second is the number everyone reaches for and the one that travels worst between chains. It is measured under different assumptions about block size, finality, hardware requirements and how much of the network is expected to keep a full copy of the state. Two chains quoting the same figure may be describing incomparable things.

Validator counts have the same problem. A thousand validators controlled by a handful of operators is a different security posture from a hundred genuinely independent ones, and the raw count says nothing about which you are looking at. Fee levels look comparable and are not, because a chain that is cheap when empty tells you very little about what it costs when busy.

A random pick sidesteps all of that by declining to rank at all. It does not claim one chain is better; it declines to have the argument. That is a weaker position than a real comparison and a much more honest one than a league table built from numbers that do not mean the same thing.

What to do with the result

Read the chain's own documentation on how finality works and what happens when validators disagree. Find out who can upgrade the protocol and how quickly. Those two answers tell you more about a base layer than any throughput figure, and neither is visible from a wheel, a rank, or a ticker. The wheel picked a name. The name is where the work starts.

What is on this wheel

Market data provided by CoinMarketCap — CoinMarketCap. Rank, ticker and name only; this site stores no prices.

This list is a judgement about what belongs in the category, not a market-cap ranking, so it carries no date. See how the lists are chosen.

Questions

Which layer 1 chains are on this wheel?

All 20 of them are printed under the wheel: BTC, ETH, BNB, SOL, TRX, HYPE, ZEC, ADA, XMR, BCH, CC, LTC, GRAM, HBAR, SUI, AVAX, CRO, TAO, NEAR and M. Stablecoins and wrapped tokens are left off, and you can replace the whole list in Custom mode.

What makes a blockchain a layer 1?

It settles its own transactions and provides its own security, usually through its own validator set and its own token. If a chain posts its data somewhere else for final settlement, it is a layer 2 by definition, whatever it calls itself.

Why do the biggest coins keep appearing here?

Because base layers accumulate the most value — they hold the settlement assets and charge the fees. That is why this wheel shares several names with the main one, and why the shorter wheels are a better spin if you want variety.