March 2024 L1 Landscape Recap

March proved to be a historic month for the crypto industry, marked by the price of Bitcoin breaking new all-time highs since November 2021, reaching a peak of ~$70,800 on March 14th. Most layer 1 (L1) networks failed to accelerate to new highs in the same fashion but nonetheless saw new year-to-date (YTD) highs in March, bringing a fresh wave of attention and liquidity to their respective ecosystems. For instance, ETH reached a new YTD high of ~$4,094 on March 12th, and SOL reached a new YTD high of ~$210 on March 18th, both of which had not been seen since December 2021. In this piece, we take a closer look at some of the effects of this broad market enthusiasm in the L1 landscape.

With few exceptions, including Tron and Osmosis, most L1s saw significant gains to their market caps in March, led by Fantom, NEAR, and Solana, with month-over-month (MoM) gains of ~115%, ~88%, and ~62%, respectively. Enthusiasm over Fantom seems to have surged in March alongside a recent uptick in public communications from its popular developer, Andre Cronje, perhaps best known for his work in decentralized finance (DeFi) as the founder of the Yearn Finance yield aggregator and the Solidly decentralized exchange (DEX).