L1 Is The New Battleground, And The Playing Field Isn’t Even
The post L1 Is The New Battleground, And The Playing Field Isn’t Even appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
Opinion by: Ray Song, founder at aPriori When you’ve been around markets long enough, you start to see patterns. The tools we trade on and the rails we build on are never static. In crypto, one of the biggest shifts happening right now is at the base layer. For years, the layer 1 conversation was dominated by Ethereum if you wanted composability and a broad developer base, Solana if you wanted speed and Cosmos if you wanted sovereignty. The choice of L1 felt like picking a trading venue, evaluating fees, liquidity and execution. Lately, however, that decision has moved from tactical to strategic. Beyond developers deciding between ecosystems, big companies are now building their blockchains from scratch. And when the companies doing it are Stripe, Coinbase or other giants with deep regulatory and distribution advantages, the L1 stops being a neutral playing field and starts looking like a moat. The Stripe Tempo moment Take the Stripe news. It turned out that “Tempo,” a payments-focused layer 1, is being built in partnership with Paradigm. If you’ve traded long enough, you know Stripe isn’t doing this for no reason. This is a settlement-layer play, with control over the base layer, the fees and uptime. In traditional markets, clearing and settlement are often invisible to end-users, but they’re where the real leverage is. Tempo would give Stripe a chain purpose-built for predictable fees, deterministic settlement times, and merchant distribution that nobody else can match. This is 20 years of payment-processor muscle memory applied to crypto rails. From permissionless to permissioned There is a clear spectrum emerging. On one end, there are fully decentralized, censorship-resistant protocols. These chains may lack the polish or compliance comfort institutions crave, but they’re the crucibles where real innovation happens. Ethereum in its early days, Bitcoin still today, newer…
