Layer 2 Crypto Wheel

The layer 2 crypto wheel picks one of twenty scaling networks at random. These are chains that execute transactions cheaply somewhere else and post the results back to a base layer for settlement, so their security is inherited rather than produced.

Borrowed security, and what it costs

A scaling network does its work somewhere cheap and then hands the result to a base layer to be made final. That arrangement is the whole product. It buys throughput at a fraction of the price, and it pays for that with a dependency: the network is only as trustworthy as the chain it settles to, plus whatever additional assumptions its own design introduces.

Those additional assumptions vary enormously and they are where the interesting differences live. Some networks publish enough data that anyone can reconstruct the state and challenge a bad result. Some keep the data with a committee and ask you to trust that the committee will hand it over. Some are governed by a small multisig that can upgrade the contracts holding everybody's deposits, on a timelock measured in hours. All of them appear on this wheel under one word.

The token usually is not the security

This is the misunderstanding worth clearing up before spinning. On a base layer, the token pays for security — validators stake it, and attacking the chain means acquiring it. On most networks in this category, that is simply not what the token does. Security comes from the chain underneath. The token typically governs, or pays for sequencing, or captures some fraction of fees if a fee switch was ever turned on.

So the reasoning that works one level down does not transfer. A network can be enormously successful — processing most of the activity in its ecosystem — while its token has no mechanical claim on any of that. Holding one is a bet on governance and on future decisions about value capture, which is a genuinely different proposition from holding the asset that secures a settlement layer, even though both arrive as a ticker on a wheel.

Not everything here is a rollup

The label has stretched. It now covers designs whose settlement guarantees range from "anyone can prove fraud and force a correction" to "a separate validator set votes on it and the base layer is barely involved". Those are not the same product and the gap between them is the most important thing about any given entry.

The list is not curated to hide that. It takes whatever the provider tags, ordered by market capitalisation, cut at twenty — which means a genuine rollup and a sidechain with a bridge sit next to each other looking identical. Calling that out is more useful than quietly filtering to the ones that meet a stricter definition, because the stricter definition would be this site's opinion rather than a fact, and this site tries hard not to have opinions about which crypto is which.

The one thing worth checking

Find out how you get your money out if the operator stops cooperating. Every network in this category has an answer, and the answers differ by orders of magnitude in how much they depend on somebody choosing to behave. Some let you exit directly against the base layer with no permission needed. Some require the sequencer to be alive. Some require a committee.

That question is answerable in an afternoon of reading and it separates these networks more sharply than any figure a wheel could show you. The wheel picked one of twenty names at random and has no view on which answer is acceptable to you.

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 2 networks are on this wheel?

All 20 of them are printed under the wheel: OKB, MNT, POL, ARB, STX, IMX, OP, STRK, SOON, ZK, LINEA, CKB, ASTR, ALT, MEGA, CELO, AZTEC, PROVE, COTI and B2. Stablecoins and wrapped tokens are left off, and you can replace the whole list in Custom mode.

Does a layer 2 token secure the network?

Rarely, and this is the most common misunderstanding in the category. Most rollups are secured by the chain they settle to; their token typically pays for governance or sequencing, not for the security the network actually relies on.

Are all of these really rollups?

No. The label stretches to cover sidechains, validiums and networks whose settlement guarantees differ considerably from one another. Where a network sits on that spectrum matters more than the shared label suggests.