The Best Layer-1 Blockchains Leading the Web3 Evolution

Blockchain has become the foundational technology for Web3, a new version of the internet that’s completely decentralized and owned by its users. Thanks to the permissionless and open nature of blockchain technology, it has become instrumental in enabling this vision. 

As mentioned, blockchains are decentralized, controlled by everyone and no one at the same time, distributing power into the hands of the many. Blockchains are also trustless, enabling Web3 applications to eliminate the need for third-parties and middlemen, and they’re permissionless, which means anybody can interact with them, leaving no room for censorship. Moreover, with digital assets, blockchains also form the backbone of Web3’s economy, enabling fast and secure transactions between Web3 users without the control of banks 

Last but not least, blockchain provides a transparent way to record ownership of digital assets, so Web3 users can retain full control of their finances, their identities, credentials and virtual assets such as avatars and NFTs. 

EOS’s Tokenized RAM resources

As one of the fastest-growing blockchains for Web3 around, EOS stands out for its novel resource allocation strategy based on the concept of RAM, a tradeable asset that’s required by dApp developers on its foundational network. 

RAM sits at the heart of EOS’s innovation, playing a central role in the allocation of its network resources to dApp developers. 

Most computer users will be aware that RAM stands for random access memory and that it’s a kind of fast memory store that’s used by various software programs and applications to perform short-term tasks, erased when the computer is switched off. 

In the context of EOS, RAM plays a similar role, providing rapid memory storage for blockchain-based data. On EOS, dApps store everything from their account balances and smart contract data in RAM, which is what makes it an essential resource. And the more users who access your dApp, the more RAM you’ll need. Because RAM is a tradeable Web3 asset on EOS, the price has always been dictated by dApp demand.  

With EOS last year capping the total amount of RAM at 400GB, demand for this resource has surged. The EOS-RAM liquidity pool contains over $16 million in total value locked, making it the network’s most liquid by far, and it delivers some significant revenue to the network via the 0.5% trading fee imposed on all RAM transactions. The biggest projects building on EOS, including the metaverse platform Upland, have shelled out to buy massive amounts of RAM to sustain themselves. 

The price of RAM has slowly but surely become the main gauge of health in the EOS ecosystem, as the resource is an essential requirement for every single dApp that wants to run on its network. However, its tradeability enables RAM to be used in various other ways, most especially as a Web3-native real-world asset that’s given rise to a range of DeFi-based financial products, including RAM synths, RAM futures and RAM yield. 

Avalanche’s Subnet Innovations

The explosive growth of Web3 applications has led to questions about the scalability of blockchains, with networks like Ethereum notably creaking under the strain of thousands of dApps, resulting in slow and expensive transactions. 

One solution to scalability is the concept of having multiple networks linked to the main, foundational blockchain, which can be purpose-built for each specific Web3 dApp. 

There’s no better example of this than Avalanche’s Subnets, which have emerged as one of the most viable scaling solutions in the crypto industry. They can be thought of as sub networks within the broader Avalanche network, and they enable each dApp to process its own transactions off-chain, before settling them on the main blockchain at regular intervals. For instance, the Crystalvale Subnet that hosts the DeFi Kingdoms game on Avalanche processes more transactions each day than the total amount processed on the entire Polygon network. 

When a Subnet is created on Avalanche, a dynamic subset of its validators is tasked with working together to achieve consensus on its state. At any one time, there are hundreds of subnets running atop of Avalanche, each one supporting its very own dApp. This eliminates the need for hundreds of dApps to compete for resources on the main network. 

Besides overcoming the problem of network congestion, Subnets are also extremely flexible and customizable. Developers are free to configure the Subnets’ features, such as which token is used to pay gas fees, who validates transactions on the Subnet, and which virtual machine environment facilitates its operations. Subnets can even create their own tokenomic structures and rules, and validators can set up custom properties. All of this features enable developers to build more sophisticated dApps. 

To put it simply, on Avalanche each Subnet is an independent and full-functional decentralized network in its own right. With the freedom to follow their own business model, issue their own tokens and more besides, it’s little wonder that Subnets are fast-becoming the platform of choice for Web3 developers. 

Sui’s Move Programming Language

Sui is emerging as a popular platform for Web3 builders due to its fast transaction speeds and lower costs, but while this is always appealing, its real advantage lies in the Move programming language. 

The Move programming language was first created by Facebook when it was working on its now defunct Libra blockchain project. It’s a cross-platform language that supports the creation of common libraries, tooling and developer communities across multiple networks. 

Sui first adopted the Move language because it’s based on a similar blockchain architecture to Libra, employing the use of account-based data models and digital assets owned by accounts. However, Sui’s creators have always been focused on building a more generalized blockchain network architecture, as opposed to the limited scope of Libra. As a result, it opted to build its own take on Move with the launch of Sui Move last year. 

As a fork of Move, Sui Move is designed to better cater to some of Sui’s unique innovations, including its novel consensus model. It’s designed to facilitate the greater elegance and expressivity of the Sui blockchain, which enables the creation of more capable dApps. 

By focusing on account-based data models, Sui Move uniquely supports parallel transaction processing. It can directly determine single-owner versus shared objects on the blockchain, apply instant validation on the former and consensus-based validation for the latter. 

The main advantage of Sui Move is it eliminates much of the bookkeeping work for dApp developers, both before and after a transaction is made. That, combined with the high performance of Sui’s underlying blockchain, makes Sui an extremely promising Web3 platform.