Topic
Base-layer blockchain networks that run their own consensus and settle transactions independently, each funding its own validators and security.
Aptos has made Block-STM v2 the default parallel execution engine on its Layer-1, with no change required from users or developers. The only throughput figures on record come from 2022 tests of version 1, so v2's gains stay a target until someone measures them on live traffic.
Reality
Aptos made its opt-in encrypted mempool live on mainnet at twice the base minimum gas price and about 20 ms of added latency per block. The premium falls on every encrypted transaction, so opting in turns on how likely a trader is to be sandwiched.
Reality
Arc's mainnet went live Wednesday with BlackRock, DTCC, Visa and Mastercard among its founding validators, and the 10 billion ARC tokens Circle minted this week sit behind a presale that valued the network at $3 billion.
Perspective Coverage
6 publishersReality
Arc's mainnet went live on September 16 with USDC as its gas token and BlackRock, Visa and Mastercard among the validators, and Circle's product chief says the growth has to come from AI agents; shifting Ethereum's existing users across would not grow the market.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
The x402 protocol has processed more than 100 million payments since May 2025, over 99% of them in USDC, and Aptos has now pointed it at io.net GPU rentals with $50 million of foundation money behind the agent stack.
Reality
A proposal opened on September 17 and closing September 20 would convert ZETA one-for-one into a Solana SPL token, leaving the 2.1 billion cap and the vesting schedules untouched, 79 days after the chain's interoperability features were switched off.
Reality
Four days after Circle opened Arc's public mainnet, a developer queried the chain's own RPC and found the node scaling native USDC a trillion times larger than the ERC-20 contract that reports the same balance.
Reality
Arc's mainnet opened with $410.8 million of DEX volume, and $336.3 million of it came off nineteen memecoin launchpads, leaving $74.6 million to test what Circle actually built the chain to settle.
Reality
Harmony blames state actors and AI agents for shutting the layer-1 it launched in 2019, and the money set aside to pay validators to power down is worth more than everything left locked on the chain it closes.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality