l1

According to The Block, South Korean payment service provider NHN KCP has signed a memorandum of understanding with Ava Labs to jointly build a Layer 1 network aimed at payment scenarios based on Ava Cloud, covering three main areas: sub-second payment confirmation, on-chain transaction data encryption, and customizable merchant payment infrastructure.The two parties will also explore business opportunities such as tokenized deposit models, multi-stablecoin settlement structures, and cross-border payments. Justin Kim, head of Ava Labs Asia, stated that the launch time of the L1 mainnet will largely depend on the progress of cryptocurrency regulatory regulations in South Korea.

MilkyWay officially announced that it has officially initiated the process to shut down the L1 mainnet. Before the shutdown, the team completed an on-chain upgrade and safely migrated all user assets from the MilkyWay L1 chain back to their respective native chains. This initiative aims to ensure that user assets return to their original blockchain networks intact and securely.According to the announcement, users who previously held assets on MilkyWay should now be able to view the relevant assets on the corresponding original networks. For example, TIA assets that were cross-chained from Celestia to MilkyWay should now be re-displayed on the Celestia network. If users are unable to see their assets, the official team recommends submitting their wallet addresses to the official team or leaving a message under the announcement post for further assistance.

The Ethereum Foundation today released a systematic explanation regarding the evolution of the roles of L1 and L2. The core point indicates that as the ecosystem matures, the primary goal of L2 has shifted from "scaling Ethereum" to "providing differentiated functions, customized services, and autonomous controllable areas," while scaling has become a secondary focus.The Foundation has redefined the roles of L1 and L2 as follows:· L1: As a permissionless, highly resilient global settlement layer, it undertakes the functions of shared state, liquidity, and DeFi hub, and must continue to scale while maintaining censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security.· L2: While developing its own on-chain economy, it will extend Ethereum's core attributes to a broader user base, forming a "full-spectrum" ecosystem.The Foundation clarifies that L2s with the highest integration with L1 should pursue synchronous composability, complete interoperability, shared liquidity, and Stage 2 mechanisms. A large number of L2s with diverse business models and technical expertise will continue to play an important role, providing functionalities that L1 does not possess.The Ethereum Foundation stated that it will continue to invest in technology to help L2 smoothly extend L1's core attributes and securely access cross-layer liquidity, while emphasizing that L2 must maintain transparency and verifiability of its security attributes.

High-performance parallel Layer 1 public chain Pharos announced a new round of capital cooperation upgrade with Hong Kong Stock Exchange listed company GCL-Poly Energy, with GCL-Poly Energy completing an investment subscription in Pharos at a valuation of nearly $1 billion.This investment delivery stems from the preliminary announcement released by GCL-Poly Energy and was officially finalized after completing the regulatory disclosure procedures required by the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The compliance framework is based on the information disclosure standards of Hong Kong listed companies. The two parties will collaborate on scenarios such as the tokenization of new energy assets, distributed energy trading, and carbon footprint tracking, promoting the large-scale implementation of real-world assets (RWA). Pharos's underlying architecture is EVM compatible, with the test network processing over 20,000 transactions per second (TPS) and supporting sub-second transaction confirmations. Pharos co-founder and CEO Wish Wu stated that this cooperation aims to create a standard model for integrating Web3 technology into the physical industry, and the nearly $1 billion valuation reflects the market's recognition of its technological value.

According to official news, the Bitcoin L1 native smart contract platform OP_NET has announced the completion of a $5 million financing round, led by Further, with participation from ANAGRAM, Arcanum Capital, Humla Ventures, Morningstar Ventures, G20 Ventures, and UTXO Management.It is reported that the core function of OP_NET is to transform the programmability of the Bitcoin blockchain into the programmability of smart blockchains like Ethereum, with plans to launch on the Bitcoin mainnet on March 17.

Bitcoin L1 native smart contract platform OP_NET completes $5 million financing, led by Further, with participation from ANAGRAM, Arcanum Capital, Humla Ventures, Morningstar Ventures, G20 Ventures, and UTXO Management.

IoTeX announced on platform X that after suffering a hacker attack due to a suspected private key leak, L1 has resumed online operations and completed an upgrade. The new version v2.3.4 includes an automatic filtering feature for malicious EOA addresses in the default blacklist to enhance network security. A comprehensive compensation plan for the affected bridging users will be announced within 24 hours.

