June Layer 1 Landscape Recap

Layer 1 (L1) ecosystems endured a challenging month marked by a flurry of U.S. regulatory actions against key entities in the crypto industry. Protocols like Solana, Polygon, Algorand, and more were especially impacted in the crossfire of an SEC lawsuit against Coinbase that named a range of L1 and DeFi tokens as unregistered securities. This newfound regulatory uncertainty contributed to immediate underperformance in the markets for the targeted tokens. 

One example is SOL, the native token for the Solana network, whose price fell 29% lower than its starting price in June, just one week after the SEC’s Coinbase lawsuit was revealed on June 6th.