The number of new chains launching these days is absurd. We are quickly approaching a reality where there’s a chain for every tech buzzword: AI chain, Gaming chain, Inference chain—the list goes on. Then come the unnecessary modifiers, twisting these terms into even more meaningless combinations. It’s no longer just an AI chain; now it’s a modular AI chain, a modular restaked gaming chain. In 2021, people were pushing for a token for everything. Now, it’s a chain for everything.

But the market is pushing back. Timelines are stretched thin, liquidity is drying up, and both private and public investors are signaling fatigue. The demand for yet another chain is fading fast. So the real question is, why build another one? What kind of chain actually needs to exist?

The answer is simple: we only need two. There are plenty of strong contenders for the first, but for the second, nothing comes close. What we do have is a flood of over-engineered, jargon-filled projects that should never have made it past a whiteboard—let alone received funding.

The Role of Blockchain

Before defining what chains matter, it’s important to define why blockchains exist in the first place. The core purpose is to provide efficient, trusted, and open financial infrastructure. But in practice, achieving all three is impossible—there are trade-offs.

The one compromise blockchains cannot make is security & trustlesness. The moment a system sacrifices security, it might as well be a traditional financial database. That means efficiency is the variable that gets adjusted, which is why crypto users have been paying absurd fees and dealing with unnecessary complexity just to settle transactions. A distributed validator set agreeing on state introduces costs, and those costs compound as the network scales.

This might sound like an argument that all blockchains are doomed to be inefficient. But that’s no longer the case. Hardware is getting cheaper, compute is getting more accessible, and software is improving. The real limitation is the model we’ve been working within—a model that assumes every blockchain must try to do everything.

A two-chain system shifts the trade-offs in a way that makes sense. Instead of forcing one network to optimize for everything at once, the system is split into two specialized environments: a Ledger Chain for financial integrity and a Compute Chain for high-performance execution.

Ledger Chain: The Foundation

The Ledger Chain’s purpose is clear: it must always be live, accessible, and resistant to censorship or attack. This is the financial backbone, the system that prioritizes uptime, finality, and trust above all else.

That does not mean it has to be slow. There is no rule that says security requires bottlenecked throughput or decade-old consensus mechanisms. What it does require is a globally distributed validator set, redundancy across geographies, and a structure that ensures the network remains resilient no matter what. Institutions and financial markets need a system that won’t collapse under regulatory pressure or technical failures.

The trade-offs here are obvious. A system built for resilience and decentralization will never match the ultra-low latency of Nasdaq. It will not be able to process every new compute-intensive application that emerges. Coordination across thousands of validators is inherently complex. But these are acceptable limitations in exchange for a truly unstoppable financial ledger.

A few chains are positioning themselves to take this role. Solana, Hyperliquid, Monad, Sui, and Aptos are all moving toward this vision, expanding their validator sets and proving their ability to function as a global ledger. The market has already validated the need for this type of chain—it’s just a matter of which one will dominate.

Compute Chain: The Missing Piece

If the Ledger Chain’s purpose is financial integrity, the Compute Chain’s purpose is execution. This is where low-latency, high-throughput applications need to live. The key requirement is simple: any code should be able to run on-chain, unrestricted by arbitrary constraints, while still maintaining the security guarantees of blockchain infrastructure.

But this comes with a trade-off. Unlike the Ledger Chain, the Compute Chain cannot force every validator to process every transaction synchronously. If the goal is to enable truly flexible, on-chain computation, the network cannot require thousands of validators to execute the same workload in real time. Instead, execution must be delegated, and finality can be extended over longer timeframes, shifting the focus toward efficiency rather than instant settlement.

This idea is not new. It’s exactly what Layer 2s were supposed to accomplish. But the execution has been a disaster. The Ethereum rollup roadmap, instead of creating a seamless high-performance layer, has fragmented execution across teams with competing incentives, disconnected architectures, and bloated engineering stacks. Instead of solving the problem, the current L2 landscape has introduced even more inefficiencies—both economic and technical.

As a result, there is no dominant Compute Chain today. But the need for one is more obvious than ever.

Why Only Two?

Why stop at two chains? Why not create dedicated chains for gaming, AI, or whatever the next tech trend demands?

Because financial infrastructure does not work that way. Liquidity consolidates. Market structures are driven by network effects, and any fragmented chain landscape inevitably collapses into monopolies and oligopolies. The fewer places execution and settlement need to happen, the better.

More importantly, a Ledger + Compute model already covers 99% of real use cases. Solana is being used for payments, gaming, and consumer applications without issue. But latency constraints prevent it from becoming the primary venue for derivatives and other high-frequency financial products. That’s the real bottleneck—not some arbitrary need for niche chains that only add unnecessary fragmentation.

The Future: Why We’re Building N1

The Ledger Chain is taking shape. The competition is clear, and the market is choosing which network will emerge as the foundation of financial infrastructure. But the Compute Chain—the missing half of this system—still doesn’t exist in a meaningful way.

Our team built on Solana and Ethereum. We’ve dealt with the limitations, the inefficiencies, and the unnecessary complexity of today’s architectures. We’ve seen how fragmentation, misaligned incentives, and short-term thinking have held back real on-chain execution.

The next step for crypto isn’t another chain sticking a buzzword on it or another rollup stacking inefficiencies on top of each other. It’s a system that makes on-chain execution as powerful and unrestricted as it needs to be—without forcing applications into trade-offs that don’t make sense.

A real Compute Chain isn’t here yet. That’s why we’re building it.

N1. Mainnet. Soon.