The Ethereum Foundation has announced the establishment of the Platform Team, aimed at building the most powerful Ethereum platform possible, enabling better support for users, applications, and all organizations built on Ethereum at both the L1 and L2 layers.Improving the relationship between L1 and L2 layers to create a mutually reinforcing system across various levels. The Foundation stated that since the introduction of the rollup-centric roadmap five years ago, a chain ecosystem has developed around the Ethereum L1 layer. The early rollup mindset has been replaced by differentiated L2 layer networks, each possessing unique and valuable economic systems, thereby extending Ethereum's core characteristics to millions of users.As Ethereum matures, the Foundation believes that more measures must be taken to build a unified platform that can fully leverage the unique advantages of the Ethereum system (L1 + L2). This includes enhancing the value proposition of L2, optimizing the adoption drivers for L2, enabling it to create value for Ethereum more broadly, guiding the ecosystem towards a more secure, permissionless architecture, and simplifying the process for users and institutions to adopt Ethereum.More importantly, building a strong Ethereum means driving technological improvements to reinforce and enhance Ethereum's core characteristics and unique advantages.

Hsiao-Wei Wang, Co-Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation, stated at the Consensus 2026 conference that currently no other L1 can compete with Ethereum in terms of technology and monetary value.When discussing Ethereum's core value proposition for development teams, she pointed out that censorship resistance and privacy protection tools are becoming increasingly important, which not only aligns with the values of crypto punks but also meets the growing demand for on-chain privacy from institutions and regular users.Additionally, she emphasized that innovation at the application layer is another major focus, particularly in the "Identity" space, where there is currently no universal solution. ENS has laid the groundwork for user identity creation, and in the future, there is a need to further explore universal identity solutions with privacy protection features to cover various application scenarios such as ticket sales, governance use cases, and social layers.

Vitalik commented on "ENS stops L2 Namechain development, v2 will be directly deployed on the Ethereum mainnet": "This is a wise decision. ENS domain names and records are the core state of the Ethereum ecosystem. I believe the best architecture for decentralized identity and social (which I think ENS is in this domain) is to store each user's account and profile data on L1, and use a dedicated L2 (which could be much simpler than a full EVM) to handle user operations (e.g., actions on social platforms)."

According to data from the SolanaFloor platform, in January 2026, the Solana ecosystem's decentralized applications (dApps) generated over $146 million in revenue, ranking first among all Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains.The top three Solana dApps by revenue for that month were: PumpFun: approximately $46 million; Axiom: approximately $15.36 million; Meteora: approximately $13.4 million.

The Bitcoin-native Layer 1 protocol and infrastructure platform Bitway announced the completion of a $4.444 million seed round financing, led by TRON DAO, with participation from HTX Ventures and others.So far, Bitway has raised a total of over $5.8 million from institutional investors. After completing its first seed financing round, it has also completed a targeted strategic financing round, which values Bitway at $100 million.Bitway was founded by former Binance team members and was previously incubated through YZi Labs' EASY Residency program and launched through the Binance Incubator program. Bitway has two core products, including the on-chain wealth management platform Bitway Earn and the Layer 1 application chain Bitway Chain, specifically designed for payment and financing solutions.

Cosmos ecosystem stablecoin protocol Noble announced the launch of an EVM-based Layer 1, Noble EVM, which is expected to go live on March 18. The new Noble EVM will be specifically designed for stablecoin applications.Noble is not the only Cosmos ecosystem project undergoing transformation in recent months; for example, Sei plans to fully transition to an EVM-only chain in the upcoming upgrade, abandoning its CosmWasm and Cosmos native assets.

The managing partner of the crypto venture firm Dragonfly, Haseeb Qureshi, recently stated that by 2026, a large tech company may integrate or acquire a crypto wallet, while more Fortune 100 companies will attempt to launch their own blockchains. However, he also pointed out that fintech companies trying to combat mainstream public chains by building their own L1 public chains are unlikely to succeed overall.Qureshi posted on the X platform that the next wave of enterprise adoption will mainly come from banks and fintech, with some institutions possibly building more private, permissioned networks based on public chains like Avalanche, while integrating existing tools such as OP Stack, Orbit, and ZK Stack, and maintaining connections with public blockchains. Previously, financial giants like JPMorgan, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and IBM have explored private blockchains, but most remain in testing or limited application stages.He also predicted that among the large tech companies dominating the internet ecosystem (such as Google, Meta, or Apple), one may launch or acquire a crypto wallet in 2026, a move that has the potential to bring billions of users into the crypto ecosystem.However, Qureshi is not optimistic about the "public" L1s launched by fintech companies, believing that they will struggle to compete with crypto-native networks like Ethereum and Solana in key metrics such as active addresses, stablecoin liquidity, and RWA. "The best developers will still choose neutral infrastructure chains."On the price front, Qureshi expects Bitcoin to rise above $150,000 by the end of 2026, although market dominance may decline; the stablecoin market size is expected to grow by about 60% in 2026, while USDT's share may drop from around 60% to 55%. He is also optimistic about the continued growth of prediction markets but believes that AI will struggle to form large-scale applications in the crypto space in the short term, except for security scenarios.